Sewing and soil

First batch finished. Little Lady is already wearing some of them and while she doesn't want to stand still for a picture she does like wearing them and they thankfully fit well.

For Little Lady:

I also made a t-shirt and pants in both the green and what looks like spotty blue but is actually little blue flowers - green set are in the wash and she's wearing the blue flowers ones right now.

For Little Sir:

My favourites are the animal ones in the middle. He's still in his all-in-ones to sleep for now so I only made him one pair of pants. Still got 9 more sets to do but they're going much quicker now.

And in the middle of all this sewing I managed to do a little gardening today. Something has decapitated virtually all my vegetable seedlings which is really disheartening since I spent a year working organic material into the soil which was a solid slab of clay and that's no exaggeration. One metre down and counting and I was still slicing clay off to get it out of the ground. One thing that has grown and not been eaten however is my grandmothers oregano. Legendary stuff this and in our family like liquid gold because it is the most pungent, flavoursome oregano plant ever. I've tried buying oregano plants in the past and they just can't compare to my Grandma's plant. She had to let her stash die off because she can't tend it anymore and now that mum has killed her plant, I'm the sole guardian of this treasure. In my house it is THE herb to use on steak, a little in scrambled eggs sprinkled with Bulgarian feta, on fried mushrooms with garlic, and in my awesome meatballs in homemade spaghetti sauce, in fact anything to do with tomatoes at all. Looks like a weed in this pic but I love it. Culinary heaven.

The Pyjama Sweat Shop

It's been a steep but thankfully speedy learning curve, this sewing actual clothing thing. My babies can't wear polyester and do you know how many 100% cotton pyjamas are out there for little ones, reasonably priced ones that is? I'm a Target girl not Country Road. 10 pairs? 2 pairs? None, nadda, ziltch. I haven't been able to find any at all. Everything is a polyester blend which means my 2 monkeys will sweat and itch and break out in eczema after just one night wearing them. So I opened (temporarily) my own little sweat shop. Thankyou Spotlight for your recent sales which made it all so much cheaper. Now if I could just win that $20,000 which I have been faithfully presenting my VIP card for for years now I'd be eternally grateful. Imagine all the fabric I could buy with that!! But I digress. Pyjamas.

I couldn't find any patterns I liked online, free or otherwise, and even less when flipping thru the pattern catalogues at Spotlight (as usual- are you starting to see a pattern here? Now you know why I so egotistically called my blog/scrapbook M-A's Designs. I'm very rarely happy with other peoples designs, constantly chopping and changing, and brainstorming my own). So knocked up my own based on the kiddies t-shirts and trackies/shorts which I know a lot of other people have done so that's nothing new. I adjusted lengths, widths, sleeves, waists and necklines to give a more comfy fit for sleeping in and then spent 3 days cutting out them all out.

This and this were an enormous help for a newbie trying to figure out how to do the neckline binding and this for general sewing tips on how to sew a t-shirt. I had already read that pants are sewn front and back first then inside leg as a single seam so just winged it. Note to self: used an 80/12 jersey needle which worked really well on the knit ribbed and cotton interlock fabrics. And tho it's all knit fabric I broke out my new overlocker anyway to neaten all seams before top-stitching anything that needed hemming or reinforcing like the shoulder and crotch. I'm now onto day three of sewing them together and should have half of them finished today. In all I will have made 9 pairs of pants, 19 pairs of shorts, 10 tanks tops, and 21 t-shirts. If my models are willing to stand still for 2 seconds I'll try to post pics of some of the finished pieces once they're done.