Simplicity 8125 - Wearability: FAIL

I love the idea of Simplicity 8125. It's an adorable 1960's empire-waist update of the classic Butterick Walk-Away Dress (Butterick 4790). It's clever. It's forgiving on my post-baby body. It's quick and easy to make, and requires only fabric, thread and a little bit of ribbon for the hidden back ties - no interfacing, bias tape, buttons or zippers. And it's reversible! You just cut out the pieces, sew the front darts, match the two layers up and sew all the way around, leaving a little opening to turn them right side out. Even with a one-month old baby hanging on me all day and night I managed to make it in just a week or two. That's pretty quick for me!

The fabric was a remnant of the fabric I used to make a shower curtain. Ok, in truth I didn't have quite enough of a remnant for the dress so I raided the bathroom for the shower curtain. It was a lot easier to find another shower curtain I liked than to track down more of this fabric from JoAnn's two or three years ago! The fabric is a sheer white with white flowers of varying degrees transparency. This was my first time working with a semi-sheer fabric. I had to be extra careful finishing the big dart because it was visible through the sheer parts of the fabric. I used a screaming orange broadcloth for the reverse. I really like the way the sheer mutes the orange and the orange makes the floral pop. Unfortunately the fabric combination is the only redeeming feature of this little sewing experiment.

The dress was absolutely adorable on my dressform. The two hidden ties (at the underarm and hip) held the front of the dress in a lovely skimming A-line shape on Barbie. The wide ties give the bust a little definition while letting the back piece hang smoothly from the mid-back, skimming over the big ol' butt. On the dressform I was a little concerned about the really deep armhole. Even when the front and back pieces were tied tightly at the bust, the armhole created by the overlapped pieces looked like it would be deep enough to show an inch or two of bra under the arm.

The trouble began when I wore the dress. Before I was even done with the picture-taking, the dress was starting to shift around. The deep scoop neck allows the shoulders to shift from side to side. The under-bust ties kept the sides of the dress closed, but didn't prevent the back or front from riding up. I had it tied on pretty snugly, and it still didn't stay put. In fact I had the ties tight tight enough that when I sat down, one of the hip ties ripped right out of the seam. I did a quick repair job and headed out for a lovely Pampered Chef party hosted by my friend *A*. Pampered Chef parties wait for no one!

So my first (second? third?) clue that the dress was a disaster is that no one at the party asked me about it or commented on it (except *A*, who knew I was wearing one of my experiments). I mean really, if someone showed up in this weird orange floral dress at a gathering of crop pants, flip flops and T-shirts, wouldn't you wonder what's up? No one had the nerve to ask about it, so I'm pretty sure I was in the realm of "If you don't have something nice to say...". It's a good thing this is my Summer of Wearing What I Damn Well Please or I might have been a little self-conscious.

The real trouble with the dress began when I had to sit down. The deep armholes allowed the shoulders to pop up and then flop forward, gaping at the neckline. Then when I stood up the back of the dress stayed pulled forward, making the back hemline higher than the front. I spent the whole evening with various parts of my bra showing, tugging at the dress to get it back to where it belonged. So annoying!

This dress is bad enough that it must evolve or perish. I still like the fabric combination very much. I'm going to do a little creative chopping to try to make an empire-waist dress that works, if I can make the armhole and bust fit snugly enough. If that doesn't work I'll default to a simple skirt so I can still enjoy the fabric.

This picture is from a couple of weeks ago, when Henry was about one month old. I can't believe he's already six weeks old! I'm halfway through my maternity leave!

Ben's Nightstand/Bookshelf for Henry

My nephew Ben made this awesome nightstand/bookshelf for Henry's nursery. It's perfect for all the little board books in Henry's library!

The design is based on a piece of furniture I found on the Target website. Ben had only a single picture to guide him on the design, and it turned out exactly the way I hoped it would. Awesome job, Ben! And thanks also to another nephew, Mitchell, for lending Ben a hand. There are some very talented guys on Matt's side of the family!

Speaking of guys, I recently realized that I'm way outnumbered at home. Here are Matt, Henry and Otto napping together while I started on a sewing project.

The sewing project is Simplicity 8125 (in the shower curtain fabric with ORANGE for the reverse). I abandoned my plan to start with wrap skirts because I've already lost most of the baby weight. Today I am wearing pre-pregnancy jeans, comfortably, with only a tiny bit of tummy pooch and muffin top. Woohoo! Hooray for breastfeeding and long walks at the botanical garden!

Nursery Curtains - Finally!

You'd think the curtains for the nursery were really something special, based on how long I've been trying to complete them. In fact, they are almost as simple as curtains can be. And I still had to have help to finish them. Here are the nitty-gritty sewing details. Can you believe I finally have a sewing project to post about? It's been ages! (Feel free to skip to the baby pictures at the end if you don't give a rat's ass about my sewing projects!)

I decided to go with a plain cotton in a slightly softer shade than the butterfly on the quilt. I had planned to do my usual style of curtains, using curtain rings with clips to hold up a rectangle of fabric. Matt wanted grommets, so I decided to try them. Unfortunately the only grommets I could find were metallic, which is not what I wanted for the room. I wanted white, to match the curtain rods, crib, and other accents in the room. I finally found white grommets at JoAnn Fabrics, but they are plastic. I think they turned out OK.

The fabric is cheap cotton broadcloth from JoAnn's, on sale for $1.50/yd. The grommets were ten bucks per package of eight before I used up some of those coupons JoAnn sends me every week. My MIL Shirley helped me work out the spacing for the grommets. At the time I only had three packages of grommets for my four panels, and it wasn't quite enough. Luckily I was able to pick up one more package so I could use eight grommets per 45 inch wide curtain panel.

Grommet package, reinforcing, test piece

I used a three inch wide strip of something stiff (from the curtain section at Hancock's, $.99/yd) to reinforce the top of each panel, as suggested on the back of the grommet package. It is not iron-on; it's sewn in as part of the folding over the raw edge at the top. The grommet package included a template to trace the circle to be cut out. I found the template to be too small. The grommets didn't quite cover up the cut edges of the small holes, so I cut the holes a little bigger than the template. The two halves of the plastic grommets just snap together, no hammer required.

I got the grommets done on the first panel, and the top edges reinforced and finished on the rest of the panels. My mom finished the project for me while I was at the hospital with Henry. She also managed to conquer my heaps of laundry and tidy up my house. Thanks, Mom!

If I had to do it over again, I would choose fabric that's a little bit heavier so it wouldn't wrinkle so much. Other than that, the curtains are perfect! Thanks again to Mom and Shirley for helping!

In other news, Henry had his first real bath yesterday!

Henry!

Henry arrived at 1:06 AM on Wednesday, May 20! Seven and a half pounds, twenty inches, with lots of dark hair and a strong pair of lungs.

Henry and I are in good shape. Labor was not too long and not too awful. Breastfeeding is going well and I'm feeling good.

I have lots of finished projects to post (fantastic pillows appliqued by mom, yellow curtains with grommets, nightstand built by my nephew Ben, etc.). I hope to get out and about to mooch some free Wi-Fi later this week.

Baby?

Not yet, but today is my last day at work!