Weekend garment sewing with Rae and April

I've wanted to learn to make dresses for awhile. This Washi dress in particular. This weekend was the weekend.

I grew up with women who quilted and made dolls, but not garments. This probably saved me from having to wear a lot of embarrassing ensembles, but still, I've always been interested in garment sewing. My first sewing project was a purse that I made out of shiny bubble-gum pink spandex in 4th grade. I used it for trick-or-treating and it sagged all the way to the ground by the end of the night. In 7th grade home ec, I decided to sew a purple jersey knit dress (not an easy fabric to start with), while the other kids made pillows. I was pretty proud of myself for taking on an ambitious project, seeing that I come from a long line of women who sew beautifully, but I hit my final growth spurt mid-semester and outgrew the dress before I finished it! It remained almost done, too tight and short to wear, and taunted me for quite awhile.

Since then, I've planned a lot of sewing projects but haven't followed through with most of them. Collecting patterns and fabric was actually my hobby. Then, a couple years ago someone in my knitting group said she wanted to learn to sew a dress that could become her uniform for work. That idea really appealed to me, and when I saw the Washi dress, I thought it might be the dress. The designer lived locally so I kept my eye out for a class with her.

This past fall I took a work trip to Seattle. While looking for a place to eat dinner after a long flight, I stumbled on a very lovely fabric shop called Drygoods Design in Ballard. I'm not exaggerating even a little when I say that ending up in Ballard accidentally was like stumbling straight into Pacific Northwest fantasy-land, where everyone drove Suburus and bearded guys in flannel and chooks sold organic beet juice at a farmer's market on a street filled with coffee shops. I even went into a dessert shop devoted to molten chocolate cakes and $8 jelly jars filled with handcrafted sea salt dark chocolate pudding. I was a little more than charmed by the whole scene and lost my better sense, walking away from Drygoods with the Washi paper pattern and enough expensive fabric for two dresses and a shirt!

This time, I was on the hook to actually follow-through. So, I signed up right away when the weekend garment sewing workshop, hosted by Rae Hoekstra of Made by Rae and April Rhodes, was announced on Rae's blog. Both women design easy-to-sew patterns with a modern sensibility. Rae designed the Washi Dress, and it's been a bit of a sensation among young seamstresses. April is from Columbus, Ohio, and is quite accomplished - owning a local fabric shop with her mom and designing very stylish patterns that she sells online. 

For the whole weekend, twelve of us - some who came from as far as away as Montreal and Chicago - got to hang out in Rae's studio in Ann Arbor, getting tips from both designers on how to custom fit patterns to your body and learn other little tricks of the trade. We also got to try on their dress and blouse samples hanging on the rack. So.much.fun. It felt like a very low stakes version of Project Runway. Except the phrase "that's so adorable" was used a lot instead of "make it work." You get the idea.

My sewing is a little rusty and I'm not the best at following directions, so my progress was a little slower than some of the other women. Most were away from kids for the weekend and laser-focused on maximum sewing time. Some stayed until 11pm Saturday night. I was in a slower paced mood and stopped for all the demos and asked a lot of questions so I could learn how to trace a pattern onto Swedish tracing paper, make a muslin, adjust the fit (particularly in the bust, which involves finding your apex!), and get some tips on garment finishing techniques like shirring, hemming, pleating, and making bias tape. I also got a tutorial on using my serger, which has been sitting in my basement since I snagged it last year from a neighbor who moved to San Francisco. 

It was also fun to be a bit of a tourist in the college town next door to where I grew up. Rae's studio was next to the pizza place my parents took me to as a baby. Saturday the weather took a turn for the even-worse, and I had to call up a good friend from high school and bum a sleepover on her couch. On Sunday I wanted to finish my dress, but I decided instead to go along on a little field trip to Pink Castle Fabrics and my favorite place to eat in town these days - Frita Batidos.

I love knitting, I love painting, I love papercrafting, but I think for a little bit here, sewing is going to be my main craft.

I'll be done with my first Washi dress within a week. Hold me to it, friends. Because like always, I have a more than a few other projects in mind.

room inspiration

I'm working on my craft space this weekend. We have a basement now so it'll be in the basement. That means I have to make it super inspiring, so that I'll want to venture into the basement to craft.

I'm a little overwhelmed by this task and with needing to decorate our new place overall. We've put some paint on the walls in the main level and that's a start, but we need to hang art. Which means I need to make some art because we don't have the budget to start art collecting.

My mom is a great decorator. Actually both of my parents are great at decorating, so I'm trying to take a little inspiration from their house. Here's some photos (that she doesn't know I took ;) ) of her sweet little sewing space, which is tucked into a guest room. The room is seriously cuter than the average bed and breakfast room. She could go into business decorating bed and breakfasts, if there was a demand for that kind of thing.

 

I think her secret is a good sense of color and an eclectic but well organized collection of vintage, handcrafted items, repurposed furniture, and mementos. The Ragedy Ann doll was mine. The dresser she thrifted and painted. The shells on the shelf have been around for may years and used to be in a bathroom. She stenciled the hat boxes on the bottom shelf and added little painted animals. She made the mosaic mirror herself! I'll say that again, she made that mosaic mirror herself from broken vintage plates and tea cups. There are a lot of cute little details when you look closely, like a little memento from my mom's nursing days. My dad's name is Matt too. Weird, huh?

There are a lot of cute little details when you look closely, like a little memento from my mom's nursing days. My dad's name is Matt too. Weird, huh?

I didn't show the painted wrought iron bed and the handmade quilt on the bed. It's a lot of talent and care for one room.

You want to stay here for a night now, don't you? Yeah, I thought so.

Freshly squeezed update

I had a busy weekend around the house, and am starting to feel slightly more organized in life. I squeezed in some time to update the Etsy shop (get it, squeezed?).

Wow. That was bad.

Moving on, thanks so much to all the pretty flowers for writing a post about my shop! Super nice. Jen was my very first friend. Our nursing mothers (they were nurses too!) set up a child care co-op where they swapped babysitting time. Really inspiring practice. And it meant I got to spend good quality time playing at my friends' houses. I have a lot of random memories from those days, everything from being mesmerized by Jen's fancy humidifier to riding the 'green machine' scooter outside to stacking up all their couch cushions into a tower and taking pictures of each other on top of it.

Which reminds me, I should add that to my 'should be scrapped' list. It's been fun to reconnect with her via this blogging thing. She lives a very inspiring life of crafting, child raising, and experimenting with the farming lifestyle.

I got into this PhotoJournaling small business because of my love for documenting and reminiscing!

To the shop, I added six new PhotoJournals in various sizes, and at different price points. I experimented with block printing on the cover, for two albums listed in the shop. I also added some white albums that you can customize yourself.

If you don't see a color combo or size here you want, please let me know because I probably have materials on hand to custom make one for you. It'd be a pleasure!

I also added a couple more patterned albums in orange and blue.

My mom told me that she likes one of the aqua mini-inspiration kits but wasn't sure how she could use it (she's more of a fabric crafter than a paper crafter). I wanted to try out the kits myself anyway, so I made up some samples of what you might do with some of the kits.

I used the pink and purple mini-inspiration kit to make a card for a newly engaged friend.

(everything but the kraft paper card and the pink American Craft letter stickers is included in the kit)

And then I used the brown kit (which I love love love) to make a scrapbook page. This is sort of a slice of life page. Nothing mind blowingly special about the topic, but I had this photo from awhile back that I wanted to do something with and I paired it with a little fact about my current life. Some day when I move away, it'll be fun to look back and remember this little part of my daily routine right now.

I cut out the hand-stamped stamped sticker, and added brown paint around the edges, along with a date stamp. I simply stapled the ribbon onto the page. The cork has adhesive on the back already so it was as simple as sticking it on the page. Gives it great texture. Everything above comes with the kit, minus the paint, 12x12 white cardstock, the date stamper, the cream paper I journaled on, and the staples!

Hopefully the kits just provide a few bits and pieces to get you started on creating something fun.

In related news, my inspiration clipboards finally filled up this weekend with new pages. Once I make another page, I'll rotate one of these into an album. I love having them out for awhile to look at before they get filed away. Fun stuff!

Apartment crafting solution

This might be the world's strangest use of a dog crate.

We had to get a new crate for Kaia - our husky mix - because she got too tall for her old one. She doesn't use the crate that often anymore because to our surprise and delight she's been extremely well behaved when we leave her uncrated. But, we still want to have her crate trained so we keep the crate up just for practice. The new crate is quite large for our small apartment though and for a week we didn't know where to put it.

We bought it from a neighbor, and she said she put a board on top of it and used it as a table. As soon as she told me, a plan was already formulating in my head. I've never had a dedicated craft space, with all my supplies in one room and a tabletop to work on. My most craft supplies have rotated from room to room - bedroom & dining room - while the less used supplies were stowed away in the office closet.

This weekend, we did a little reorganizing in all the rooms, and came up with this solution for the office...

We got a thin board cut down to size at the hardware store, and spray painted it white.



That little green tote is for all my essential tools - glue sticks, pens, scissors, etc.. It comes in handy. The wire basket holds my finished mini-albums. The jar is for inspiring bits and pieces. The basket in the back holds my stamping sets and letter stickers. I used to keep them all in a drawer but I decided wanted to flip through them more easily.



I painted that canvas in 8th grade I believe. That year I took a mural painting class at a local university in 8th grade and I loved it. I had a small collection of acrylic paints in the basement and my dad even built me an easel. One night I spent a few hours down there, and with no real plan, that painting came out of me. I still remember the look of surprise on my dad's face when I emerged from the basement with it. The painting is a good reminder to be open to creativity.

The clipboard inspiration wall idea is ala Rachel.



I'm going to clip up little bits and supplies that will inspire me. I'll also display new scrapbooking pages for a couple weeks before they go into albums.



With a new space of my own, I started sorting photos for a project and got to sewing a few mini-album pages together.

There is more organizing to do, but this is a good start!