Baby's posh threads and other news

It's been rather quiet out here in this blog on the post front.  This is because the Button Shipyard has been super busy!  One set of baby's grandparents visited for a week, and now I have 10 days to swab the decks, cook and complete village-based activities before the other set of grandparents come for another week.  Fortunately, baby is delighted with all grandparents and has a wonderful time.  Mummy is so boring, apparently.

I'm going to break my self-imposed ban on people-pictures and post a picture of the wedding outfit for your delight.  The Blooper Shirt, Moonraker Waistcoat and Gennaker Trousers look much better with a small person in them:

Ta da!

Apologies for the bright blue rug and mismatching socks.  I totally ran out of time to make tiny black shoes, and didn't have the presence of mind to sit him on grass and expose the tiny baby toes instead.

We all had a super time, and huge congratulations to the bride and groom who looked stunning and very happy.

I keep saying I'll make the shirt and trouser pattern available, but I need to fix things with the shirt first.  In the progress of that, I got distracted by this forum, which is a UK-based sewing forum.  It's amazing and has very talented and generous people on it, who recommended me to get some new pattern drafting textbooks.  I'm super excited for them to arrive and I'll tell you all about them!

In other wooly news:

My Stegosaurus got featured as pattern of the day at Quartered Heart Crochet!  It's a lovely pretty website, take a look!  A big thank you to Amy and her three-year-old who has excellent taste.  ;-)  I hope she'll like her dinosaur.

Chameleon is doing my nut.  I think I said that about Stegosaurus too at this stage.  I'm on my 5th pattern, and 5th crochet attempt.  I'm working from the tail up and I've reached about row 120; I think I'm almost done with the tail... ARGH!  I think I need a less complicated idea for the pattern after this one.

The third bit of wooly news is that I got IDed to buy knitting needles yesterday.  Seriously, you have to look over 25 to buy a 3mm set of circular needles in Dunhelm Mill.  HA HA HA HA HA.  I wonder what you must do to convince them if you happened to be under 25 but legitimately wanting to knit?!

Finally, I save the best wooly news until last:
My super-talented knitty friend has a new blog!  You can read about her adventures with hand-dying yarn and pick up some serious fibre knowledge while you're at it.  Hooray!  I can't wait to see the results.

I'm on the Christmas sewing and knitting from next week.  The great thing about this is that I'm starting in reasonable time, but the downside is that I can't post any of the resulting images or free patterns until after December 25th!  Bah!

Free baby pattern: Moonraker Waistcoat

I decided to give this pattern away for free - I hope you enjoy it!

The pattern is for a waistcoat in size 6 months, although it comes up large, probably similar in size to a lot of commercial 9-12 month size baby clothes that my baby wears.  That said, he is actually 6 months old, so the size designation is good for him!  The best way to decide if it will fit your little one is to measure some of their clothes and compare it to the pattern.

Get the pattern pieces here: clicky!
Get the instructions here: clicky again!

I made mine up in some fancy silk for a wedding, but I guess you could make it for casual wear too: it would be cute (and warm) in a pin-corduroy with a cotton back.

You need to print the pattern out on A4 paper at "actual size", or scale 100% (whatever your printer offers you); I've provided you some 5cm square boxes to check the scale.

I'm pleased with the construction method I devised - you won't need to finish any raw edges for this garment as they're all hidden inside the lining.  There's just one edge to hand-stitch shut at the end.  It's all in the instructions.  If you want to save on printer ink, the last page of the instructions is a summary, so you could just print out that page for reference when you've read the rest on screen.

Please don't reproduce this pattern or sell it (or any finished garments based on it).  It's intended just for your personal enjoyment.  If you like it, please consider following my blog - I hope I'll have more patterns for you soon!

To see more pictures of my version, see this previous post.  I'd love to see the waistcoats you make from this pattern: do send me pictures if you like!

Waistcoat finished! Excitement!

My posting frequency has gone right down, I know, but that's because I've been busy working on new patterns and sewing!  Hopefully there might be a rash (or at least a dribble) of posts with exciting freebies in, within a month or so...

Anyways, as the title suggests, I'm done with the waistcoat!

Baby has not tried it on yet because I'm terrified of ruining it before Uncle's wedding day.  Even though I know there will be sick or dribble on it within 5 minutes.

The best thing about this is the "free"-ness of it: it's just fabric I had lying around which I'd already mentally written-off the cost of!  The front is some light-weight woven silk brocade from Hong Kong which I used to make a dress for a friend about 10 years ago.  The back is several layers of "premium" white dress-lining fabric.  I think the pattern would work well in almost any fussy "special" fabric for the front, with slippy lining for the back.

Woo: covered buttons!

I'd forgotten how tricky slippy fabrics are to sew with.  It's what I learned on, so I didn't realise how fiddly they were until now, when I've had 6 months' break from them making cotton baby things.  I had a bit of bother with them fraying and stretching.  Particularly since the white lining is so translucent that you can see the selvedges through it on the finished waistcoat: frayed selvedges look the worst inside that.  I saw it on a bespoke waistcoat once and it spoiled it, so I was pretty careful about not handling the fabric too much, especially after the seam allowances were trimmed short.

I toyed with the idea of false welt-pockets on the front, but in the end I decided it was too much on such a small waistcoat.  Perhaps they'll appear on Moonraker 2.0 for a bigger baby.  It's not like he needs anywhere for all that stuff he carries around: he's got a minder for that!

My mum expressed shock over a pink waistcoat for a boy (or at least what sounded like surprise on the phone).  What do you think?  Real men wear pink shirts, right?  Plus, it's nice and wedding-y I think.

Anyway, I'm thinking of giving this pattern away for free, when I've done the instructions... any takers?