For you February – Project Weekender Bag & Project Pajamas

This For You February post isn’t the most impressive one but I had fun doing it so I wanted to share it anyway.

For You February for my Dad.

It was my father’s birthday coming up and I wanted to give him something personal. He’s a Landrover Defender maniac and he goes away on weekends with a Landrover club a lot. But everytime he has to take one of my mother’s bags and they are all quite feminine. So I decided to make him a weekender bag.

I based my bag on this tutorial for a zippered box pouch. I only made it a lot bigger and added 2 handles. I wanted to incorporate the Landrover logo and decided to carve a stamp. This was also a first and I think it turned out really nice. (I am aware this is technically copyright infringement, but because it was just a gift for my father I thought what the hell.)

He was dead happy with the result and took it to work the next day to show all his colleagues what his ‘little’ girl made him 🙂

Note: As you can see on the close up of the zipper I had a little touch-and-melt between the zipper and my iron. Whoops, didn’t think about the fact that plastic zippers melt 🙂

For you February for my Mom.

Remember the pajamas I made for myself? Well, my mother loved the pants so much I gave them to her. A few days later she called me saying she had a huge problem. She wasn’t able to take the pants off long enough to get them washed 🙂 She wanted to live in them, they were that comfy and warm.

So I decided to make her another pair. This time I went for an off-white flannel. I saw it as a good opportunity to try out some decorative stitches on my new machine. I wanted to try flowers but my mother isn’t really the flowery type so I chose ton-sur-ton thread and went for geometric stitches instead. She loved them and now both pants are on heavy rotation.

I’m really sorry for the bad photo quality on this one, but my mother took these pictures with her iPad.

Note: I have enough of this flannel and the plaid flannel left to make some for me, so yay! 🙂

How is your For You February going?

For You February – Project Bumblebee

The Twitter Sewing community got talking again and suddenly we all realised that we were all sewing for others this month. We decided it needed a name and For You February was born. Leave it to the ever lovely Gillian to design a logo for it!

It wasn’t any different for me. There were some ‘For you’ projects on my list for this month. Only difference is, they weren’t presents. People actually asked me to make these (which does make me a little proud of myself) for a special occasion. So instead of taking it easy, I was on a schedule! And I hate schedules 🙂 I love sewing and I love seeing the finished results on other people but I just have to force myself to start work on those projects. Once I get started it’s lots of fun but the time it takes to get started…. Pff 🙂

My first two requests came from two of my colleagues. I usually teach secondary school, but once a week I also teach English in primary school. The two teachers over there are super lovely! So when they asked, I just couldn’t say no!

The first request (I’m keeping the 2nd one a secret until it’s finished) was a ‘bumblebee’ dress for Carnival (think Brazil, think Mardi Grass). The dresses for sale in shops were either too expensive or too ‘sexy bumblebee’… Not the look you want to go for around 10 year olds 🙂 She wanted something dark yellow (more of a musterd colour) with dark brown. A sleeveless, loose fitting dress so she could wear something underneath.

I opted for the Banksia Dress pattern but left off the collar, the placket and the sleeves. For the first time ever, I made a muslin. Not because the pattern was difficult (because it’s really not), but because I wanted to make sure I had the right fit (When sewing for others, I want it to be perfect). She tried it on, I made my alterations and I thought the final dress would take me only half an hour.

Wrong! I decided against buying striped fabric and instead I bought two colours of twill and cut my stripes. That’s the part that took some time, together with making sure the stripes matched (I wanted them to continue at the side seams), sewing all the stripes together and finishing the seams 🙂

But when it was finally done, I was very very very happy with the result! I even took the time to change thread colour while doing the topstitching so it matched the twill! Yay for not being lazy!

All in all, I think the end result matched the design drawings really well. Why did I draw such an easy dress? Because this way it was easier to see how many stripes I needed and which colour to put on top. Far easier to visualize!

I’m happy and so was she! And in the end, that’s why we do it!

How is your ‘For You February’ going?