Birthday treats

There hasn't been any sewing going since we got back from New Zealand. We've had a lot of fun sorting out our house and now feel that we are really back at home. Sorting out a sewing space still hasn't happened ..... The spare room became a bit of a dumping ground, whilst we sorted out various other rooms!

It was Youngest's birthday at the beginning of the month, so of course a cake had to be made. I had very strict instructions - it had to be chocolate and it had to be a number 5, and no pink! Not much room for creativity there then. I used a recipe from my Australian Women's Weekly Childrens party cake book, with a slight adaptation, in that I reduced the quantity of sugar in the cake by about 100g. When I have made it before it has been over sweet, and with butter icing on top it was just too much.

Having made the cakes, and trimmed them as per the instructions to get the number 5, I was left with quite a few off cuts that were too nice to not use. After decorating the cake I was left with a large quantity of butter icing. I had a vague recollection of seeing/reading something about cake truffles, so after a quick internet search I found this. I used the recipe as a base - crumbed all the left over pieces of cake and then stirred them into the butter icing. I scooped them into balls and put them in the fridge on a lined baking tray. Whist they firmed up I melted a little plain chocolate and put some 100's & 1000's (sprinkles) in a bowl ready for dipping.














By this time I had a couple of 'helpers' lured by the possibility of sneaking any leftovers! When the chocolate had melted we stuck cocktail sticks into the cake balls, then double dipped into the chocolate, then the sprinkles, and put them back into the fridge. These were then taken into school the next day as birthday treats. The treats went down very well as did the birthday cake itself, however, this seems to be the only birthday cake I have made that I haven't taken a proper photo of.

To post or not to post...

No posts for over a month. We have now relocated from New Zealand, moved back into our house, unpacked some of the stuff we had stored, bought a car, got the girls back into their old school, been on a ski holiday, unpacked more stuff, and now we are waiting for the boxes we shipped from NZ to arrive so we can do some more unpacking!

The unpacking of 'Stuff' has revealed my sewing machine, patterns, notions, a horde of clothing I was planning to refashion, and a small stash of material. Husband has very kindly bought me a dress form as a belated 40th birthday present, which arrived a couple of weeks ago and is still waiting to be unpacked.

Our spare bedroom is going to double as my sewing space, with a bit of re-jigging of furniture, but it is still full of semi-unpacked boxes, but we're getting there. For now I need to sew a bobble back onto a slipper - Youngest has been waiting patiently until I found some needles and thread.

Checks & Dots

I decided to make my friend Lorraine a goodbye present. On the day we were going to her house for dinner. When I could have been sorting out stuff for packing...ho hum.

I sort of followed a tutorial that I found online. I chopped up an old shirt of Husband's to get some usable fabric. I used the whole of the back piece (with a bit of trimming). I cut 2 rectangles from my navy and white polka dot material to match the width of the shirt material and sewed one to each end. I then added the ric rac to cover the seam. After that I folded the material length-wise, right sides together and sewed along two of the three open edges. After turning it the right way out, I tucked in a centimetre and and top-stitched it closed. I continued the top-stitching all the way around the edge of the scarf to give a more finished look.


Luckily Lorraine loved it and wore it the next day:

Pre-Christmas sewing and post-Christmas packing

Over a month and no posts, tut tut!

I am still taking time out from my HotPatterns muslin - thanks to Carolyn for her comments the other day. Will reconsider when I get back to the UK - more of that later.

In the run-up to Christmas I made the nighties for my other 2 daughters. I used Kwic Sew 3105 again, using age 10 for Middle Daughter and 11-12 for Eldest, only a couple of years over their ages, but plenty of growing room! Having done it before it felt nice and easy, especially by the 3rd time. No lace on these, just ric rac, which was fiddly to attach but looks great. So, Middle daughter's nightie first:Eldest daughter's:

And the girls together: So, our adventure in NZ comes to an end and we are preparing to leave. We can't leave until we pack and we can't pack until we leave! We brought so little with us we are using nearly everything right up until we go. We are shipping some stuff back, as we have different baggage allowances than on the way out. Fortunately, we have duplicates of most stuff back at home so it doesn't matter if the stuff takes a while to ship over.

I hope a good time was had by all over the festive period. We had a picnic on the shore of Lake Tepako, then went to a friend for coffee in the late afternoon. I have cast an envious eye over some peoples sewing related Christmas presents (Tasia, Tilly to name a couple) and hope I can organise a sewing space when we get back to our house.

Dot to dot

While I have been putting off tackling my muslin, I decided to do a couple of smaller projects. Eldest has been growing again and a funky little dress that we bought a couple of years ago was only suitable for wearing with trousers/leggings underneath.

I had a look at the dress and decided that it would not be too hard to make it into a skirt. I unpicked the red binding that went round the outside of the neck, as far as each side seam. I then cut off the small piece of fabric that had made the Halter part of the dress.

After carefully, pinning the red binding over the new cut edge I sewed it with a small zigzag on my sewing machine. I left a gap where the binding met the original stitching and ran some elastic through the channel in the binding. I'm not sure I needed to do this for Eldest, but I then did exactly the same for a matching dress for Youngest, which did need the elastic. Not a huge refashion, but enough to prolong the life of the dresses.

As usual, I forgot to take pictures of any of the stages of doing this, but I did think to take before and after pics!


I have yet to get a picture of the skirts being worn.

The never-ending muslin

I bought some material some time ago from a shop in Timaru that has now closed down. I got it in the shop's final days of trading and got nearly 3 metres of fabric, 8 buttons, lots of thread, a Vogue shirtdress pattern (NZ$1!) and a remnant of a navy and white polka dot fabric, for less than NZ$20:

I had fully intended to make the Vogue pattern, but only a few days later I came across the HotPatterns website and fell in love with the Metropolitan Urbanista Coatdress. Having not made dress for years I thought that I would make a muslin, having read about them a lot recently (on the Cupcake Goddess, Sewaholic and Gertie's blogs). I had bought a couple of sheets from a charity shop, which I thought would be ideal.

The HotPatterns pattern pieces are printed on a very stiff paper, so doing a tissue fit would be quite tricky. I enlisted Husband to take my measurements, and these indicated that if there was such a thing, I would be a size 11. I traced off the size 12 with the thought that I would take it in if necessary.

I then very carefully cut out the pattern pieces from the fabric (I have been known to be a bit slapdash in the past) and started to piece it all together.
Even trying this on over my clothes (to avoid constant stripping of in the front room) I could see that this was too big. Just to make sure, I tried it on properly:
and a close-up:
At this stage I took in the seams where the side joined the front and the back, which looked better, but then I realised that I would need to change the sleeves too. I found a very detailed review of the pattern on PatternReview and having clicked through to her blog, got some advice from Michelle at Cheap and Picky. Following her advice I made the pleats bigger which seemed to help. I also got some similar advice from Sunni at Cupcake Goddess.

Having adjusted the seams on the body, the pleats, and the under arm seams on the sleeve I think the dress is still slightly too big and that the shoulder seam is sitting too low.


This last picture is oddly angled to try and show the shoulders being too low. I did put pins in where I thought the shoulders seams should be, but they haven't shown up in the photo. I'm not actually sure if the style of dress is really me.

Having worked this out, I gave up in a bit of a grump. Having taken a step back and thought about it some more, I think I might need to adjust the centre back seam to see if that helps with the shoulder. I haven't done any sewing on this for a couple of weeks now and I'm a bit nervous about starting it again, so I have been doing other things.....

New Fabric photos

I mentioned recently that we had been fabric shopping when we were in Wellington, and I finally got round to taking some pictures of what we bought. I forgot to take a picture of the first fabric uncut, but you can see it made up in my previous post.

First up is the nightie material for Middle and Eldest daughters:

Secondly, the material Husband chose for his shirt. Not sure which view I'm making yet:

Thirdly, this stripy jersey for a top for me, possibly a BurdaStyle Lydia top, or a HotPatterns top, although I don't think I have enough for that. It is a different colour of one of the samples I discussed on an earlier post:

I am currently almost at the end of making a muslin for a dress, which will be my next post. I am not sure when the above projects are going to be made. My muslin is taking foreverahh, and I am planning a couple of other little projects too!