Little Fish Creations

Ok I’m just popping in for a quick post so I don’t completely lose the blogtoberfest spirit 🙂

This week our friends Catherine and Heath had a baby girl, Matlida Olive, born with ginger hair. Awwwww. I wish I was there to share some baby cuddles.

I’m making up a couple of muslin wraps to send in my ‘baby package’.  This fabric was $2/m at Spotlight this week.

It’s nice to be working on something ‘tried and true’ after my recent sewing disasters.  Yes.  I’m loath to admit it, but the cute little pants are too small 🙁  They wont get up over Jasper’s lovely, lovely baby thighs.

So I’ve go to redraft this pattern to be baby shaped rather than Japanese todder shaped.  I’m thinking; add an inch to each leg width and then also add a bit more bum room.  AND make a muslin this time. (I’m also wondering what this means for the hooded jacket which I was all excited about)

Onwards and upwards.  To get over the dissapointment of cutting too much off the hem of my skirt I moved onto a new sewing project with lightning speed.

I am happy to report that the first project from the Japanese pattern book has been a success.  The diagrams are very clear and I didn’t have any problems with this simple little pair of pants.

The fabric is a grey/brown ‘ripstop’ weave cotton from Spotlight.  With the natural grid on the fabric I couldn’t resist adding some cross stitched knee patches.

I’ve been studying the diagrams for a little hooded jacked from the same book.  Jasper doesn’t need a jacket in Northern Territory, but we’ll be travelling to Tasmania and Victoria in January and I think a lightweight jacket might be useful and would look super cute 🙂

ETA: We’ll be in Darwin for the next few days, so I’m taking a break from Blogtoberfest until the end of the week.

This post was going to be titled: Measure Twice, Cut Once; When Good Skirts Go Bad. 

But I don’t want to talk about it.  So I wont.

Instead, I’ll share some doodly drawings I did yesterday.

It was almost inevitable.  I was triming the seam which attaches the waistband to the skirt.  And SNIP. I cut a hole in the waistband.  Crap!

I had three options.

1) screw the whole thing up, hide it under the bed and pretend the bloody thing never existed.

2) unpick this waistband and reattach another made from left over fabric.  I have enough.

3) repair the hole.

I went the low road and attempted a repair with a little patch and some buttonhole stitch.  I figured that if it looked horrid I could always go for option two… the dreaded unpicking.

It isn’t as invisible as I imagined, but it’s on the back so I’ll never see it.  So there.  It’s staying.

Besides nobody will ever notice the patch when they’ve got my dodgy zipper sewing to stare at!

Against my better judgement I’ve bought a book called Clothes for Kids Who Are Just Able to Walk.

Seduced by the cute pictures of children in beautiful clothes I ignored the obvious fact that this book is in Japanese; a language I do not understand.

I’ve put my faith in being able to decipher the diagrams and nut it out regardless.

Obviously, Jasper isn’t able to walk at his age (5 months)

But I figure I can get a head start on some clothes… and he’s BIG, a fact that was reitterated to me today when I hosted my mums’n’bubs group and we had 9 babies layed out on my lounge room floor.

I also purchased this fabric from Tessuti and I’ve started making a skirt from it straight away. No pattern this time as it is a simple pleated skirt with a waistband.

I like learning how things are done.  It might be the engineer in me, I don’t know.  Anyway, I’d love to learn how to weave but I can’t add a loom to my already overstuffed workshop (aka spare bedroom)

A few months ago I was reading back through the archives at AT-SWIM-TWO-BIRDS and saw that you can make a loom out of cardboard and weave up some pretty scrumptious stuff too.

So I immediately got some cardboard and tried it out.  My results weren’t as impressive as Renilde’s but it was fun to do.  I used this ‘How To‘ to get me started.

I used embroidery cotton and linen for the top one.  It took ages to finish and I ruined it by attempting to machine finish the edges which didn’t work at all.

The second one went faster using my hand spun wool.  I’ve got plenty of wool that I’m not knitting with.  Maybe I could make a massive cardboard loom and weave up some placemats or something Hmmmmm.

Today I had FOUR (4!) parcels waiting for me at the post office.

One  cute little package contained Renilde de Peuter‘s georgous pincushion all the way from Belgium. The $AU – EURO exchange rate is a killer, but I’m glad I’ve now got it in my hot little hands.  It was immediately pressed into service.

A Miriam Bereson yearly planner to stick on our fridge (photo from her website).  I love yearly planners, I couldn’t live without them when I was in the thick of engineering project work.  This one is prettier than any I ever used in my office!

Jasper received a suprise from Grandma… A BOOK!  ‘Where is the Green Sheep’, by Mem Fox, which I read to him as soon as we got home.  He loves to join in when we are reading, so it was a pretty noisy affair.

And finally, an envelope from Tessuti with some sewing goodies.  To be blogged about later……

I’ll leave you with a progress shot of the Yellow Triangles.

Stitching and the use of stashed fabrics have been occupying my creative thoughts over the last few weeks. 

The yellow, hand dyed muslin has been waiting for many years.  I this is my favourite type of yellow – it just has a touch of green-ness and is ‘oh so cool’.

I wouldn’t have normally teamed it with the natural hued linen, but it’s working for me today so I’m running with it.

I stitch in the lounge room and this is today’s ‘pile of mess’ which has accumulated on the little side table next to me.

Phone, scraps of thread and fabric, little scissors, glass of water, a book that needs to go back on the shelf, a little zippered bag where I keep my embroidery bits and bobs and water soluble texta.

When Jasper isn’t feeding or sleeping (or being smothered in cuddles and kisses by moi), he’s usually rolling around on a quilt or two at my feet.

My two hansome fellas lounging beside the pool.

The water in the Jabiru pool has warmed up beautifully since our last swim.  Jasper loved it! We swooshed him around and he spashed and kicked.

Jasper’s current favourite trick: blowing raspberries!