Archives: 9. September 2014

It takes a village…

      

… to raise a child, they say. Which is why I was utterly happy to find the above fabric to use as the „star“ of my latest baby blanket. It’s been quite a while since I last made one – this one’s for my little great-nephew who was born just a month after my own little one.

Even though these blankets all follow roughly the same design, it’s always great fun to pick out fabrics for a new one. This time especially so, as I got to visit Kathi Kunterbunt for the 4 fabrics featured in the squares. Then it was off to cutting, more cutting, piecing and sewing (most rewarding). After finishing the top, finding some backing fabric proved unusually tough. I had pictured some grey vichy (checkered) fabric but couldn’t find anything like it.

However – polca dots to the rescue!

I guess noting can ever go wrong with polcadots. Only after buying the brown fabric I realised that my village fabric also features some polcadot details, which prompted me to also use the backing for the binding. This is the first time I sewed the binding with just one loooong strip of fabric – making for such clean corners. I followed this tutorial (in German) and it made everything so much easier!

      

 

So here it is, Zwirnstern’s latest baby blanket, modeled by its new owner. Thanks to mea photography for both model and lovely pictures!

– Katrin

 


Fit for a princess?

Happy Friday, everyone!

Just quickly checking in to share one of this year’s mardi gras costumes. I figure it’s better late then never, I love this particular costume and I don’t want the blog to be silent for another year.

As you may or may not have guessed from the title, my 4-year-old decided she wanted to be a princess for mardi gras this year. Having seen and admired  Ashley’s lovely Rapunzel costume before, I knew I wanted to do something like it and set out to find some fabric. I fully intended to use some of the fabric specifically designed for costumes – some shiny or glittery, as well as usually quite cheap polyester… Then I thought why not make it from velvet? Enter a beautiful crimson cotton velvet – which I ended up liking way more than the costume selection!

Putting together the Rapunzel-inspiration, the velvet and throwing in some pieces of gold lace this is what I got:

Princess Dress Front

For the top I adapted a bodice pattern from an ottobre design pattern following Ashley’s directions. I only decided to ad the lace strips after sewing the front folds and attaching the bodice to the skirt – it would of course have been much easier to do that before! The pattern also included little puff sleeves that I could use. The back features a simple zipper and the skirt is basically a big rectangle gathered at the top.

Princess Dress Back

To complete my little princess I made a little crown from felt I had left over from the advent calender and added some gold embroidery and a couple of self-adhesive sequins.

Princess Crown

Both dress and crown have gotten quite some wear for dress-up at home which I love! Nothing better than expanding that dress-up pile.

Have a great weekend!

Katrin


Blogging again?

I haven’t been on this site for quite some time now – about a year and a half, actually…

This is partly because there haven’t been many projects completed during that time and those that have I didn’t take the time to photograph and blog about. This, in turn, is because I never know whether this blog serves any purpose at all – it doesn’t have many readers and it also doesn’t offer much valuable information.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that I’ve considered shutting it down entirely quite a few times and am still on the fence about that. Since I do, however, use it as some kind of a sewing journal and to quickly look back on what projects looked like or when I completed them, I’ve decided to keep it for precisely that purpose.

As our family has grown once more, I will be staying home a while and this just might lead to some more sewing around these parts, so who knows, maybe there will be more than one post in 2014?

Should there be anyone out there reading this blog – I’ll always be happy to answer any questions! I’d love to hear from you.

This somehow turned into a second blog-opening post. Things have changed quite a bit since 2008. Zwirnstern is a sewing blog most of the time and as with crafting entirely, change is evident. Sewing has become much more popular in recent years – my town now has a number of veritable fabric stores with quite nice selections (kathi kunterbunt being my newest discovery). So by now, I’m buying fabric offline and turning to my favorite online stores but for extra special fabrics. I’m working on a combination of both of them hopeful turning out as well as planned (check the facebook page for a sneak preview!).

Here’s hoping I’ll blog the result soon!

K.