Five Favorites: Look What I Made! Edition

Hosted by Jenny this week!

--1--

Ponchik has just discovered object permanence.  The giraffe blew her mind.  I wish I could have captured the first look on her face when I put the giraffe in front of her.  It.was.priceless.

 --2--

I decided to put myself on a clothes shopping moratorium for a few months (for myself only, obvs), so now if I want it, I've got to make it.  I've gotten some serious sewing enabling from Rochelle over at Lucky Lucille, and decided to make a blouse.  She made a great dress using the top half of this pattern (paired with the skirt from the pattern in #3, below), and I thought it would make a great blouse as well.  I'm all about the butterfly collar these days. 

  

I'm making a muslin first because I'm changing the length to be a blouse rather than part of a dress, and making long sleeves, which require math and a small bit of drafting, garshdarnit.  Better safe than sorry.  So my muslin is out of this pretty-but-unwearable-for-me fabric I bought on clearance at Joann about a year ago.  

The front (so far)

 What makes this blouse a great 1940s facsimile (my current favorite word) is the tucks at the yoke on the front and back, plus the butterfly collar and pleating at the waist.  One of the reasons I'm making a serious effort to gear my vintage look to the early 1940s is that the detailing is superb, but the practicality is pretty high.  

The back (so far)

I purchased the actual fabric for this blouse earlier this month (on $4.00/yard clearance at Joann!).  It looks like a feedsack print to me, and the cotton is the type that doesn't wrinkle easily.  I'm going to pair it with some vintage buttons from my grandma's stash.  

--3--

And because I'm also focused on making outfits, rather than individual pieces that don't necessarily go together, I'm also going to make a swing skirt out of some navy blue bottom weight fabric that I have in my stash using this fabulous pattern.  I'm a little concerned about the fit being too big (sometimes modern reissues put in too much ease, and it can be hard to tell until you are done), so I'm going to use the rest of my muslin to make up the skirt just to check fit.  

The most massive pattern evah--blouse, jacket, skirt, pants.  It's a lot of pieces!

--4--

And in other sewing news, I made a dirndl skirt this week, largely without a pattern.  I made a muck of one last week with some stash fabric, but I learned from it, and decided to call the mess a muslin and be done with it.  Maybe I can salvage the fabric for some other home decor project or something.  I love this yellow print--it has a mustardy tone-on-tone floral print that doesn't show in the photo very well, but is very pretty in person.  I bought it after seeing Rochelle's skirt made from a green fabric designed by the same person.  And pretty much copied her whole outfit.  I have to say, once I got the math right for the panels (again with the math!!), it came together pretty quickly.  Just two rectangles, attached to a waistband with a zipper.  I ended up hand sewing the zipper in, mostly because I was too lazy to get out my zipper foot, but I had to hand sew the inside of the waist band anyway, so it was just a little extra sewing.  I used a vintage yellow button on the waist band just for decoration, and used snaps as the fastener.  It ended up about an inch too big in the waist, so I have to take it in (I currently have a safety pin in the back), but it is super comfortable and swingy.  I wish I'd put in pockets, but I just wanted a quick and easy project. Instant-gratification-like.

--5--

I have this mom friend who has lost over 20 pounds in the last five months doing Focus T25 from Beach Body, and she is such a source of inspiration and encouragement to me.  She recently became a coach for the program, and started running challenge groups on Facebook.  When she asked if I wanted to do it this month, I shrugged and said, "why not?"  I'm always hesitant about workout programs, because I find them hard to stick to, and tend to get injured, or burnt out, or just find myself too tired from them.  I don't get a net energy boost from exercising, as a general rule.  I just get...tired.  But I want to firm up from the pregnancy, and my heart could use some extra work, so I decided to take the plunge.  

I'm four days in, and I'm kind of loving it.  It is 25 minutes a day, so very doable, high intensity, and sort of fun?  It is getting me out of bed in the morning at the ungodly hour of 6:15 a.m., so that says something, right?  Oh, and I've been ghastly sick since last Thursday, so it definitely says something that I can do this while sick!  (And it is a work out, let me tell you!  I'm so sweaty by the end!)  And honestly, doing it with the challenge group has been the best--I don't think I would have gotten started otherwise, and it definitely motivates me to keep going with it.

Go see Jenny for more Faves!!