The Great Boulevard Sewing Bee

 So I thought I'd do a sewing post as I am sick of thinking about my house failing to sell.....

Back on Australia Day (26th Jan), Kindergarten Friend and his wife (The Divine Miss M) asked me to accompany them to the Fashion Icons Exhibition at the City Art Gallery. This was an extraordinary treat for those of us with a love of fabric and sewing. The original pieces by designers such as Chanel, Christian Dior, Yves St Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana were so displayed that you could walk right up to them and peer at the stitching! We marvelled at the metres of delicately folded fabrics and intricate beading.

 In the Art Gallery Shop, they were typically profiting from all items (cough:TAT) that could be remotely related to sewing or fashion. I fell for the old 'simple pattern for a skirt' trick, encouraged by a demo model on a mannequin in a striking African print. The Divine Miss M , who claimed not to be able to sew for $%#@, agreed to purchase some IKEA fabric and let me make her a skirt. I have yet to see this fabric.

BUT.... several days later I had cause to visit Local Cheap Material Superstore, let's call it Floodlight, and spotted some cheap and cheerful African print which I thought I could probably use

That's it on the left. The skirt was ludicrously simple and I quickly decided to make the skirt reversible, finding this other pleasant ethnic fabric in my stash.

Buoyed by my success, I quickly made this skirt:

(not really enhanced by my long tailed black shirt)

And this one, opting for a tie and 'wrap around' effect for the final version.

(please forgive bathers and megafat arms)

 So 3 skirts (4 if you count the reversible) from the one pattern....and I'm NOT DONE!!!!!

Meanwhile, I have been sewing plastic storage bags for the 'Kidsboxes' at church, and was rewarded by the sight of two young children playing with toys that had been in the box for ages, but never used.

Also whilst at the Exhibition, I succumbed to a 'sew your own' scarf kit which is basically a piece of fabric and a skein of thick thread for you to do a running stitch along the edge of it. Pics of that 'gem' when I've completed it :-)
The whole sewing 'simple and quick' has been very cathartic mind you, particularly in the face of my current woes.

Viva La Fashion!!

It 'Seams' I Have Some Sewing To Do

It's that time again! The school musical is upon us and once more in a fit of creative stupidity I have volunteered to work on costumes.

This time around, I was lulled into a false sense of security, or maybe a real sense of inadequacy, when the Home Ec teacher ( a sewing whizz) also volunteered. 'Great', I thought, 'at least with an expert on board I won't have to make all the decisions.'

Wrong.

Lulled as I was, it took me some time to notice that not very much was happening regarding costumes. To be fair, the director also 'lulled' me when she said that the costumes would be 'easy' and that part of the time they would wear their own clothes. By the time I had realised what we needed to do; met with the Home Ec teacher and taken on board her ideas; seen the logo and realised the colours were all wrong; asked for the logo/sets to be redesigned colourwise and decided on a plan; I was just in time to notice that we had less than a month until the performance! How did that happen? I was sure that last time the show had been 3-4 weeks after the holidays. This year it is in week 2!!!!

(Oh and just to clarify, we are now entering the second week of the holidays).

So what do we need to do? Well, there are 15 fast food restaurant 'uniforms' to create. The 6 boys will wear red trousers, yellow shirts and black aprons. The 9 girls (yes, NINE!!) were originally going to wear princess line, button down, panelled dresses in black and red/yellow/or orange with white aprons. The time line check forced a very quick rethink on that!

My next plan was: buy red/orange and yellow T Shirts for the girls and sew some one colour, one hour, A line, pullover shift dresses, probably in black. Then I felt worried about the black and thought red, which meant yellow T Shirts, so I went on the hunt for yellow T Shirts. There were none to be found.

What I DID find though were some lovely red mens' chinos for $7.50 a pair at the outlet store! I bought up their supply, praying desperately that the random sizes could be made to fit our lads (this still remains to be seen). Next I found the cutest red flip skirts for $4.95 each! So I bought up 10 of them too. The tops are my next challenge.

I had planned to make shirts on the serger for the boys so I figured we could do the same for the girls so they all had tops in the same colour which would at least look like a corporate uniform.

I had thought to use these two patterns for the girls and boys respectively, until I realised how many buttonholes I/we would need to do. So now I am contemplating sewing up the fronts so the shirts go on over their heads, thus eliminating the need for buttons, but I am not sure it will work with the girls' pattern. Next step: make some prototypes.

Once all this has been decided, I have another 4 teachers willing to sew up one or two shirts each so we should be able to knock them off reasonably quickly. The Home ec teacher has agreed to take responsibility for the aprons (see girls' pattern above).

So that only leaves me the vexing issue of how to create both a hamburger and french fries costume in the time remaining. We looked online of course and you Americans have all manner of ready made costumes available whilst we Australians do not. Unfortunately the shipping costs to Aus will be ridiculous so that is out (not to mention the time factor).

I am hopeful that we can construct something like this:

or this:

although Himself is determined that I should be aiming for something like THIS! Sanity, blood pressure and marital/collegial harmony will determine the eventual outcome. Stay tuned!

Eight Hours In Labour And This Is the Thanks I Get

There was a time when I could make a dress for myself off a pattern and it would mostly fit. Admittedly I would have to chop 6 inches off the bottom due to my limited height, but mostly I was of extremely average proportions.

Those days have gone.

My front has expanded, my back, above the waist, has not. Ergo I am a 16 in the front and a 14 in the back. And do I have a charming, helpful offspring to help me pin myself into an ill fitting pattern?

No I do NOT.

I have a cantankerous little cow who is far too obsessed with her own search for a job, and the high life, to give her mother more than five minutes, with the worst grace in the world, to pin up the back zip opening.

It is time to invest in a dressmaker's dummy. But where will it live? These things take up space!

But wait! I have an idea. There is always THIS room!!!!!!

Surely it's time someone moved OUT!!!!!???????

It Is Finished

The BA and her Dad prepare for the Grad Ball. A story for later!

I Think She Likes It

Remember the flashy Alexander McQueen ball dress that the BA decided she liked? Well my friend Blondie and I came up with our own version!

This was the first draft. I was pretty happy with it considering the pattern we adapted looked like this:

but I didn't like the boxy front pleats so I fiddled. This is the finished result. Not perfect but hey!

I decided against lining the skirt as I figure she will wear it once. Who knows though, it may get a run in a school musical someday. Stranger things have happened! For the big night (tomorrow..eek!) I will make sure she has a long slip.

I am looking forward to seeing the finished effect tomorrow with hair and make-up (and obligatory fake tan). This Grad Ball will be the final, official school function of her young life and I am so grateful that her grandparents, both parents and step parents will be there to share it with her.

ANOTHER Evening Dress!

Believe it or not, the BA is graduating from school in two weeks. The journey which began here

will end on December 11th with her Graduation Ball.

And of course, she must have a dress!

This time the dress must be a formal floor length dress in white or cream. This Ball is akin to the old Debutante Balls, so fashionable in years gone by. The girls are presented by their fathers and must undertake the father daughter dance, something which her Dad is very excited about. I have been fielding questions about dinner suit v lounge suit, bowtie v straight...for some time now!


Initially I thought the easiest option might be for her to wear my second wedding dress.

 

Which looks a whole lot better on her than it did on me!

But she wasn't having a bar of that. She used the fact that it was about 6 inches too short at the front as justification for not wearing it. OK, so I'm short! Aren't mullet dresses all the rage now anyway?

Apparently not for my girl.

Running short of time I announced that I would simply make her the one I had planned to make once before: Vintage Vogue  V2962.

 

I thought I'd use some heavy silk for the dress and a softer chiffon or lawn for the bodice. I checked a few online images and began to get nervous. It is entirely possible to make this beautiful garment, really badly. How is that possible, I hear you ask? Well, here are the steps:

1. Make sure you are quite short and have REALLY big boobs.
2. Use a soft drapy fabric all over so that the central bodice panels cannot support the weight of the hugely gathered skirt.
3. Tie something sparkly around the waist.
4. Alter the halter so that it looks like a bikini top.

To be fair, there were a number of images where the seamstress had done quite a good job but it had taken them hours and required massive amounts of alteration.

I called my friend Blondie who is a dab hand at all things sewing and asked her opinion. She had made a retro evening gown once and I'd thought it was the Vogue one, but in fact it was this one.

Nevertheless, in the course of our conversation, she offered to help AND donated 5 metres of ivory dupion silk left over from her own wedding dress 20 years ago!! "It's been sitting around this long," she said. We  had a long conversation after school during the week and decided we would do a combination of the two patterns. The skirt from Blondie's pattern was cut on the cross and not as full so we decided to subtitute it for the excessive Vogue one; and we decided to try wrapping the tie waist effect around the halter dress to hide the central bodice panels which we felt would probably wrinkle unless we boned it...and did we really want to go there?


Now this was all fine and dandy until the BA came home. She didn't exactly turn up her nose at our ideas so much as move right along to her own preference. And this was it.....

Undeterred I thought I might make a mock-up of the Vogue dress. Just to, you know, see what all the fuss was about! I actually thought it looked quite nice, despite the fact that the halter was made out of an old curtain! One look at the BA' s face here will tell you what she thought of my efforts!

Meanwhile I sent Blonde an email containing the BA's dress preference. She was delighted and promptly went out and bought a pattern which we could 'adapt'. I was a little concerned about the depth of the neckline of course but Blondie assured me we could create something appropriate.

So, here I am in the middle of all these 'mock-ups' and Blondie has gone. We have devised a neckline and adjusted the pattern, and now I'm going to try and cut it out of the silk.  It's not as low as the photo, and Lord knows if I'll get the skirt to resemble the photo in any way; the main thing is that it has to have pockets!

I really don't know what I'll do with myself once all these formals are over! I certainly won't be sewing too much for me because, although I am dieting, things are not moving too quickly on the weight loss front. In short, I have altogether too much front, and no one wants to sew for that :-(

I'll keep you posted on our progress!                         

Formal Number Three: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime.

When The Baby Angel announced the invite to her THIRD Formal in one year, my heart sank. After the trauma of sending her off, partially clothed, to the last dance (and I use the term dance loosely), I was terrified by the thought of a) the cost and b) the modesty battle involved in this next invite.


I mean, I don't know what it's like in your part of the world but the early 70s fashion for ludicrously short skirts has re-emerged with a vengeance over here in Aus.
Girls are frequently attired in nothing more than a couple of tea towels tied at the shoulder, usually with a price tag equivalent to the GDP of a small African nation. When browsing the pages of online clothing companies of late, I have been confused by pictures of what seem to me to be obviously shirts, being described as dresses!






These two are some of the tamer examples.






And it seems that everyone is wearing them! Some of the nicest girls from the BA's former school, the really studious ones who don't even have facebook, are turning up to 18th birthdays wearing little more than extended 'boob tubes'.


At each party the BA attends, her dress gets shorter and shorter until I am entreating her to 'take a cardigan in case it gets cold'. I am, judging by some old photos I have recently discovered, possibly more prudish than my own mother!

And after seeing this photo (circa 1975) I will never complain about the BA wearing short shorts again either!

So it was with trepidation that I started to ask her about her dress plans for this next Formal. I bravely tried, once more, to suggest a re-run of the black dress worn at St Saviour's Formal. I should have saved my breath. Then, after a chance buy at the supermarket, the movie High Society came to my rescue. It turns out that the BA is a closet Grace Kelly fan with a penchant for the fashions of the 40s and 50s!! Having established this, I started to trawl photos of Grace and her outfits on google, comparing them to vintage Vogue patterns on ebay. Now don't ask me how we got to this one but the BA chose it:

And...she agreed to let me make it for her! Given the last disaster I was touched that she still trusted me.

We chose fabric, I made the whole thing up in a calico first and agreed to a few modifications. The sleeves were taken in, the skirt was narrowed and the split up the front was extended. So, here are the results...

I was pretty pleased with the result, with the possible exception of the obvious 'line' above the split (at knee height) where the facings had been tacked in behind. She was happy with it too and felt proud that she had been the only girl there wearing long sleeves! Not sure how her date felt about that :-)

(Oh and yes, that is a new beau. Already! Although I think he has competition from another. Oh to be so spoiled for choice!!)

Crafty Tuesday: A Birthday Present To Me

My lovely Aunt/Godmother in the UK sent me some money for my birthday. I love birthday money because you can be totally self indulgent with it. I would normally have talked myself out of buying this as it is 'non-essential' but, because it was birthday money, I was able to spoil myself.

This book totally cracks me up



This is the first one that got to me.


Bwahahahahah!
This one was a close second!


But there was more!



This one is a jam jar cover, covered with bugs!!


And how much would I love to send these out for Christmas this year???


Happy Crafty Tuesday everyone. I haven't actually made anything since the infamous 'formal dress' episode, but I thought you might get a laugh out of these.....click over to Carrie to see what everyone else has to share.

As Time Goes By (and posts slip away)

My Baby Angel attended a Formal with her BFF tonight.



(remind me never to sew with stretch satin again. Hit me if I even suggest it, and perhaps point me at this post. >:-(.......)

These two have known each other since 2003 when, praise God, the BFF's family moved in across the road from us in Happy Valley (no, that is a real suburb!). We had just arrived from the UK in the January, knowing no-one, and my poor BA had been suffering from leaving a very large and tight knit group of friends in the UK. She had made a few school friends, but no-one that really resonated, until the BFF moved in. What an amazing blessing.

The redhead on the right was the school friend that we have not seen since 2005, the BFF is on the left.

Even though BFF is 14 months older, the two hit it off like the proverbial house on fire. Dress-ups were the theme of the day



developing as the years passed



and it appears dress ups are still the fave game.


So for this Formal, the BA was the date of BFF's twin brother. That's him there on the right.

Aaaaaaand, there on the right again.....

My how time flies!


To be honest, I think the girls had the best night dancing together!! High School Formals are like that :-)

************************************************************

I have learned a lot from this one and I think the BA has too.
Lesson 1: Hair
The hair that looks good in a photo does not necessarily suit you. The back was pretty but she didn't like the front.
Lesson 2: Make-up
More is not necessarily better. Don't let the make-up wear you.
(note to self: make up short course as a Christmas present)
Lesson 3:
Never sew with stretch satin unless you are a whizz or have done some kind of a course.......
Lesson 4:
Picking up 16 year olds early from 'after parties' is definitely a good idea.......especially when you see young men helping themselves to two large bottles of vodka on the breakfast bar whilst you wait for your baby!!!!!:-(

On that note, I am fast reconciling myself to the fact that my area of expertise is younger children. In the warzone that is teen parenting, I find myself constantly a victim of 'friendly fire'.

Tonight, for some reason, I looked back over some unfinished (there have been many) posts from this last 18 months, and I found this:

85% Proof Parenting

"So Mum, if I were at a wedding, would you let me have a Breezer?" With this one question, innocuously asked after a visit with her father to an interstate cousin's wedding , the BA moved me deftly into the 'mega-hard, rethink your whole peace of mind', advanced section of the parenting course. Not for Sissies. I don't even know why I am making light of this. Except that of course I do. We make light of all difficult things in life in order to convince ourselves that they are less serious than they seem. Like Harry Potter we shout 'Riddikulus' at the boggart in the trunk, in the hopes that it will vanish into a puff of triviality and distress us no further. Of course, it's not going to happen. Having kept the spectre of the 'difficult teen years' at bay until now I am fully aware that I am about to be engulfed in the floodwaters. Back in July when La Jeune Fille was here, we had our first minor brush with the question of alcohol. The two of them had been invited to an 'end of exchange' party to be held at the home of one of the Year 11 girls who had had an exchange student. I didn't think twice about saying yes. It was a school function, at a parent's house....what could be simpler? Of course the BA returned full of excitement because alcohol had been provided by the parents and several members of the party had got 'very drunk'. She assured me she hadn't had anything and didn't appear anything other than her normal lovely self, but I noticed La JF slink off to bed
surreptitiously.

I am glad I didn't finish that post because it was going to rant on about the irresponsible parents who provide alcohol to under age children at parties. I am far less self righteous nowadays.

I also found this:

Formal: Part Two

A busy, and sometimes traumatic month down the track and I thought I would fill you in on the lead up to, and the second part of, the BA's Formal Adventure. I don't know how much you guys know about 'after parties'. In my day I don't think we called them 'after parties', I think they were called 'Join us for coffee and cake after the Formal'...usually on an invitation. Nevertheless, 'after parties' is what they're called now! I had a small idea about the phenomona from our own school formal last year, where I attended as a staff member. At the end of what was, let's face it, a pretty tame evening, there was a great buzz of excitement and much phoning and texting as pupils regrouped for the whispered 'after party'. Later, I was able to see from facebook photos that it involved a tent, apparently some music and, undoubtably, some alcohol. A little investigation revealed that this was a common event in school life today. The schools tend to cover their ears and go 'LA LA LA LA LA' as the parents organise the events and, apparently, often provide the alcohol. Well, some parents at some schools, I rather archly and naively snorted in my head. Or maybe it was out loud? Sometimes that happens.

Again, I failed to finish my sanctimonious post about the weakness of some parents. (although it was a good story and I should probably tell you sometime...)

Well tonight I sighed and drove my daughter home knowing full well that the no alcohol policy had been breached and all I said to her was 'I'm very disappointed'.

In retrospect, any stance I had on the issue shuddered majorly in its housings after that Halloween party where she went dressed as Cleopatra. Later in the week I saw photos on one of her friend's facebook sites, showing her clearly standing with a bottle of some sort of hideous blue alco-pop in her hand. I texted her that if she wanted to be allowed to go out with her friends, she needed to tell them not to post incriminating photos. I did not apply any other consequence.

Actually, the real crack in my fortifications, come to think of it, occurred at her own after party (the one that was the subject of the previous unfinished post) when she informed me (I was a chaperone) that she was going to have the two 'drinks' her entrance ticket entitled her to. I made a spot decision not to 'make a scene' and the two UDL cans were duly drunk, happy dancing ensued and she came away cheerful and satisfied.


So here I am, at this stage of her/our life. My innate parent sense tells me it is only going to get worse. What to do?

1) I could totally ban her from attending all social events where alcohol is supplied
(and they are MANY)

2) I can set acceptable limits and lower the boom gate when these are breached.

The only trouble is, I am wrestling with what the acceptable limits are. I thought I knew, I thought I held them securely in my hand. Now, in the reality of the situation, I feel their organic writhings and their nasty, sharp teeth.