Ugly Pattern Party!

This past fortnight, the girls at Simple Simon and Co, who are the same masterminds behind Project Runandplay, have been hosting the You Can't Judge An Ugly Vintage Pattern By Its Cover party on their blog. If you haven't been there to party with them, you have to go catch up with what's been happening. It's hilarious! And inspiring. Let me explain. See, in the spirit of indomitable optimism, they believe that even the most hideous sewing pattern has redeeming features worth adapting into something gloriously redemptive. A sewing pattern makeover, in other words. And who doesn't love a makeover? Especially when the Befores look like this

and this:

Words fail you, right? Yeah, same here.

So, some time ago, Liz and Elizabeth picked some of their most unfortunate vintage patterns and mailed them to fellow bloggy seamstresses with the invitation to give them a new face. Then, all fortnight long, Liz, Elizabeth and their guests at Simple Simon and Co. shared their makeovers! So much fun.

Now it's my turn! The girls invited me to join the party and were soooo nice to overlook the fact that I actually know squat about commercial patterns, vintage or otherwise. My pattern arrived while I was in Singapore and when I got back home, I opened the mailer and -whoa! Demure Maiden Pastel Curtain Frock.

Stunned. Showed it to Emily, who stared at it for a long time before hesitantly and carefully saying, "I like the cloth. But I wouldn't wear the dress, Mom."

Here's the odd thing: the dress is really not vile. Yes, it's old-fashioned and pastel and stiff cotton and feminine in ways that none of the females in my house will ever be. But it isn't avert-your-eyes unfortunate like that tulip-bikini pattern in the previous picture was. It's not even ridiculous; some people might actually call it "sweet". And I'm quite sure I remember actual folks wearing similar frocks in church recently. Like just-last-month kind of recently.  It's just... not my style. And therein lay the problem: It wasn't bad to the point where I could revile it and totally dismiss it as hopeless but at the same time, I couldn't bring myself to use it because I was personally allergic to ruffles, gathers, calico and pink.

Well, man up, you wimp, I finally told myself. You've never used a commercial pattern in your life. Now's the time to at least touch one. 

So I did. 

Interesting. 

So this is what commercial patterns look like! 

They have instructions with pictures! 

And the pattern pieces are all cut out! 

Um... they look big, though. 

Let's go get our slopers (or measure our children) and compare them. I picked Kate's.

Here goes.

SCREAM! Did I miss the fine print saying, "Life vest not included?" Because it sure looks like this dress will have to be worn over one!!!!!! 

Oh, wait a minute. 

Seam allowances. 

That's right. LiEr, you moron! Commercial patterns 

have seam allowances added in, like invisible borders!

Okay, let's try that again, with seam allowances this time. 

Um...

Nope. 

Am I not using this pattern correctly? 

Because that's still way too much ease.

Might still need that life vest.

Oh well, moving on- 

sleeves now.

Okaaaaaaaay...

Now, let's examine all the facts. This sleeve is a puff. Actually, the technical term is "leg-of-mutton", but let's go with "puff". What do we know about puff sleeves?

Answer: They have high and wide sleeve caps. Check.

But that sleeve pattern looks suspiciously uniform.

Let's fold it in half. 

It's completely symmetrical. The front and back are the same. That breaks drafting rules! You all know that the front of the sleeve block (see blue arrow and dashed line) has to be deeper/more slopey) than the back (black arrow), right? Because of the movement of the arm and the ball of the shoulder joint? See sleeve block drafting post here. 

Although... this is a puff sleeve. And a very voluminous puff sleeve, by the look of it. So maybe, just maybe, under all that extra ease, it doesn't matter whether the front and back are the same, or if they're shaped like squids or whatever. So Ding! Today's Benefit Of The Doubt goes to McCalls!

Wait... wait... what's this?

Perhaps the instructions will give us a clue.

No.

Oh. 

My.

Word. 

It can't be true.

Shoulder pads. 

For toddlers.

Well.

See here - I can work with gathers. And mountainous sleeves. And even bodices to get lost in. But I might have to draw the line at shoulder pads for children. It's just cruel. This pattern is officially Not Viable.

So! Words, having now failed me on the subject, are hereafter devoted to a tutorial on how to draft your own shoulderpadless pattern for the makeover. 

Let's not make that dress, though.

Let's make this dress.

See the similarities?

Both have drop waists!

Both have full skirts!

Both have princess seam styling!

Both have puff sleeves (okay, one doesn't really)!

Both have smiling models!

Let's get started.

Here are the sloper bits - front bodice block, back bodice block, sleeve block and random bit of newspaper that was cut into a circular skirt block.

So, Step One is to find a picture to copy, because we are too lazy to draw one ourselves. Look - Barbie wore a dress like that! Let's do a Barbie-vintage makeover!

Step Two is to trace the bodice slopers on our drafting paper. Notice how I'm indecisive about the waist height on the front bodice? 

That's because this sloper was drafted last October and there was this epic battle going on between the various aspects of my split personality:

Mother: She hasn't grown a nanometre since then. Leave the waistline as is.

Physics Teacher: Pfffft. I can smell denial a mile away. Look, Queen of Mush, the rules of life dictate that she's elongated at least an inch and therefore one should lower the waistline to reflect that. In fact, let's extrapolate her impending growth over the next two years and lower it even further to get more mileage on the dress.

Granddaughter of Professional Tailor: Oh, bosh. Where's the child? Measure her and be done with it. Oh, we can't. She's in school right now. We'll have to use rules-of-thumb.

Crisis Counselor: Friends! All your viewpoints are equally valid. What about a  happy consensus? Let's start with a lower waistline and cut it higher later if it's too low when we measure her after she gets home from school. How do you feel about that? 

Pre-motherhood LiEr: Shut up, all of you. My head hurts. It's too early in the morning for this.

Step 3 is to make adjustments so the sloper looks like the dress we want.

Let's work with the front bodice first (all adjustments in blue).

1. Draw in the princess seam dividing the front bodice into two sections.
2. Cut in the armscye so that the shoulder "strap" thing lies closer to the neck. Two reasons: one, because it looks nice in this fake-corset design and two, so that the strap stays on the shoulder more securely. Often, wide-open necklines, particularly if imprecisely drafted, may gape and shoulder straps may slide off shoulders. Scratch out the old armscye. Remember this change, because we will later have to adapt the sleeve block (next post) to accommodate it.
3. Drop the waist at the center front and curve it along the waistline back up towards the side seam.

Whatever you do to the front shoulder has to be done to the back shoulder so the shoulder seams will meet and match. So measure the width and placement of this new shoulder strap on the front bodice (see ruler) and reproduce it on the back bodice (see pencil).

Now draw the new back bodice. Later, we will extend that vertical shoulder line downwards into a princess seam and cut the back bodice apart into two sections, just like the front bodice. I have left it as a single square-necklined piece for now because there are already too many intermediate sketching lines - again the result of my experimenting with different neckline heights and widths to see what they look like. Sorry about the mess - thought you might enjoy seeing the imperfect, undoctored version so you could see how my brain works (or doesn't) as I am drafting. If you want to keep the back darts, you should incorporate them into the back princess seam now. I didn't- I forgot. 

Notice that I didn't include any ease in the new patterns. A dress like this doesn't need it. Plus, remember: we're working with puff sleeves, right? 

Puff sleeves+well-fitted dress = stylish, whereas 

puff sleeves+loose dress = just loose.

So cut out the patterns, lay out on fabric, etc. etc., and sew up the bodice. Lots of fancy details and lining and layering and whatnot went into the construction up to this stage but that's beside the point. The point is that it all comes from that one draft - princess seams with cut-in shoulders. 

Let's do the skirt now. I thought I'd show you how to do the drop waist. I've realized, after writing this blog for a while, that some things I take for granted as being obvious are not really so for other people. So I'm trying to slow down a bit and explain some basic concepts - things that, as a beginning seamstress or drafter, a person might not even think to ask about because they might not realize it needs asking. I think this drop-waist thing might be one of them.

I'm starting with a semi-circular skirt block. I decided that a full circular skirt was too heavy for this dress and tossed out that random bit of newspaper from the earlier photo. We want it to be swirly and swishy but not ballgown-fussy. The original vintage pattern has a gathered skirt, which is full and bulky at the waist (good for those of us who are superslender and would like to add fullness to the hips) but it does not swish.

A circular skirt is wonderfully swishy and drapes beautifully but it also adds a lot of bulk to the hips. It's good for dancewear and (again) tall and  slender figures.

A semi-circular skirt is swishy and drapey and just skims the hips but does not bulk up the hips or waist as much. If you have a fuller lower body or are vertically ungifted, you might want to pick a semi-circular skirt over a circular one. Better still, pick a bias-cut Aline. Whoa! How easily I digress.  

So, semi-circular block. This new newspaper thing is the front half of the skirt (so it's a quadrant, which is half of a semi-circle). The top concave edge of the skirt matches the bottom hem of the bodice.

If the bodice had a straight lower hem (i.e. if it wasn't a drop-waisted thing), we'd just attach the skirt to the bodice as is and call it a day.

Our bodice, however, has a dropped waist. If we attached the skirt's waistline to that dropped waist, the front hem of the skirt would sag correspondingly. Wrong and, more importantly, hideous. 

So here's how we adjust the skirt pattern to accommodate that dropped waist.

First, measure how much below the side seams that dropped waist has uh... dropped.

You can measure the paper pattern directly, but this way is visually more interesting - put a ruler across the bodice and measure.

1.25", says the ruler.

Q: Why are all the edges so irregular? Did you use unmatching seam allowances for all the various sections of the bodice? 

A: Yes and no. I was working with satin (woven), jersey (knit) as well as layers of both. Satin has an unstable weave and frays like there's no tomorrow. This means that it shifts as we work with it and the shape changes. One way to avoid this is to hand-baste all layers to stabilize it (I did). Another way is to stabilize it with interfacing (I didn't, because makes it stiff). Another way is to cut the lining layers a little bigger i.e. with wider SA and trim after sewing. The light pink fabric is jersey, which also shifts and, worse, stretches. I simply cut that piece much longer than the darker pink satin in front to allow for all the fabric shape-shifting. It all gets trimmed neatly later. 

Q: So, with all those funky SAs, how do you know which is the real stitching line?

A: It's in my head. And, after all the layers and colors were patchworked together, I re-measured the bodice and re-marked the final stitching line again.

Now fold the skirt pattern in half so you get the center front fold line.

Measure that same amount - 1.25" from the top of the waistline of the skirt.

Draw a curve from that point to the side seam of the skirt.

Cut off that arc,

and open up the skirt pattern. This skirt pattern can now be attached to the dropped waist of the bodice

and the hem of the skirt will be perfectly straight.

Here is the dress on Kate, standing on the coffee table, to show you what the bottom hem looks like on the actual wearer. Note that this hem is literally the raw hem - I didn't trim it or doctor it in any way. It is perfectly even because it has been drafted to hang from a dropped waist.

Here is the completed dress - front

and back. The bottom hem of the skirt was faced with leftover satin not only because it was fun but also because velour (the skirt fabric) doesn't hem well by folding and gets all wonky with serging. A faced hem (see this post for instructions) is crisp and neat. 

I didn't add the buttons afterall!

The sleeves- I like them. They're pleated 

and drapey

and lined.

They look puffed but they're not! Ha ha ha ha! Take that, traditional puff sleeves. 

Some notes on the effect of those cut-in shoulders from Step 3 now. Remember I mentioned not wanting the neckline to gape or the straps to slide off the shoulders? Done this way (i.e. with cut-in shoulders), the back neckline and armscye are snug without being uncomfortable. And if you look at the photo below, you can see what a cut-in sleeve looks like - Kate's actual shoulder point (blue arrow) doesn't lie at the shoulder seam of sleeve and bodice. 

Here's the semi-circular skirt in motion- swirly!

Next is a photo to show you the fit of the back. I forgot the back darts, as I confessed earlier, but by the time I remembered, it was too late to alter the princess seams to include them. So I took in the sides, which is a highly inferior alternative but Kate is going to grow and fill out the dress in all kinds of ways, regardless, so I let it go. Anyway, notice the back neckline does not gape- the cut in shoulders (and the lack of superfluous ease) help with that.

See?

No gaping.

Since we're nitpicking for the sake of sharing sewing and drafting tips, I'm going to say that I'm pleased with only one of the shoulder straps. The other one pops a bit and doesn't sit as neatly on Kate's shoulder. This was the result of manhandling the bodice in its half-finished stages for tutorial photoshoots. Satin is not the most resilient fabric and normally, I'd baste and sew and face each satin edge as soon as possible and handle it only minimally. This time, though, for the sake of the tutorial, I dragged it through mud and hell. I can tell that it is the mud and hell and not a poor draft that are to blame because it's only one shoulder strap that went astray. Poor shoulder strap. I feel so guilty. Moral of the story: do not drag your unfinished garments through mud and hell just to take photos for tutorials. Go right ahead with your bags and stuffed toys and zippered clutches and key fobs and crayon rolls but be gentle with your garments, okay? Don't be like me.

So that's my makeover! No shoulder pads! I did my best to keep as many of the original features  as possible -the dropped waist, the princess seams, the full skirt (although I swopped out the rigid gathered skirt for the swishy semi-circular one to earn Good Mother points with Kate) and the puffish sleeves. 

In the next post, I'll show you how to draft that cut-in, horizontally pleated, not-really-puff sleeve. Too long to include in this post. See you soon!

What Should I Pin?

Something fun - I am one of the contributing pinners for Family Fun Magazine's board Blogger Ideas We Love.

What an honor! Very thrilled, needless to say. I get to pin stuff from ikatbag to share with over 10 000 followers! When I sat down at the computer today to start pinning, I suddenly realized I didn't know what to pin since I never pin my own stuff! So I started out with some of my more exciting cardboard projects (you can see them in the picture above) because these are the ones that do things - they move, or light up, for instance - or which have resulted in endless hours of play in our home. I'd also like to include some of the simpler projects - the ones that are possibly less daunting on first sight, maybe can be finished within a day, the kinds most people would themselves pin for a rainy day. The trouble is that it's hard to remember all my projects, let alone choose from among them when half my blog is a record of my silly sewing adventures plus random rants about losing favorite CDs and falling apart in my role as people's mother. 

Will you help? Which ikatbag projects should I pin to this board? Are there any projects from this blog you've pinned yourself that you think other like-minded crafty family folks might find interesting and want to take on with their kids?  Given that this is Family Fun Mag's audience, it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense to pin, say, drafting tutorials, or any technical sewing post, but I imagine that anything cardboard, or children-doable is fair game. Incidentally, my assignment is to only pin projects from my own blog (for now), much as I'd like to pin a whole bunch of other people's awesome stuff as well. Thanks in advance, friends!  

Bunny

Kate's birthday's coming up. She wants a party. I haven't planned it. Am I panicking? Nope. I'm still in post-Singapore DullLand - you know, where everything is slow and I react slowly (if at all) to craft stimuli and stare slowly out the window at the snow in disbelief. But - and this is how I know my body has been hijacked by aliens - I'm doing all these handmade gifts for her, when I swore never to do handmade gifts for my children because I go insane trying to finish them in time for their birthdays or Christmas.

So Exhibit A: Handmade birthday gift #1 = that fake corset dress (photos later - am feeling slow now).

Here's Handmade birthday gift #2: Bunny.

Kate has been asking me for a bunny for some time.

"You already have a bunny." I say. "Remember? It's Baby Bunny (that's its name). She was mine (a student gave her to me years ago) and I gave her to you."

"Yes, but she's flat. I want a puffy bunny."

"What do you mean - 'flat'?"

Kate takes Baby Bunny and lets her flop on her belly, all four limbs splayed out. "See?" she explains. "Flat."

"So what's 'puffy'?"

Kate vigorously makes scrunchy fingers in the air and declares, "Like... not flat!"

How succinct. 

Eventually, through an extremely thorough interrogation process, I managed to extract enough information to understand what she wanted. Flat animals, apparently, are those designed to lie down on their tummies a la bearskin rugs or stand on four feet e.g. dogs. Puffy animals are designed to sit up on their bottoms e.g. teddy bears. Who knew?

So Kate wants a Puffy Bunny that sits on its bottom. Someday I want to make the kids a squid but for now, I can do bunnies. Stuffed toys are easy to draft up because there are principles for toy-making, just like there are principles for bag-making and clothes-making. Takes maybe an hour to cut everything out and sew a muslin to test the roundness and relative proportions of parts and so on. Then there is tweaking. The tweaking takes some time because every tweak affects some other part and needs another muslin to test out. And then the muslins must be stuffed and tested for balance. This is an interesting aspect that's absent from clothes-making or bag-making: Does The Stuffed Animal Sit/Stand Properly Or Does Its Gargantuan Head Cause It To Fall Flat On Its Face? Like what happened when I made Chicken long ago and the first muslin did a face plant on my work table. It took a couple more versions before it sat squatly and stably.

But back to Puffy Bunny. Here she is. 

She's about 16"? 18"? long, stretched out from the top of her head to her tippy toes. She's made of some weird woolly-feeling stretchy fabric that I bought from JoAnn Fabrics years ago to make a lamb (never happened). It might've been from the Fake Fur aisle or the Minky Fabric aisle - I don't remember now. It's so woolly that it required very little stuffing to make it puffy.

Here are some more photos of the Important Bunny Bits - ear lining

bobtail

and footpads. 

And her round head, of course.

Kate hasn't seen her yet - a miracle. Let's hope she doesn't read this blog before her birthday. 

How To Burn Out

Have a to-do list like this:

1. Cook all meals from scratch and never eat out, buy in or use a boxed dinner.
2. Sew all the kids' clothes on account of "not being able to find store-bought that fit".
3. Sign the kids up for swimming, gymnastics, art class, ballet, jazz-tap, soccer, piano/violin/both, volleyball, karate/aikido and drama. Personally drive them to and from all of those classes. While also doing 1.
4. Publish a book while doing 1 and 2.
5. Design patterns for sale while doing 4, so as to pay for 3.
6. Exercise at least 4 days a week.
7. Do home tuition/remediation lessons with the kids (what we do in Singapore to supplement actual school lessons, but which I never did as a kid and till this day refuse to do with my kids).
8. Organize and/or accept playdates with each of the kids' 100 friends on regular rotation. Bake cookies and other healthful snacks while hosting playdates.

Alternatively, here's how to not burn out, at the expense of being heinously unproductive as far as "involved parenting" goes: have a to-do list like the one that often drifts in and out of my head:

1. Employ elves to cook meals and clean the house. Eat out on the days when the elves are out sick. 
2. Give the kids sacks to wear when they complain about store-bought clothes. Say: "Sacks are one-size fits all!" Invest in fabric markers so kids can personalize their own sack-outfits. Screen results before kids actually wear them out, to eliminate incorrect spelling, unwittingly-coined rude words and (worse) poor color choices. Personally buy and wear store-bought clothes yourself, even if they don't fit at all, just to set a good example and avoid being accused of hypocrisy.
3. Sign the kids up for cooking lessons and driving class. Then enlist them to help with all the chores that normally consume all your time by slotting them into the elves' roster (see 1) when the elves are on sick leave. Pay them (the kids, not the elves - elves usually choose telepathy over technology when communicating) in cellphone minutes, which you can also take advantage of by texting them links to recipe websites containing dishes you like to eat.
4. Only buy books that are about world history, politics, outer space conquest or improving personal financing, knowing that they aren't written by anyone you know who has a creative blog, thereby avoiding comparing and feeling inferior to people who write creative blogs and who have published books on crocheting dinosaur-shaped oven mitts.
5. Hit "delete" when people email you demanding free patterns and tutorials.
6. Attach weights to your feet (or let the smaller children cling to your leg) and walk around and up and down the house carrying large loads of laundry for natural and incidental calorie-burning. Punch fist in air at regular intervals for sense of solidarity with other equally-resourceful home-exercising SAHMs everywhere. Feel extra encouraged that fist-punching counts for extra calorie-burning because of action against gravity. 
7. Believe that kids learn best by playing. Then give them an old electric appliance (minus CR tube because dangerous) and tell them to extract all the resistors and stick them on a card in order of increasing value. Offer prizes to everyone who collects resistors whose total value (in parallel for older kids; in series for younger kids) exceeds 50 megaohms.
8. Tell the kids that school counts as one big playdate; snacks optional.

Of course my real to-do list looks nothing at all like either of those. It only has stuff like, "Buy cereal", "Wash K's snow pants" or "Replenish toilet paper in upstairs toilet if you know what's good for you". Charmingly repetitive.  

Boy, is it hard to come back to real life after a vacation. I'm getting there. Real life, I mean. 

A Grand Way To Procrastinate

What to do on a Saturday night in winter in Minnesota:

A   Sew fake corset
B   Write tutorial on sewing fake corset
C   Take photos for tutorial on sewing fake corset
D   Ditch A,B and C and go solo to rock concert and watch Kevin Max sing live.

Wow, that's a tough choice. Gimme a minute to think... um...

Duh.

Although, I'd forgotten how loud these things can be in an enclosed auditorium. Forgot to bring earplugs. Luckily had my ipod with me so shoved the earbuds in my ears (music off) and strategically positioned my hair to hide the wires so nobody would see and (correctly) guess how uncool and old and feeble I was.

Today: back to domesticity. Sniff.

I Am Sewing A Fake Corset

It's a princess dress for Kate's birthday, in cotton candy colors. Here's my question: should I add those Tiny White Buttons for grommets? I think I should, but I'm lazy and want to leave the bodice as is.

It's hard to resume sewing after a break away from it. But I know that if I don't sew something, I'll take up, I dunno, knitting or something, just for something for my fingers to do and maybe never return to sewing. And now that Kate is turning five, I'm panicking at the thought that my children's Dressing Up Days might well be numbered. So I'd better sew costumes while they still want them. Especially when I have so much costume fabric in my stash that needs to be used.

This is a short-sleeved non-fleece costume, which is something I haven't made in a while. Usually, every costume is constructed like insulation for arctic temperatures because it's for Halloween and Halloween here is arctic. So this was a nice change. And to make it even more exciting, I set some rules for myself: 

• Must use only fabric in my stash
• but can go out to buy zipper
• and, while at the fabric store, can buy more yardage if it means not compromising on twirl factor (e.g. circular skirt rather than gathered skirt).
• Cannot be scratchy on the inside, especially since it isn't lined with fleece.
• Must finish in three days.

Kate is allowed to see it, of course. I've long given up with the Secret Gifts concept in our house. I teased her a bit, when I caught her spying on me. 

I asked her, "Hey, Kate, I like this dress. I think I'll wear it when I'm done making it."

"You can't!" Said Kate.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because it's too small for you! It's for me and I'm four years old and you're, like, seventeen!"

Bless you, Kate. Just for that, I will finish this dress in three days and not procrastinate by knitting or something. 

Just for the sake of sharing, here's the inside of that front bodice piece:

It's lined with jersey, which isn't scratchy (hurrah).

Here are the back pieces. The left piece is flipped to show what it's supposed to look like. The right piece has a row of pins, one of which stabbed me viciously in the foot while I was photographing the front pieces. 

 

Incidentally, I pin stuff along the stitching line, not at right angles to it. Someone has asked me this before and up to that point, I never thought about pin direction. This was how I was taught - pin parallel to the seam allowances, preferably IN the seam allowances (so the holes don't show on the garment) and never sew over pins. There are times -like in this garment - when I pin exactly on the stitching line itself, and pull out each pin as the presser foot approaches it. Of course, I was also taught to hand-baste everything, even paper patterns to fabric, but it's hard to be so assiduous all the time (or at all).

Later (like, not tomorrow or even next week), I'll show you some of the drafts for this dress. The sleeve, especially, is interesting. Provided it works, I mean. It's a semi-raglan puff (ugh) but with horizontal pleats. So it's a draped cut-in sleeve that's puff. I know, it sounds just awful. The draft looks like a Christmas tree. 

Confections

Ignore Melissa and Doug box- it's just a photo prop. 

The kids have been watching The Great British Bakeoff recently. My lovely friend sent me recordings of the first season and we have become instant fans, albeit several years late. Particularly Jenna, who loves all things baking, and watches the episodes over and over again and, before she watched the finale, took polls among family members on whether Ed, Miranda or Ruth should win. Then all three girls held their own bakeoffs at home with all our felt food. I got to be the judge and walk around their tables, looking imperious and commenting on their novel flavor combinations (green beans and strawberries, anyone?) and congratulating them on avoiding the fatal "soggy bottoms" in their pastries and cakes.

Our felt food is so loved that it has been played with to death in our home. All kids should have felt food, I think. And wooden food, too. Unfortunately, wooden food takes skill to assemble and paint. Felt food, on the other hand, can be made by anyone who can cut circles out of fabric. Including exhausted and jetlagged anyones. And so, now that I'm back home and needing a low-intensity sewing project to ease myself back under the presser foot, I made some felt confections for Kate's upcoming school fundraiser.

First, some doughnuts.

Very similar to the old ones I made for the Donut-Shop-On-The-Go, but with revised designs and some glass beads. These were packed in a bakery box,

all ready to go.


Next, some cookies.


With frosting removable or permanent.


I don't remember ever sharing my recipe, so here it is now:

Two felt circles, RS together, layered on batting. I used two layers of low-loft.

Obviously, if you are making permanent frosting like this:

you'll want to applique the frosting on the RS of one of those felt circles BEFORE sewing both felt circles together.

Sew all around through all the layers, leaving an opening.

Peel back the top layer and baste the bottom layer onto the batting, within its SA. This is just to hold the batting to the felt when hand-stitching the opening closed later.

Trim the batting.


Turn RS out.


Ladder-stitch the opening shut.


Make a lot.


Cut out frosting shapes from felt.


Embellish.

Iron fusible fleece on the underside to cover up all the knots and thread.

Make a lot.

Add a piping bag.


Here's how.

Cut a quadrant of a circle from white fabric. And a small quadrant of a circle from fusible interfacing.

Iron interfacing to the corner of the WS of the fabric.

Fold fabric in half, WS out, so the straight edges line up and the shape is an eighth of a circle. Sew the long edges together and serge/zigzag.

Finish the curved edge of the resulting cone - I made a rolled hem.

Knot a double-length of thread and sew basting stitches partway down from the opening, all around the cone.

Stuff with polyfill

and pull thread to gather the basting stitches into a tight neck. Wrap thread around neck a couple of times, poke your needle through the neck and then secure with a knot.

Combine cookies, frosting and piping bag. Invite children to give comments. Panic when children run off with cookies, deaf to mother's feeble cries of, "But they're not for you. They're for the fundraiser! Please don't get chocolate all over them. Did you wash your hands? Go wash your hands! Please wash your hands!"

If you want a short cut, you can buy printed cookies and layer them on felt and batting to get the same puffy effect. 

See - so cute, right? And totally should've been done for Valentine's Day except when am I ever in time to observe any holiday?

Throw in another piping bag.

In fact, make multiple piping bags and let your kids hold their own cookie-decorating version of the Great British Bakeoff. They're going to run off with the rest of your felt food anyway.

Questions I anticipate:

Q Where did you get that heart cookie fabric?

A Random fabric store. I think it was Mill End Textiles. Saw while looking for lycra for Emily's swimsuit, thought of Jenna, and bought. 

Q Where did you get that checkered tray that's holding the heart cookies?

A In Singapore. I think Daiso, but it was about 6 years ago.

Q Do you have a pattern for the round cookies?

A No, but they're circles - go ahead and make your own pattern.

Q Do you have a pattern for the donuts?

A No, but again, they're circles. Concentric circles, to be precise. You can go to the donut-shop-on-the-go post that I linked to, and find the link to the tutorial I used.

Q Do you have a pattern for the piping bag?

A It's a quarter of a circle. 

All three confection sets are going to Kate's fundraiser tomorrow, not my shop. However, if anyone is interested in the heart cookies, let me know and I may make some sets for the shop at some point in the future. But not the doughnuts or frosting cookies - too much hand-stitching to be a viable project at the moment.