the dress that made me almost miss my flight...

after seeing how cute faye looked in her southport dress, i endeavored to make my own.  (ok, i lie: i was always going to make one for me too.  hence why i got an adult one and shrank it down to fit her.)  also, her bday is the day after mine, so clearly i had to make us twinsies.  this weekend, i visited shirley, who now resides in florida.  we had a sewathon on saturday, from 9am to 3am.  it felt like i was a star on project runway.  she encouraged me to make my own bias binding from the same fabric (my least fav task ever), so i made a ton:

(yes, i need a haircut.  oct 8, oct 8!)  i burned my fingers SO many times.  the inside of the dress looked so nice though!!!  i can't say i've ever finished any garment this nicely.  i'm the lazy one who will just serge edges and stitch them down, although this doesn't work so nicely for neck and arm holes.

it's not really pink dress weather anymore (and school is FREEZING!), so i wintered up the dress with short boots and a wool cardigan.

the dress hits just above my knee but because my friend madeline took it for me (and she is quite a bit taller), it looks like the dress hits lower than my knee.  fear not, it's not really this frumpy looking in real life!  i did the double button on top and evenly scattered buttons below again, as eric designed on faye's dress.  i figured i should stay true to the style of her dress if we were gonna be twinsies.

funny story about the twill tape drawstring:  i brought some to florida, but it was too short.  so, right before my flight, shirley took me to a joann's by an airport.  the private jet airport.  oops.  we thought airport=airport.  i almost missed my flight, for the sake of a me-made garment.  however, as i sprint to my gate 20 mins before take-off, i get a text that my flight was delayed.  hallelujah!  thus, i successfully made it to school today, as you can see from the school office pic above.  the risks we seamsters (what i call sewing teamsters) have to take... hehe

the weekend of t-shirts

eric's nephew, reid, celebrated his 5th birthday yesterday.  we spent all saturday making him a t-shirt for the occasion.  i say WE because i sewed up the 3/4 sleeve baseball tee (the twin-needle is giving me a hell of a time on the new sewing machine, arghhhh), while eric printed a tricerotops, tweaked a silhouette of a small boy to be a smaller boy looking like reid, put that boy on the tricerotops, and cut that image out of freezer paper.  (he rigged the most genius platform so that he could light the image from underneath to see it through the freezer paper and to cut out both without having to trace the image 1st with pencil)

then we ironed the freezer paper onto the t-shirt and he painted into the stencil he had made.  on the back, the t-shirt had "reid" and a 5 

the shirt was AMAZING.  

look at the detail that eric was able to put into the stencil he made!!  the little boy had a cowlick in the back of his head and little bangs in the front, just like reid!  he shortened the arms and body of the original image to make the boy look younger.

we then steamed the paint so that it puffed up a little bit.  you can sort of see the texture in the pic above where i'm holding the t-shirt for display.

because the inside of the stencil was so intact and intricate, it pained me to throw it away.  remember the little t-shirt i made for my friend amanda's son, jacob, with the necktie sewn onto it?  unfortunately the shirt got ruined by jacob's friend (he got tons of paint on the back), so i had promised him i'd make him a new shirt.  here was my chance!  i made the same t-shirt as reid's and ironed on the negative of reid's stencil onto jacob's.  i painted rays of paint beaming off of the image so that it would look like spray paint around the image...

it came out super well.  the details that were spectacular on reid's shirt were maintained on jacob's!  we did nix the cowlick and bangs on jacob's, since jacob has neither.

this fabric could also be puffed up, so we steamed it as well.

on the home front, bunks and squeeks had a moment of extreme cuteness this weekend:

they battle for dominance of the yard and apartment but also are really intrigued by each other.  unlikely animal friends =)

peach cake!

eric's dad delivered more peaches from the backyard.  peach desserts are da bomb.  eric sliced probably 6 cups of peaches while i made the cake's cookie bottom layer and the brown sugar and cinnamon topping.  i tried this recipe from "joy of cooking" with apples a couple of years ago, and it was nauseatingly sweet.  these peaches, although very ripe, have been a little tart, so i figured they'd be the perfect fruit to lay between the layers.  we used 4 cups of the peaches, which means 2 more cups for more peach desserts!!!

this cake:  also da bomb.  might be my new fav dessert.  the topping came out kind of caramel-y.

summer radio silence has ended!

been super busy this summer.  after the birdy mobiles, i baked these oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

and this blueberry pie.

eric and i then went to montana to meet up with his friends, float down some rivers, and go camping in a tent!  omg so fun.  we also went fishing a lot, but caught nothing but some tree branches hehe.  on the last night, i baked a pie for his friend who hosted us.  pie in a square dish: i feel like that's an oxymoron!

eric's friend florence gave us a bunch of rhubarb stalks from her garden in bozeman.  we carried them home and i baked them into a strawberry rhubarb pie.  so beautiful isn't it???

here's the pie, baked!

eric and i started a huge garden in our backyard this summer.  it has yielded many gigantic summer squash:

perfect for baking into squash/zucchini bread!  (we currently have 6 loaves in the freezer... eric would like that number to get up to 12...)

here's a meal we made from all homemade or homegrown goods:  swiss chard, amaranth, cabbage, peppers, tomatoes, kale, chives, and beef dumplings (those we folded... they don't grow in gardens unfortunately!!)

bunks turned 8 this august.  8!  we're growing carrots in the garden, and i accidentally pulled this one too early, soooooo, the teeniest carrot for the wee birthday bunny!

faye, eric's niece, has her birthday the day after mine.  i thought i'd sew her a bday dress, as she's super fly and adventurous.  i bought the southport dress pdf pattern from true bias and printed it out at 89%.  (i calculated that faye, at size 10 kids, is 89% of an adult size 0!  and who said fashion designers don't need math!)  pdf patterns suck.  you have to tape all the pages together and then cut out each pattern piece.  SO tedious.

bunks was so bored.  grumpy boy.

because i bought the adult pattern and not the kids one (so that i can print out more copies in my size or in sizes of my adult friends hehehe), i wanted to make sure the neckline was a little more modest.  i raised the neckline for faye's version:

my friend shirley always thinks i sew with perfect finishing.  here's proof that i'm a dope and sewed the bias binding too tight.  since i already trimmed the seam allowance, i ended up just separating the 2 ends and stitching them down flat.  i know, i could have redone it, but that would have taken FOREVER.  otherwise, the other armhole is nice!

here's the finished dress!  there's a drawstring at the waist and a waistband casing to enclose most of the drawstring.  you may recognize this fabric as being the same as the one i used for my sleeveless parent-teacher conference dress from 3 years ago.  my coworker carin gave me this vintage fabric from her mother's collection.  it's soft rayon.  i love it.  i still have a little left and plan to make mom a top from the rest!

eric helped me choose both the fabric and the buttons.  2 hrs he spent on button selection!  2 hours!  he also suggested that i do 2 close together at the top and the rest spaced out farther.  i dig it all, and i think the buttons are perfect.

here's the back.  the dress was a little long on faye, but fit her quite well across the top.  she'll grow into it!  she wore it to school today for her first day of 4th grade!!  i'm so flattered!

and finally, here's the peach pie i baked with the peaches eric's dad picked from his garden for my bday.  so delicious!

work starts next week!  i hope to do more sewing in the afternoons after i get home from school!!  

bird mobiles

at the school, i was selected to be the welcoming colleague for a year for a new hire both last year and this coming year.  my job is to make sure she fits in well to the community, knows who to go to for xy and z, has a familiar face, etc.  it's a great program.  i still keep in touch with my welcoming colleague jenny.  anyhoo, esinam, the woman for whom i was a welcoming colleague this past year, is having a baby boy in september, and kelly, a woman who started with me at my school, is having a kid in july.  time for some baby gifts...  i started by sewing 19 birdies. (an extra one was for my coworker jess who hosted kelly's shower.  jess loves birds.)

i kept the theme black, silver, and red.  19 birdies are a lot, let me tell you.  making them assembly line style sped things up quite a bit.  esinam got a special ghanaian fabric birdy in celebration of her ghanaian heritage.  (you may remember the cream fabric from the twinsies tank tops i made mom and me for our birthdays 2 summers ago!)  i then picked up some dowels from the hardware store, which eric helped me saw down, and a key ring.  i miraculously had twine in my work desk.  the set creator for our school's theater department (i'm not sure what his exact title is) helped me hot glue the birds down and the twine in place so that the birdies didn't look like they were clinging for dear life under each branch, hehe.

side view:

these were photos of kelly's mobile.  i was an idiot and forgot to photograph esinam's.  oops.

congrats, ladies!  now, onto mom's mother's day gift hehehhee.  oh wait, it's father's day that's coming up??  :)

first pair of zip fly pants!!

i finally finished my first pair of zip fly pants.  this project took at least 2 months!  the material was so thick that the needle punched a bunch of dents on the plate because it kept misaligning.  however, i finally hemmed the bottom up and finished the belt loops this weekend!

the belt loops sucked.  after everything was all folded up and tucked under, there ended up being SO many layers.  my machine would get very angry at me.  very.  angry.  in total there were 6 belt loops.

eric was very anxious to try them on.  here he is testing them without the jeans button hammered in or the rivets.  i modeled them after carhartt work pants.  they have a reinforced knee and thigh.

i am definitely most proud of this garment.  the back is even better:

they fit SO WELL!!!  AHHH!!!  i'm going into his factory later this week to help him put in the jeans button and the rivets.  those are his areas of expertise!

poor bunks had an eye infection 2 weeks ago.  little guy wouldn't open his left eye.  it was so goopy and pink.  it was so terrible to witness.

he's now healed, after a week of antibiotic eye drops.  back to mischief!  bunks turns 8 this summer.  can't believe it.  he still acts like a mischievous youngun'.

zip fly pants attempt

for all the numerous garments that i have made in the 6+ years that i have been sewing, i still have yet to sew a pair of zip fly pants.  zip flies scare me.  a lot.  i've sewn many zippers before; however, the idea of origami with zipper installation does not appeal to me at all.  i decided to try out thread theory's jutland pants.  eric is my guinea pig since boys don't wear close-fitting pants anyway.  he wanted me to try to replicate his carhartt carpenter work pants.  we used 14 oz duck canvas (or 16... i forget...).  this stuff is thick!

mom and dad got me a new singer heavy duty sewing machine for christmas.  it plowed through this material quite easily, though at times i had to handcrank the needle through the many-ply thick parts.  sewing the pant leg was a nightmare.  look how impossible it was to see:

last night i got myself up to the zip fly part.  shudder.  tonight i attempt the zip fly.  i've studied the instructions through and through, but i am not excited!

with this warmer weather, i've been dragging bunks out to run around a bit.  he'd much rather eat the lawn or torture the cats.  squeeks is relatively patient with him.  here they are canoodling:

wish me luck tonight with the zipper.  hopefully i get it on the first try!

lawnmower

bunks experienced the outdoors for the first time yesterday.  it was 75 degrees in brooklyn and super sunny.  he was rather hesitant and creeped around, sniffing everything in the backyard.  

today, a little bolder, bunks interchanged exploring nature with eating his breakfast.  lots of sprinting and skipping occurred.

then, after the meal was done, he started mowing the lawn.  mmm fresh grass

i had quite the time trying to get him to come back in.  he kept hopping away.  nothing a little carrot bribery couldn't fix, hehe

parent teacher conferences outfit 2

this might be my new favorite skirt.  i got so many compliments on it today (haha, i sound like i grovel for compliments...) and it's comfy.  not too short, no chance of a wardrobe malfunction, and shinyyyyy

amanda took the pics for me at work, between conferences.  she accused me of not looking fun.  so, here's what i think looking fun is like:

my only wish is that i had sewn the pockets closer to the center of the skirt so that the gold pocket flap was not so close to the gold zipper.  boo!

i'm currently working on neckties.  quick little projects.  pics to come soon!

parent teacher conferences outfit 1

the cream and purple dress has made its debut!!  i had a student take pics for me before the parents and their children rolled in.  here i am mid-sentence hehe:

not liking my derpy face here, but whatevs, at least i now see that i need to get my hair cut!

so, funny story: this morning, while walking to work, i noticed in my reflection in windows and doors that the slit in the back was quite high.  like scandalously high.  upon arriving at school, i rushed to my friend amanda's room and made her help me stitch down a bit of the slit.  phew.  fashion emergency resolved!

too bad you can't really see that the sleeves are actually a deep deep purple velvet.  looks more luxe than a black velvet would be.  i've gotten so many compliments on this dress today, from coworkers and parents!  yay!!