Easter Overalls

Several months ago, I happened upon a really cute fabric. The dinosaurs were friendly and bright and weren't licensed characters (I tend to be somewhat anti- licensed characters. If my child doesn't know who Barney is, why should he wear Barney pajamas? Anywhoo ....). Immediately a vision sprang into my mind. Dinosaur overalls! I hastily estimated how much fabric a pair of overalls would take, added a smidge for safety, and plopped down my money and forgot about the whole thing. The fabric languished on the "someday" dresser in my sewing room.

And would have continued to languish, long past Easter, had not a friend pinned a free overall pattern to her Pintrest board. It was by LiEr of ikatbag.com, whom I deeply admire and it was a size 3T - exactly what I needed. Also, did I mention, free. Clearly, this Easter overall thing was going to happen.

When I cut out the pattern and studied my fabric, I realized that I had enough fabric for TWO pairs of overalls, which was fabulous, because I happen to have two boys. (Twinkle is only 2, but he is a very sturdily built 2, and is currently straddling the fence between 2T and 3T. Besides, overalls are naturally adjustable.)

I very narrowly avoided making a terrible mistake, cutting out the overalls here. I was all set to cut and suddenly realized that this pattern has a right side up, and a wrong side up. If I had just doubled the fabric to cut out 2 sets (exactly what I was set to do), one of the sets of overalls' dinosaurs would have been upside down. So I cut off some of the fabric and layered it over the other fabric, so that the dinosaurs were right side up for both sets.

I did two things differently from the pattern.

1) I made the front chest piece separate from the bottom front pieces. You can see (maybe) from the pattern above that she has you cut out one big piece (twice) that you join by sewing them together down the center front and then that's your front piece, from the top of the bib to the pants legs. I wanted to be able to put in pockets (both my boys adore pockets, especially Twinkle) but I didn't want to have a sewn-on waistband, which is her solution for the top of the pockets needing to hide under another piece or in a seam. So I took the top straight dotted line as the top of my pants fronts, and then cut another piece for the chest, cutting it on the fold so that it was one piece. I then sewed my two front pants legs together, sewed on the pockets, and sewed the pants part to the chest part, thus "hiding" the top edge of the pockets in the seam between the pants and the chest piece. Capisce?

This was very simple to do and I'm very pleased how it turned out.

2) I made the overall straps several inches longer because they just looked short to me. The boys were sleeping, so I couldn't attempt to measure the straps against their shoulders to figure out if they were the right length, and they're fairly good sized boys. Munchkin has always been the tallest of his friends his age, and Twinkle earned the nickname "Tank" as an infant and has kept it ever since.

I should have trusted LiEr. They're now totally too long. This really doesn't matter, because the extra doesn't show, but I should have trusted LiEr.

A slightly tricky thing with LiEr's patterns is that, coming from a professional background, she doesn't put seam allowances on her patterns. You're supposed to add however much you prefer. 1/4, 1/2, 5/8, the world is your oyster. I comforted myself with the fact that I was making clothes for an active child, not assembling a nuclear warhead, and cut them out with a very approximate 5/8" seam allowance, measuring only occasionally to make sure that I had not strayed too far afield. This I did until ...

I did this. In case you can't tell the grievous nature of my error, that's the hem of the pants. Which I just cut out with a 5/8" seam allowance. Which is way too small. Notice that on most hems, the hem is at least half an inch wide? Sometimes more? That's because a wider hem is a) easier to work with and b) doesn't fold up as easily. A too narrow hem on pant legs is one of those rookie mistakes that just takes the shine off your otherwise well-made, professionally finished clothing item, which is certainly what I hoped that these overalls would be.

(For those of you who are confused and are saying "Isn't 5/8 more than half an inch? Wouldn't you still be ok?" I say: "No. You have to fold over the top edge of the fabric, and then fold it again so that you don't have a raw edge on the inside of your hem. If you just folded it once and sewed it down, it would fray. The making of well-made, professionally finished clothing is really just one long quest to eliminate all raw edges, ever.")

So what I did was this. I took a length of appropriately bright, wide bias tape and sewed it to the edge of the pants, folded it up, and sewed that edge down to make the hem. (Bias tape comes pre-made with folded edges.) This is what they used to do in the olden days when skirts or pants were let down as a person grew. When there wasn't enough fabric left to fold up to make a proper hem, they would use this exact technique, and in fact the reason that I happened to have neon orange bias tape on hand was because I had inherited it from my grandmother, who had bought it for just such a purpose. I think that's pretty cool.

At this point readers like my brother are rolling their eyes and saying "Enough with the technical crap, let's get to pictures of the boys!

OK, let's do.

Early morning selfie with Munchkin, looking pretty unthrilled with his awesome dinosaur overalls. Don't worry, he did cheer up later, especially when there were

BALLOONS.

This may not look like an excited face to you, but that's only because you cannot perceive the laser-like intensity with which he is holding that balloon.

(Yes! Our church gives out balloons to all the kids after the Easter service. Isn't that awesome?)

Again, the look is a little anxious, but trust me, Twinkle is having a good time here.

After church we went to the park and had a picnic with my parents and brother and sister. 'Stache bought the boys real soccer balls for their Easter gift, so most of what I saw of the boys for the rest of the afternoon was this.

Or this.

These are actually with zoom. It's a large park and they really love running.

Munchkin is sitting on Twinkle's ball here, and Twinkle is trying to steal it back. Despite 'Stache's buying IDENTICAL balls, they still knew whose were whose.

My sister and brother with the boys.

I was sneezing convulsively the whole afternoon and it still managed to be a pretty perfect day.

Patience is Rewarded

Last Friday I played with fire and made a skirt.

At the same time.

You see I had this fabric that (purely metaphorically speaking) has been burning a hole in my fabric drawer for a while. A long, long while, since I bought this fabric on my honeymoon six years ago. Apparently that (metaphorical) fire wasn't burning too hot. This wasn't because I didn't like it, because it is purple and flowy and has just enough sequins to add a fairy-tale, pretty-girl touch without crossing over the border into “Bling,” which is a country that I just don't visit. I have many friends who rave about it, a cousin who pretty much lives there, but it is just not for me. Tempt me not with sequined sandals and pass me my trusty Merrells.

It wasn't languishing for want of a destiny, because I knew when I bought it that it was meant to be a skirt.

It had only two strikes against it, but those proved almost deadly.

1. It is crepe (no idea exactly what kind, since all receipts for this are long gone) which can be tricky to deal with.
2. I have a very wide range of textile-craft interests. I usually have several projects in process and more that I am planning. My main interests are knitting, quilting and sewing children's clothes, but I am quite good at crochet, home-decorating sewing, sewing adult clothes, cross-stitch, French Hand Sewing and scrapbooking. If you take the average day of 24 hours, subtract A for sleep, subtract B for being married, subtract C times D for two boys under the age of three, subtract E for cooking and F (not coincidentally) for housework and then divide that wee little number by the number of interests at the moment, the end result is a very, very small number that you have to peer at with a magnifying glass. I usually look at that poor little pathetic number, trying bravely to stand up by its weak little self, and take pity on it and steal a bit of time from the last thing mentioned. (What's that? Housework was the last thing mentioned? How … um … coincidental.) I can't help it. I'm tenderhearted after all, and just can't bear to see the darling thing struggle so.

So the Lovely Purple Crepe lived in the drawer for a long time, until last Friday when I opened it looking for blue flannel and was suddenly struck with a memory.

Once upon a very long time ago, I was a ballet girl in my church's fledgling ballet school and wore black leotards and pink tights and our mothers made us skirts for the performance.

They did this with fire. Literal, non-metaphorical fire.

Fun fact: polyester is basically made of plastic bottles. Funner fact: just like plastic bottles melt, so too does polyester.

Instead of hemming our ballet skirts (which would have been an enormous task) the moms set up a station with a candle and after cutting out the skirts, they very carefully passed the edge of the fabric along the edge of the candle, making a small melted edge that does not fray.

If you would like to try it you might watch this video.The key thing is to keep your hands steadily moving. If you pause and wait for the section by the flame to be melted “enough” you will melt a lot more than you actually want. Trust that it is happening, move your fabric steadily along and then pull your fabric away from the flame to run your finger along the edge (it should be cool enough) to check that you didn't miss any spots

However, I should warn you, this is a Very Unprofessional way to finish an edge for a regular skirt. (Unless you're deliberately going for a funky, burned, post-Apocolyptic high fashion look.) The reasons I thought I could get away with it were:

1.  I was making a handkerchief skirt, which meant that the hemline isn't supposed to be parallel to the floor, it's supposed to be all drapey and flowy. This meant that the inevitable imperfections would be camouflaged in angles and drapeyness. If this hem had been parallel to the floor, the difference between the natural straightness of the floor and the meandering attempt at straightness that would be my hemline would, I know, make me twitch.
2. I was using 2 squares of crepe, set 90 degrees from each other, like an 8-pointed circle. This meant that there would be 8 different points hanging down and there is safety in numbers. If I had done an asymetrical skirt with one high point and one low point, it would be easy to look at that simple shape and say “Hey look. That edge isn't even. What was she thinking?" With 8 points you don't stop to count and examine each one, your brain just says “That skirt has a lot of points hanging down.” And moves on.
3. I knew that this was not going to be a high-impact, hard-wearing, hard-scrubbing skirt. This is a pretty-girl skirt, meant to be worn to church or on a date perhaps once a month. Its ok that it has a delicate edge because it's not going to get thrown in the washer and dryer all the time. I might even treat it to dry cleaning, if it behaves itself.
4. I lack the equipment/skills to hem crepe like it should be hemmed. In a perfect world I would have a serger and be well-versed in delicate fabrics such as crepe and chiffon but this is real life and I have a (mostly) trusty Brother sewing machine and I usually sew with cotton or flannel.
5. My standards are low. I mostly live in jeans and t-shirts. I knew that this skirt would not have to pass the exacting standards of a professional workplace. Most of the people I know are not going to examine my hem and find me, my sewing skills and my moral worth lacking.
6. If it was hard, I knew I was not going to do it, and having a new skirt made of lovely material was more important to me than doing things As They Should Be.

So I plunged in, cut two big squares, melted the edges, measured my waist, looked up the radius of a circle that had the circumference of my waist measurement (I love online calculators) and cut a waist-sized hole. I made a simple casing from a doubled piece of fabric, and sewed it on, trusting to the seam allowances (that were making the waist-hole now slightly bigger than my waist) to allow me enough wiggle room to get the skirt on. I then made a tie cord using this very clever method.

Normally to make fabric ties I would have had to cut a 1” wide strip, measure and fold the edges over 1/4”, iron firmly, and then fold the strip in half and iron firmly, and then sew down the edge of the strip to make a nice little fabric cord with no raw edges. The ironing probably wouldn't “take” as much as I wanted and a great number of pins would be used. The end result would be serviceable, wobbly, and would have taken an hour and a half to make.

Instead, I cut my 1” strip and fed it into my 1/2” bias tape maker. This is a wonderful little gadget that does the first set of folding for you. If you are making bias tape then you pull your strip through the gadget and iron the creases as they come out of the end. If, however, you intend to immediately fold this tape in half and sew it, you can just feed it directly from the gadget to the sewing machine. I took a few terrible pictures to try to explain:

It works best if you hold the last fold with your finger: 

You only do this about 2 inches at a time, but it is lightning fast compared to measuring and ironing and pinning!

After I made my cord, I fed it through the casing and voila! A skirt! 

 

If I had been making it in real, uninterrupted time instead of Mommy time, it would have taken about 1 hour from first idea to final product. 

Thanks for reading such a long post! Gratuitous cute picture of Munchkin in safety goggles:  

Yes. He wears pink crocs. They were on sale and he loves them and (most importantly in both our estimations) he can put them on himself.