Catch Me (and my Pencil Cases) on Sew Mama Sew!

Today you can find my tutorial for making these pencil cases on Sew Mama Sew! So excited to be invited to be on SMS that I went and made six of them, just to test out different color schemes.

In my typical How I Hate Exposed Seam Allowances mania, I fully lined them (easier than it sounds).

And they also have fun possibilities for fabric combinations.

Nobody in our house has use for pencil cases

this year (we're barely in school), so I've

put them in the shop if you'd like to own one.

But if you prefer to make them yourselves, or just want to learn how I put piping on everything I can possibly lay my hands on if given the chance,

head over to Sew Mama Sew!

Update 2021: Unfortunately, the Sew Mama Sew (SMS) website is no longer active. However, you can still access this free tutorial, as well as my other tutorials which had been featured on the SMS site - see this more recent post for details and links. There is also another version of this pencil case tutorial in this post, which is part of a longer series on bagmaking. Happy sewing! 

Radio Silence

Erm, hello everyone!

Bit of a computer overhaul this fortnight. Lovely husband has installed Aperture, our new photo organizing program, and we've moved our thousands of digital photos over from iPhoto. A lot of housekeeping, and learning to use the new (and quite superior) software. So the computer and our photos have been off-limits the last week. Today I took my first peek at Aperture, and I think I am going to like it a lot. Anyway, lest I sound like I actually know anything about computers, I am just reporting all this to explain why there's been yet another black hole of silence in the drafting series.

All the hundreds of photos are taken, the instructions are written out, the slopers are done, but I just haven't been able to even offload the photos from the camera, let alone post them. Last night we did get them all off the camera, so that's progress!

Here's another picture of Life At Home Whenever The Mother Attempts To Do Anything Sewingish/Bloggish:


It is a sad fact that there is practically nowhere inside our house where the light is decent (or even uniform) for taking photos. So most of the pictures are taken on our deck, or the front porch or some other windswept part of our outdoors. I photodocumented the sloper drafts on the front wall of our house, in plain view of all and sundry. I felt extremely self-conscious under the stares of neighbors walking past with their dogs! What must their dogs think?

And then the girls came out to see what I was doing. "Oh!" said Emily "You're drawing patterns!" "Fun!" said Jenna, "Can we do it too?" So had to stop mid-draft, mid-photo, and run into the house to gather more kraft paper, masking tape and art supplies, and tape up paper for each of them to draw on. That's our front door Jenna is being artistic on. Very squashed, with all four of us on our front step! Emily copied everything I was doing, down to sketching Front Center Lines and seam lines. Kate drew Rapunzel. Jenna shredded her paper just to cut out her picture of Cinderella or somebody. There were masking tape and post-it arrows everywhere. Craft shrapnel, I call it. And all those bemused passers-by. And halfway through, Kate decided she wanted to get in her Renaissance costume and dance a bit.

Chaos and princesses. Same old drama, brand new stage.

Back soon with photos (in faith)!

Bathrobes

Hello all! Just wanted to check in to say I haven't forgotten I owe you all a sloper. I'm making and organizing my sketches (31 and counting!) to start photodocumenting the tutorial tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow, I mean. Emily has a birthday party smack in the middle of the day that requires chauffeuring to and from. We've had a busy week - the husband was out of town on business so I was parenting solo half the week. While sewing to keep sane, of course. We had some meltdowns (mostly me) and I forgot to water our tomatoes and lone sunflower for two whole days, and well, let's just say I'm glad he's home :)

Because now I can resume sewing AND drafting.

Thank you all for encouraging me on this crazy series. When I first started thinking about doing drafting tutorials, I was motivated by my girls. Specifically, I wanted to do this for them. I thought of myself, drafting after 10 years of not-drafting, and wishing mum were in the same room, pointing out all the bits I was messing up and showing me how to do it right. Or, since she wasn't in the same room, wishing she had written a drafting book so I could buy it on amazon and figure it out myself. Someday too, my kids will not be in the same room as I, and trying to do some funny crafty/sewingy thing and saying, "Bah, if only mum were here to show us how to turn this wretched glue gun on." Maybe someday they might even draft patterns. I hope they do. So I'm starting now - and maybe by the time they're teenagers there will be enough here on drafting for them to sew their own prom dresses from scratch. (Yes, they will. Because I am not sewing them. Because I will be off to some diving spot like Belize with the husband, lazing on the beach between dives, hand-stitching my OWN clothes.) But until then, I am very happy to have you all enjoy this draftalong as well! And if, in the tutorial (when I finish it), I sound like I'm talking to children, er, it's because I am.

Also wanted to say that I've retracted the printable measuring table in the Part 1 post. In the process of planning out the sequence of steps in the tutorial, I found that the table was driving me slightly crazy. I found two mistakes and made a few other revisions. Nothing major to you, but massively clearer in my own head for me. So I apologize to those of you who've already wasted printer ink on that table, and started filling it out. I will re-upload the nicer version when I post the sloper tutorial, and tell you what the few changes were, and all will be well.

So in the meantime, here's a distractor post for you while I work on my drafting stuff.


Emily and Jenna are enrolled in swimming class this summer. They both love it. Jenna is in the Parent-and-Child type class, an unfortunate side effect of which is that I get to be in the pool with her without actually being allowed to do laps. It is like being given a nutella bottle that is sealed shut forever. Or a sewing machine with no thread. I miss swimming so much that I will even swim in a humid, heated indoor pool if allowed to. Who swims in indoor pools (and heated!!!!!!!!) in 95 degree weather?

Pardon my whining. Unbelievably, this post is actually not about swimming (too late for that now, though). It is about bathrobes.

Some years ago I made bathrobes for the girls. Kate wasn't born yet, so they were just for Emily and Jenna. When they started swimming lessons this summer, they decided they wanted to wear bathrobes. Jenna fits nicely now into Emily's,


and Kate has happily adopted Jenna's,


(The girls are getting used to me flailing my limbs and shrieking, "The light! At last! The right light for photos! Quick, photoshoot! Everyone on the deck! Stat! Before the sun comes out from behind the clouds!" So here they are, fully dressed under their bathrobes, just to humor me.)


Unfortunately, this convenient hand-me-down system has left Emily bathrobeless. So further interrupted my To Sew project list last week to make her one. I told her it was meant to last her the next 5 years.


Very easy, bathrobes. They don't even have to actually fit. So a person could, in theory, randomly slash out from the fabric, shapes that somewhat resemble a bodice and a sleeve, and then run everything under a presser foot. The hard part was getting a good, thick terrycloth to make them with. I got mine from Mill End's remnant section. Very thick, chenille-like on the outside, and terry on the inside, like an expensive towel.

Back when I made the first bathrobes for E and J, I also made some for their cousins. That was in the pre-blog era, but I took photos - this is what they looked like when I had enough fabric


and when I didn't - a bit patchwork-y.


The fancy pictures on the patch pockets are appliques of random fabric scraps.

But, oh, you should have seen the house when I had finished them - it looked like it had snowed indoors. I never knew a fabric that shed more bountifully than terrycloth.

Germ Warfare

A quick and silly paper craft this morning before breakfast - Germs.

We cut some shapes out of construction paper
and let the girls add eyes, mouths, teeth -
which even a two-year-old could sort of stick in the right spots (bravo!).
And if some small persons were a bit heavy on the glue,
it was perfectly appropriate, given the subject matter.

A cardboard stand (we cut up an old Ritz cracker box)
stuck to the backs of the germs
and we had a whole army of the wretched creatures.
Which meant war.

So we stretched a rubber band across the legs of an overturned chair,
cut the remnants of the cracker box into ammunition
took aim-
and then remembered the smallest members among
us would be better off with hand-hurled boulders,
then faced the enemy
and wiped them all out.
Then all headed back in for morning victuals.

Suddenly Emily runs out with a toy pump bottle, and squirts
us all vigorously. "Hand sanitizer! You've been handling germs!"

Well!

I should've thought of that earlier!
Before we got all bashed up in the battle!
The wisdom of children - always leaves the grownups
(me, anyway) looking decidedly daft.

Renaissance Festival Costumes

Some time ago, I interrupted my To Sew list of
projects to start on the girls' Renaissance Festival
costumes. I didn't really want the whole King Henry VIII -
Anne Boleyn look - I thought something Queen-Guinevere-
meets-Lucy-Pevensie might be more fun for small
children. Found this illustration in one of our books
and decided it was exactly what I had in mind.
Minus the velvet/velour/crushed panne look,
though - it is the middle of summer, after all.


So used jersey knits instead - like Tshirt fabric, but slinkier -


and whatever trims I could find at Joann's



and went to work to make a Small,


a Medium


and a Large


Very fast work, as far as costumes go. The kids' slopers
were current, and all it took was to adapt the neckline and
the sleeve block into a long fitted sleeve slightly flared
at the elbow, inside an outer bell sleeve.

A bit overachieving in that they are done about a
month before the actual festival (hurrah), but I wanted
to finish them and share them in the middle of our
drafting series as an example of what a sloper
can do, even for two-year olds,
and even in stretchy knits.

I love the fit of a custom draft -














and the drape and movement of the fabric


- cool and comfortable like an old T shirt (literally!) and
yet with such a nice weight. The girls thought they felt
like nightdresses and wanted to wear them to bed.
I don't think I'll even bother to finish the hem since it doesn't fray.




The plan is to wear them to the festival and have the
girls pick out their own crowns (they're wearing
last year's crowns in the photos).


When I was sewing Emily's, I couldn't believe how much
hers looked like an adult's. When did she get so tall?
She's only five! I need to stop time.