KCW 2013- Day 3-7

Something for my son this time. Boys are a little tougher (and dare I say it- not as fun!) to sew for, for lots of reasons, but, at almost 6yo, he still gets so excited when I make him something. So, I plan to keep doing it!

I cut out a new Ottobre pattern- #11 from the 3/2013 issue, in size 128. It’s modeled on an old mini-Boden appliqued tee. He’s loved bowling since he was tiny- he even chose to dress up like a bowling pin for Halloween when he was 3- that was soooo fun to make. 🙂

And then… I petered out. It happens most of the time that I’ve participated- I start strong and life gets in the way. This time, though- it was for a pretty good reason- I got a new toy! I sew so many knits that it was time for a cover stitch machine. So, a Brother 2340CV now lives in the jungle that is my craft room.

And after many, many, many picked lines of stitching (so much worse than even serger stitches to pick out), and some under-the-breath cursing, I think we’re friends. And for the record, it was ALL me- I kept making the same dumb mistakes over and over, and the machine did exactly what I asked it to. Tell it to stitch with 0 thread tension? Oh, it did- many times. Heh.

This little dress was a major alteration of the LBB racerback (because I had the pattern cut out and sitting next to me). I brought the arm scythes in the back in, so it’s just a simple sleeveless dress up top. I made the same alteration to the skirt that I did with the raspberry colored dress earlier this week- it’s really simple, and just makes for a really swingy dress.

As you can probably see, I don’t seam the straight sides near the bottom together- on the earlier dress, I just left the hem raw. On many knits, this is totally fine- the raspberry dress is made of a thin rib, so it doesn’t curl at all- that’s the big issue with leaving skirt/dress hems raw on jerseys and some novelty knits. This is a prone-to-curl jersey, though- so, that leaving the hems raw wasn’t really a great option.

I just used a narrow cover stitch to hem this one- first I went across the straight parts of the skirt, then I folded the bottom hems up and went across them.

And I can finally stitch down serged on ribbing without compromising the stretchability! My kids have enormous heads, so, straight stitches aren’t an option for them- and even the typical twin needle cover stitch cheat is too fragile for necklines around here. This is so stretchy- I want to go back and stitch down the necks and arm ribbing of all those dresses and the tee I made earlier- someday. I think I need to make some sawdust next week to let my fingers recover from all the thread picking!