Birthday gifts

One of my goals for this year was to make as many gifts as possible. It's easy when it comes to my daughter and her friends' birthdays- girls are so easy to sew for! I whipped up this cushion cover for a party Elizabeth was invited to a couple of weeks ago.

It was so quick and easy! I decided to buy some Star Wars fabric and make one for Jimmy's birthday. Yes, I realise I've broken my vow...but it's for my boy's birthday, so I talked myself into making an exception to the fabric buying ban!

Once I'd decided to make the cushion cover, I went to Spotlight to get a zip and noticed the Star Wars fabric was 40% off. I grabbed a blanket-sized piece of fleece for $11 and thought I could bind the edges and make a quick blanket. However, I didn't take into account that the print would be backwards on the reverse side, so I went back to Spotlight and found the same print on a smaller scale, on flanellette. I grabbed that and some grey corduroy to make some nice fat binding.

I've never really done proper quilting before. I made my daughter a quilt when she was a baby, but because I made it up and did no research, it was rubbish. This one is much better, but far from perfect.

The edges are not perfectly straight and my quilting is dodgy, to say the least (I quilted around the big pictures on the fleece side). I'm really proud of my binding, though- I took my time with it and did every step of an online tutorial. I even made sure that the nap of the corduroy is all facing the same way!

The cushion should have been super easy, but as always when I make something using measurements instead of a pattern, I did something stupidly wrong and the back (just a rectangle of corduroy) was heaps bigger than the front! Oh well, that was easy to fix.

I can't wait to give these to my boy tomorrow and I hope he loves them!

Shagadelic Jiffy dress

As soon as my dear friend Trudie gave me this awesome fabric, I knew I had to make a cute shift dress out of it.

The last time I used this pattern, I had a really hard time getting it to fit me, but I thought I'd give it another shot as I think the style really suits the print of this groovy fabric. This time I graded the back waist to a size 12 (the top section is size 8) but weight want to do too much to the front as it has French darts and I was scared of stuffing it up. I wanted to add the cute little bow on the neck but I had barely enough fabric to cut the two dress pieces. The fabric was only 36 inches wide- I've never seen fabric so narrow! I'm it quite sure of the fabric composition- perhaps Trudie can help me out. I don't even know if it's vintage fabric or just retro repro.

It came together very easily, but when I'd finished and went to try it on, it wouldn't fit over my lower hips. WTF? I'm not even hippy...I have no shape! Luckily I'd only basted the side seams, so I just reduced them down as far as I could in the waist and hip area.

The fit isn't perfect- there is some excess fabric in my lower back and under my bust, and I couldn't even attempt pattern matching with the amount of fabric I had, but I love it! It's so cute and shagadelic!