What to Wear to America’s Birthday Party

I found this fun sun top pattern on the internet. It looked just right for summer outings, so I decided that I wanted to make one for each for my co-workers tween daughters. This top is made as a front and back square, sewn into a tube. Elastic is sewn to the top to gather the tube to fit the body, and then shoulder ties are added to help keep the top on. Simple enough. The only measurement needed to make this top is an accurate chest measurement. I reached for this Stars and Stripes cotton print that has been hiding in the stash for as long as I can remember. And I hoped that this would give the girls something fun to wear on the 4th of July.

I cut out 4 squares of fabric, 23 inches by 28 inches, for the two tops and 8 strips, 4 for each top, for the shoulder ties. The first step was to sew the side seams. Normally, I would have just serged the side seams to finish them up but the pattern called for french seams. I have read about french seams and seen videos for sewing them but I had never done a french seam. And I figured that I might as well learn something new while making these tops, so I sewed 4 french seams  The french seams were very easy to make and leave a beautiful clean finish to the seams. In fact, you hardly notice there are side seams with the french seam technique.

Next came the shoulder ties. These were not difficult to make, just time consuming. There was a lot of ironing to make these ties. I folded the strips I had cut like bias tape by folding the edges to the middle and then folding the strip in half, then tucking the raw edges into the fold.  Next I edge stitched down each tie. I learned a lot about folding the edges, ironing the edges and edge stitching by the time I had made 8 ties.

I next stitched a 1 inch hem at one end of the tube and a 1.5 inch hem on the other. I added the ties to the larger hem as I stitched it and I placed the ties 8 inches from the side seam. I made a tab and placed it under the hem at the center back as a tag, and also to tell me which top was for which girls since their measurements are just a little bit different.  I also left an opening for the elastic in this hem. I then stitched down the middle of the larger hem to make a casing for the elastic. This left a nice ruffle at the top. This ruffle is very cute and adds a nice touch at the top of the elastic. I cut the elastic to the chest measurements that the girl’s mom had given me plus one inch. I did not want the elastic so tight so that it cut into their chest when wearing the top. I also wanted the elastic just big enough to the make the gathers and hold the tube to their body. Lastly I pulled the elastic and then finished it off to complete the top.

Upon completing the tops, I put one of the tops on a hanger to take pictures before giving the tops to the girls. It look terrible on the hanger. The ties looked too close to the center front and the tube looked like just that, a tube. I was very disappointed. I could only hope the tops would look better on the girls than they did on the hanger. Luckily, they did. The girls looked very cute in their summer tops, and they seemed to like them. The tops seemed a little long and I told the girls that I would shorten them, but they both said they liked the length. The smaller girl mentioned that her elastic seemed tight. I told her that was an easy fix and had her try on her sister’s top. She said that the larger size was a better fit. This really was an easy fix. I just unpicked where I had closed the elastic, removed the smaller piece of elastic, pulled in a longer piece and stitched it back up again. At work, their mom said the fit was great and they were already wearing their tops before the 4th of July. I was excited to hear that.  I hope they will wear and enjoy their tops all summer long.

Until next time…

Happy American Independence Day and Sew forth and Celebrate On!

It Should Be Simple

Or at least that is what I thought when I started. A few months of the year the sun sets at just the right angle that if it is your day off and you have decided to watch a movie between the hours of 5:00 to 7:00 PM, the sun will shine right through the decorative glass on the back door and right in to your eyes making the viewing of the movie quite difficult. So, I said to myself, “You know, I should make a removable curtain to cover the decorative glass so that the sun will not bother my movie watching time. It would be a very simple project and would not take much time at all.” Well that was what I thought anyway, but it turned out to be not quite right.

I started by digging through the scraps in the stash to find some inexpensive pieces of fabric. Since this curtain will only be used for a couple of hours at a time, and maybe only five times a year, I did not want to use any nice pieces of fabric on it. Luckily I found some left over beige denim and decided to use it, but upon measuring, it was a little small, but it was the best fabric scrap I had for the job, so I decided to sew pieces to the sides and bottom to make it fit. I only have one good size piece and the rest were really scraps so it took some piecing to get the size I wanted. I used all the scraps I had and the pieced square just fit the window, but there was no extra left for hems so I just serged the raw edges. After all this work, it would have been so much simpler just to use a large enough piece of fabric from the stash. So now you know what happens when you try to cut corners and save time. It doesn’t save you any time at all.

So, now that the curtain is complete, I have to figure out how to hang it. I did not want a rod mounted to the door permanently to be used for only a few hours a year. Since the door is metal, I thought it would be just a simple matter of taking some magnets from the fridge and sticking the curtain to the door, but the fridge magnets were not strong enough through the fabric to hold it in place. Next I tried glueing some pieces of strip magnets to the back of the curtain but it was not strong enough to hold the weight of fabric either. I thought about velcro, but really did not want a piece of velcro glue to my door either. Seeing my frustration, my husband bought me some rare earth magnets at the hardware store. Wow, are these some strong magnets! I was just going to hand stitch the magnets to the back of the curtain but these magnets stuck so well, I could not pull them from the door without pulling them from the fabric. Since I did not even have the fabric for a hem, I had no fabric to fold the corners into little pockets for the magnets. So I made some external tab pockets to hold them in. Now the challenge was to sew the little tab pockets with these super strong magnets in them to the curtain. I did it, but a third hand would have been helpful. I needed two hands to hold the fabric, lower the pressor foot and sew, and one hand to hold the magnet up so it was not automatically stuck to the metal parts of the sewing machine.

Well, with all that, a simple curtain that should have taken just a few minutes to cut out and hem, but ended up taking several hours and a great deal of brain power to make. Yet, it was fun to be creative and solve the problems to make something I needed without having any idea of how it was going to work or any pattern to work from. It was nice to do something ‘off the cuff’ as it were for a change.