Attitude

I had a post not quite finished that I meant to finish and publish BEFORE Kids Clothes Week but never got around to. It's pretty irrelevant now. I was busy in the lead up to mine and Liam's birthdays and so it never got finished. I will maybe do a post later about the birthdays, but for now I will tell you what I did during Kids Clothes Week.


During Kids' Clothes Week, I made this Oliver + S Music Class blouse and skirt. I didn't get anything else done, but I'm okay with that. I started with the skirt. I love the little pleats, and the pockets are a clever design. Amélie calls it her Spotty Wot skirt, because it is spotty. The skirt was pretty quick to make, a couple of hours at the most.


Then I made the blouse. You have to be pretty accurate with those pin-tucks, or the yoke won't fit onto the rest of the bodice properly. They are a really beautiful detail. If pin-tucks seem to fussy or fiddly, you could easily gather or add small pleats instead.


As you can see, I messed up when I cut out the blouse. I went to lots of trouble getting all the dots to line up when I folded my fabric before I cut it out. I actually placed the fabric up against a window to line up the dots and placed pins through them to force the fabric to be symmetrical. I am glad I did, as you can see that the dots still do form a neat row, but I should've placed the centre front down the middle of a row of dots. What I did instead, was to place the fold line on the middle of the dots. Maybe I worry about these things too much? If the dots were smaller, it wouldn't bother me so much, but those half dots that don't line up across the diagonal really annoy me.


I also agonised over the buttons. In the end I chose the clear butterfly buttons because Amélie likes butterflies (flutter-bys) and I wanted them to be clear. My usual pearl snaps would have been too attention grabby for this blouse, I wanted the spots to be the feature. I also considered red buttons, along with some red piping on the yoke seam and on top of the skirt pleats, but then thought that if I didn't then the blouse or skirt could be worn with other (probably pink) clothes. Some red tights and a cardigan and maybe ribbons in her hair could do the same job.


I was having a really bad time with my button holes on this blouse. I did have a bit of trouble with the bulk in the seams either side of the top button hole. They were stopping the buttonhole attachment from moving smoothly as the seam moved over the edge of the sewing machine. In hind-sight, I think if I had put the extension table on, that may have over-come this problem. I really can't explain why I had to unpick and re-stitch the buttonhole second from the bottom though. Once I accidentally tapped the buttonhole lever by mistake (distracted by a child), another time it seemed to not be down all the way, so it didn't work, another time it went completely wonky... I think I redid that buttonhole maybe 5-6 times? Ugh! Well, I got there in the end...

To explain the odd title to this post:


I took these photos as everyone was on their way out to the car for school and kinder. Amélie really wanted me to take photos of her holding up her (manky) blanky.


Did you join in with Kids Clothes Week? Have you blogged about it yet? What did you make?

SYST13: I managed to squeeze this pattern into six fat quarters from my stash
Running totals: in = 180, out = 76, total = +104