I <3 Grainline's Moss Skirt

Seriously, I love it!  I have been reading about the moss skirt and archer shirts all over the blog-o-sphere.  I finally dove in and purchased both patterns.  I put the pattern together, cut a muslin, and sewed away.  

A few things I love:  the style, the instructions, and the fact that you can make this skirt with about a yard of fabric!  A lot of reviews mentioned confusion @ the fly front insertion, but IMHO, I thought the method was easy to follow and resulted in the best fly front I've ever done.

What I didn't love:  I cut a 6.  It was HUGE!  Not to mention, like others have pointed out, the waistband is drafted about 4 inches short.  Boo.  So, I added a bit to the waist band...and wore my skirt to Thanksgiving dinner.  I ended up pinning the waistband to keep it from falling off.  It's destined for someone else.

For skirt #2 - yes, I've made 2 skirts in three days - I used a piece of leftover denim and cut a size 2 - I kept the size 6 waistband.  A little snug in the hips this time, but a keeper!  I top stitched...

Look @ my badass skills - done without a twin needle, thank you very much.

And, here it is...my micro mini moss.  I will definately make it again.  Now. On to my archer top!

Teen Beach Movie shirt

Haha!  The girls wanted to watch "Teen Beach Movie" today.  So, I decided to get  a bit do sewing done.  I made the Tessuti Mandy shirt - a free downloadable pattern.  I love it!

I bought this fabric on sale at Hancocks for $4 yard.  It's a sheer sweater fabric & I thought about making a slouchy cardigan with it.  I decided to use it for this instead - glad that I did.  Normally, I'm not a big fan of oversized...but Mandy changed that.  Comfy, with slender arms to give it a sense of style.  I see more comfy sweatshirts in my future!

Well, the shirt was done by the time the movie was over - that included printing & taping together the PDF!  Woot!

 (Sorry @ the bad pic - my 5 year old photographer wasn't cooperating!)

Pika, pika, pikachu!

Happy Halloween!  I love Halloween!  It's the one time of year that kids (and kids at heart) can be anything they want to be.  My mom is an amazing seamstress and we always had the best Halloween costumes.  I remember telling her what I wanted to be and a few days later, the costume would magically appear!  Well , the tradition has carried over to my kiddos.  They are lucky, lucky girls!

Here's a picture:

Mom made the vampiress costume and I made the Pikachu costume.  I absolutely love how they both came out.

The biggest struggle with the Pikachu costume was the hat.  I actually used an old Japanese pattern book pattern for the shirt and a self-drafted pj bottom pattern for the pants.  The hat, however, is a different matter.  To save myself time, I bought Simplicity 1953 - a simple hat pattern.  Trick on me, it was not simple.  To sum it up, I spent more time on that hat than I did making the shirt, pants, and tail!  Oh well, the end result worked out.

Some more pictures:

The back - she was super excited about the tail!

The front during the "trying on" phase!

Hope you got lots of candy last night!!