Paging Dr. Pinterest-- Code Blue: Emergency T-Shirt Surgery

Dress in action, circa Nov. 2012

Oh hey, look! It's like, June... of 2016. Heh. I did indeed make things between my last post and now, I just didn't blog them. Of course, I'm pretty sure no one but myself will ever read these again, but as a grad student and former auditor, I can state with certainty that the value of good documentation cannot be overemphasized. Which means I should probably get off of my ass.

At any rate, I tend to make things when I need an outlet, so lolz. I need to be making shit for years, apparently. In the meantime however, I made a dress for Darth Cuteness from a dress that I used to love to wear when I was pregnant with her. Here's the original dress, modeled by yours truly and accessorized with the Elder Kid =>>


I started using Pinterest a while ago, and lo and behold! I needed to make something to maintain my mental health and there was my "clothes" board waiting for me, filled with good ideas (and also some bad ones; let's be serious it's Pinterest).

I settled on the Junebug dress by Jess of Craftiness is Not Optional (here; click on the 'junebug dress' tag for all of the posts and downloadable pattern), and it turned out MAGNIFICENTLY if I do say so myself:

I'm really digging on the Skellingtonesque stripes.

Buttonholes have been my enemy in the past, but that's only because I had no idea how to make good ones until around about last year during my quest to not suck at sewing things. I can't tell you how nervewracking it was to sew them into the front panel here since it's not like I had spare fabric, but it turned out fantastically and I'm super pleased. Here's some detail on the front panel (please excuse the chalk marks if you see them; I literally finished it, squeegled a lot, took immediate photos and came here to gloat. err, share.)

THE BUTTONS. OMG.

So, this was a resounding success and my kid is going to look ridiculously cute wearing it. Therapy achieved. Now let's see what I make tomorrow... err. Later today.

Pants-on-Head-Awesome Handmedown Surgery/Restyled Toddler Skirt

First, I want to talk about how we all use the phrase 'restyle' now and yell at the kids to get the hell off of my lawn. Back in the day, we all used 'surgery' and we liked it just fine. :) Don't actually get off my lawn, though. I just wanted to be a cranky old lady for a second.

Now, the dress. We receive bags of handmedowns from my sister-in-law, whose child is 18 months older than Darth Cute, my two-year-old. Sister-in-law gets handmedowns from at least one other family, so when Darth outgrows things, we hand them back into the circle along with our own additions for another 1-2 families that have younger kids. As a result, we tend to leave things in the bags that might otherwise be ruined in the hopes that someone else can either use it for grubbies, or just... do something with it. This dress was one of those items. As you can see it's an adorable print, but it was also stained all down the front with what had to have been punch or kool aid or berries or nocturnal feedings of vampire young; not super terrible, but definitely noticeable.


This poor, adorable dress... which, since I am clearly impaired in some fashion, I managed take a photo of only the detail but not the whole dress (I've got no excuse other than 'derp'). You would have unfortunately had to take my word on the fact that it was a drop-waisted, knit jersey, tank sundress with red piping around the neckline and arms. Since I'm using a laptop with nothing but MS Paint at my disposal though, I've decided to punish myself by recreating it for you.

Can't stop giggling. WAY too easily amused. Anyway. *cough* Terribly sorry.

Originally, I thought maybe I would just cut the skirt off, but then I remembered a tutorial I saw a few months ago, and I ran to the internet to dig it up (YES! THIS is why Pinterest is actually useful some days)-- the Gathered Skirt with Attached Shorts from It's Always Autumn. Now, the dress isn't very large, but neither is my baby girl's bottom, so I figured there might be enough material to make something similar happen. Disclaimer! don't blame It's Always Autumn for anything that's broken here. I just wanted to make sure that she got credit for giving me a fantastic surgery idea.

I cut the ruffle of the dress soon-to-become-skirt off, leaving some of the torso fabric attached to make the waistband. That left me with what appeared to be not quite enough torso to get proper shorts, until I decided to make the underarm a design feature. I cut the legs out as shown and assembled them as usual to get the pants shape. Then, I pulled the piping off of the neckline, ripped the seams out and reattached it around the new leg openings as a hem, then off into the wild blue yonder and back to form a window on the side of the legs, using a pair of her leggings to gauge where the leg should be at that point.

Being jersey knit, the unsewing and re-sewing sort of poked too many holes in my fabric, but being jersey knit, at least it won't fray? I'm not happy with the messiness even after I went back to mitigate it a bit, but it's a learning experience for next time.  (You can see a little bit of the mysterious kool-aid splotch there. It could be argued that on a grown woman's clothes, this might be an even worse location for a red spot than down your belly, but on a toddler, I vote it's totally innocuous.)

Then, it was time to attach the newly-created pants to the about-to-be-skirt.  Remember when we learned last time what 'easing in the fullness' meant? Pardon my language, but I needed to ease the shit out of the fullness in gathering the waist to the shorts, since by that time I was completely off of the grid in terms of Autumn's tutorial and was just trying to make an elastic casing happen while folding the remaining edge of the dress over the raw waist of the shorts.


At any rate, it ended up kind of cute in a frankenclothes kind of way, and I was excited about getting it onto Darth. (fun fact-- I've been saying 'frankenclothes' forever, but it turns out someone on Etsy actually *is* named Frankenclothes! Awesome! And thanks, Google. :D)

Finally, the moment I had been waiting for-- my adorable, ridiculously cute, super hyper model, ably assisted in getting the thing on her by Superdad:

As you can see, the crotch is a little too short to cover her whole diaper, and the child wouldn't stay still because she wanted to remain pantsfree after losing her jeans; honestly I think we can all relate. Still, I'd say the project was fairly successful, and will be useful once this potty training business really takes off.

Cost: handmedown dress & negligible thread cost = $0
Time: I'd say it maybe took an hour, give or take 15 for the resewing on the one leg that hated me.
Lessons learned:
- Make the pant waists higher until this child is freely pottying.
- Jersey. Be really careful about re-sewing.
- Photos. For pete's sake, take so many. They're digital, you can always erase the ten hundred you don't need.

Next up, I think it's a pillowcase dress from a t-shirt Darth picked up at the thrift store while we were out snooping. No, really, she did, and on her own. Legally! But that's a story for next post.

Some days are more exciting than others--

--today all I did was fix a pair of slacks for my son. The seam came apart, and essentially took less time to fix than it did to set up my machine. I have however been reading in a chair next to my sewing machine and pondering my next project. That counts, right?

You win some, you lose some.

Sometimes you get a rematch, though.

Generally when I remake something, I have fairly positive results. I'm not saying I'm wildly talented, I'm just saying I have low standards. :) Ok, to be fair, I've produced some major cuteness, and so when something goes awry, I get cranky about it. Still, the only way to learn is to do and possibly fail, so I'm sharing my current project with you.

This project started with a dress I bought on Zulily that taught me two things:

1) fast fashion for plus size women is a disaster waiting to happen, thus

2) buying nonreturnable clothes on the internet is a really dumb thing to do.

[here is where I would have inserted a before photo if I'd thought ahead and took one; I know this is my first project here, but I've been doing this a while and should know better. sigh. next time!]

Now, don't get me wrong, I've had some massive wins with Zulily when it comes to toys or kid's clothes, but just-- if you see what looks like a good deal on clothes for your adult self, don't do it. This was supposed to be an adorable yellow gauze summer dress in a 3X-- it was a sack. It fit, yes, sort of in that I could put it on my body and headtilt in confusion at the mirror whilst doing so, but the bodice was... an unrecognizable mess, the straps were about a foot too long and the underskirt was more like a bodycon slip. Oh. dear. And no way to send it back! :( Fortunately, it had only cost me $15. Unfortunately, I now had a completely useless yellow sack that went into the fabric bin... until my baby girl (we'll call her Darth Cute) found it and was infatuated with it. 

I've got to say, it's not a bad choice of fabric- super bright yellow and flowy with little tiers of crochet trim, so I've been holding onto it trying to find a contrast fabric for the neckline in order to use this pattern (McCalls M6377) I picked up at the thrift store (my absolute favorite place for patterns on the cheap):

And then I found this. Oh yes. Leftover from the skirt on my first bellydancing costume. PERFECT: 

Except for how it's a satin business, which is scary but that's cool because I'm invincible, right? Right. Also, I have interfacing. At any rate, I figured it shouldn't take too long-- I've found in the past that these 'easy' patterns are generally super quick.

Now, I took up using patterns because I wanted to learn how bodices worked, and how seams turned invisible, and they've been an invaluable tool in furthering my clothing chaos. I set about my mad science with fervor and took apart the skirt and the underskirt, cut out the dress parts such that I had ready-made hems (FAVORITE bit of restyling skirts), cut out the yoke and the interfacing, fused the fussy things then assembled the dress and arm holes. 

Then came the bit I'm going to call "McCalls Thinks People that Make Easy Patterns Can Be Taught To Speak In Tongues". Step 12 for attaching the yoke is in English and has a picture attached, but I have no bloody clue what they want me to do. I've read it over and over, I've read it out loud, I've re-sketched the diagrams, and I got nothin'. So I pinned the yoke on and then... did stuff to attach it according to the instructions. It went... err, alright. Then step 12 tried to happen. What. The. Hell. 

I Googled "Easing in the Fullness" and hit so many posts that asked me to ease the fullness for sleeves that I sort of figured out what it meant without being able to intelligently explain it until I ran across a Burda page that discusses it in terms that made total sense. Turns out that 'easing in the fullness' is the official name for the technique we all use to do things like hem a flared skirt or set in a sleeve, where you end up having to carefully get those extra roundy bits into a seam without making it look puckered and cheap. Fine. I took another crack at it but I still am honestly unsure that I've got the second half attached they way they wanted me to, since the shoulders are doing something crazy and even ironed, the attachment to the bottom of the interfaced side looks funny. Still, Darth Cute will love it imperfections and all, so I've decided to handstitch that and call it good, and hopefully fix some of the weird stitches that happened.

Thus having decided to bust out my delicious vintage war needles, I held it up to behold my handiwork... and found that the armholes were silly large, even if you imagine it as a jumper over a long sleeve shirt.  Honestly, these armholes would have fit both arms through, so I pulled them in a jot and that part at least worked out spectacularly. Finally! Something that looks like a gauzy, swingy, quirky summer dress!

 Darth Cute is a tall girl that just turned two, and is wearing a 2T just right and a 3T a little loose (depending on who makes it, which my friends, is a tale for another time), so I cut this to a 3T. So, for next post:

1) handstitch the yoke and fix some of those ratty sleeve seams
2) photograph it on my model
3) Give a cost/time/lessons learned roundup

Alas, this episode is a cliffhanger. But progress! 

Hi! So, we're new around here, and when I say 'we', I mean, me, my beatup old reliable sewing machine, and our fabric stash. I make a lot of neat things out of old things-- people like to call it 'upcycling', but I generally refer to it as Mad Textile Science.

I've been sewing since I was a little girl nabbing scraps and needles from my mom to make doll clothes, taught myself to use the machine, took a semester of home ec and then spent years being brainwashed by T-Shirt Surgery communities online and just sort of running at the sewing machine and blundering through restyles.  In my wise old age (heh), I've spent some time trying to learn more standard ways of doing things so that they can contribute to my mad hattery, and I'm hoping my blog will be a place to talk about learning to make stuff, and not being afraid to fail when you bring your fabulous frankenclothes to life.

My life is better when I'm actively making and building things on the regular, and hopefully I'll run across a couple of people who feel the same. And we'll high-five. So, hi!