Tag: Tula Pink

Sixth Birthday Dresses

I’ve gotten into the habit of making my granddaughters matching dresses for their birthdays. On occasion only the birthday girl has gotten a dress, like the year the youngest wanted a “pink princess dress”, and I only had a limited amount of the fancy, flower and sequin-encrusted tulle. The elder girl got a simpler outfit. But usually they get matching dresses. Sometimes the dresses have matched the theme of their party, and other times the girls have requested what they wanted.

This year when asked, the soon-to-be-six-year old said, “I like it when Grandma surprises us!” In the past they’ve sometimes drawn a picture of a dress that they want Grandma to make. Maybe six or eight months ago, they drew a picture of a dress with a tiered skirt in multiple colors, with ruffles at the shoulders in rainbow stripes. At the time, I didn’t have fabric that would work for that vision, and they kind of forgot about it.

Well, when I bought fabric for my second quilt, as a novice, I of course had no clue how much yardage to buy. (I like modern quilts, so I use yardage rather than charm packs or jelly rolls). Anyway, I had plenty of fabric left over from my quilt, and it kind of fit into the drawing they had made of the colorful tiered dress they wanted. So I got to work.

I used the Little Lizard King Aarhus Dress for the bodice, hacking it to have the Mackinac Island neckline in the front. Then I made up the tiered skirts, adding one and a half times the width for each successive tier. The size 6 dress had a skirt with tiers of two pieces at 5″x 21″, 6″x 31-1/2″, and 7-1/2″x 47″. The bottom tier has a bit more length since it is hemmed. The size 8 dress had tiers of two pieces at 6″x 21″, 7″x 32″, and 8-1/2″x 47″. The 8 year old is slim, so her bodice was size 7 width and 8 length. Honestly, she could have fit into the size 6 bodice.

The fabric is all by Tula Pink (Free Spirit Fabrics) except the lime green as the shop was out of that color. The lion print is called Good Hair Day, which I think is hilarious! Of course a beautiful lion’s mane would look good. So I just had to use the fabric selvedge to make my own tags for the dresses.

I used sections of the lion paw prints (that show all the colors used in the fabric print) for one side of the tags.

Then I used Good hair Day (the name of the print) on the other side of the tag. I used a Tula Pink print called Stargazer for the shoulder ruffles, elastic casing, and handmade piping.

Although it’s not a rainbow stripe, it does contain a rainbow of colors, so I figured it would be acceptable! 😉 The girls like the elasticated back so that they don’t have to deal with zippers or buttons when getting dressed.

I used 1-1/4″ strips of the Tula Pink Stargazer fabric to make the piping. I pressed the strips in half, and basted it to the bottom edge of the first two tiers. That way it was perfectly in place when I gathered the top of the next tier and stitched it to the tier above. I think it adds a nice pop of color.

The girls had so much fun playing with their friends, eating snacks and ice cream cake, and enjoying face painting (done by the eight year old with her fancy face painting kit). Grandma stayed nearby to rinse and sanitize each brush as it was used. The designs turned out super cute. She practiced the night before by painting flowers on Grandma, Mama, and sister. She even made a little sign listing the designs available. She was willing to be a little flexible when a couple of the boys at the party wanted 67 painted on their arms. 🙂

The morning had been nice and sunny, and the afternoon was sunny for a while. But then the rain moved in. Some people left, but you know kids, they don’t care if it’s raining, and continued on playing and running around.

Someone had a canopy in their vehicle, so the adults huddled under the canopy for a bit, trying to stay dry, while the kids had a blast running and jumping and continuing to play on the playground. Eventually the party came to an end, but my sweet girls still looked adorable in their (sopping wet) matching birthday dresses!

Being a Grandma is the best! And I love it when I can make my girls pretty and fun clothes.

The details: I used the Aarhus and Mackinac Island dress patterns from Little Lizard King as the base of the dresses.

I bought all the Tula Pink fabric from a very nice quilt shop in St. Petersburg, Florida called Whim So Doodle. All of the ladies who work there are so friendly and helpful. And they have the largest selection of Tula Pink fabric that I’ve seen in this area.

Thank you for reading and sharing my love of sewing, fabric, patterns, color, and making cute clothes for others. Since this is my blog and represents me, I always give my honest opinion about any patterns, fabric, or supplies that I talk about. I do like knowing whether the time I spend writing posts actually interests people enough that they take a look at the patterns I review, but I write for me. It’s one more creative pursuit that I hope is helpful or interesting to others. I write to share my love of sewing and to encourage others to love it as much as I do!

My First Quilt

As a garment sewist, I’ve had little interest in quilting, except to admire the work that goes into them, and admiring all the pretty quilting cottons. I always thought, “I’ll never be quilter, that’s just not me.” Hah! Famous last words… 🙂

I’ve been working towards remove toxins from my life, which I guess got kicked into high gear four or five years ago when it was found that I have food allergies. Eliminating all wheat, dairy, and soy products in my life felt kind of overwhelming at first. Reading labels on everything can be rather eye opening. They put wheat in chicken salad? In vitamins, shampoo, and body care products? I knew it was in obvious places like bread, baked goods, pancake mix, and tortillas, but the other ones kind of surprised me. And don’t even get me started on all the things that they add soy, soy protein, and soybean oil to. Let’s just say that there are very, very few condiments that I’ll buy. Let me know if you’re interested in a post or two about food allergies, what I eat, recipes, what brands I trust, etc., and I’ll be happy to oblige.

There is a point to me talking about food allergies, in that it has led me to cleaning up many things in life, not just food. I’ve switched over to natural and toxin-free skin care products and deodorant. I’ve started making some more clothing out of cotton wovens. So I decided it was time to ditch my favorite fuzzy blanket, and use cotton. I bought a cotton waffle weave blanket, but honestly, it wasn’t soft at all, and felt rather scratchy. Then I remembered the quilts my Great Grandmother used to make, how soft and cozy they were, and decided to make a quilt.

See the pale purple ditsy floral? That is the scrap fabric from my daughter’s first birthday dress and bloomers. Note that my daughter is in her mid-thirties, and I now have granddaughters!

My hold up with quilts is that I don’t care for traditional design. At all. My taste leans contemporary, yet comfortable. So this was definitely not going to be a traditional patchwork, hexie, or english paper piecing sort of thing. I wanted something simple, with clean lines. So I dove into my stash and pulled out all the solids.

Peep the two Tula Pink prints: “Forbidden Fruit Snacks” and I can’t recall the name of the tiny scrap of the dragonfly print. I used those fabrics (at different times) to make matching dresses for my granddaughters. The girls loved the fruit snack dresses, and literally squeezed themselves into them until they were snug and far too short. Not a big deal really since they wear shorts under their dresses.

I decided to piece the solids together to make simple rectangles, and used narrow strips of printed fabrics in between the solids. I think the strips were 2″ high. Except for the Tula Pink dragonfly print, because I had such tiny scraps of that to work with. The solids were arranged in somewhat of a rainbow of the colors in my little chunk of the color wheel, ranging from green, through turquoise and blue, and down to purple. I used prints to tie the colors above and below it together.

The light blue batik with the silvery dots (between the two blues) is made of scraps from my eldest granddaughters second birthday dress. The darker blue batik with circles was from the handwarmer scarves I made for my Mom, sisters, and sister-in-law a few years back. The greenish turquoise with white dots was from the pillowcases I made for the microwavable rice pillows I made them the year after that.

Lest you think that only the prints hold memories of things I’ve made for the people I love, about half of the solids were from the matching rainbow dresses I made the girls for Lila’s fifth birthday.

I’m not into traditional quilt labels, but I did want to “sign my work”. I used the lettering capabilities of my Bernina to add my name and the year to the bottom right hand corner of the quilt. I used matching (or rather, only slightly darker than the fabric) thread for a subtle look. If it’s a bit too subtle to read on the wrinkly quilted surface, it says Debora 2025, since I made it at the end of last year.

Piecing and quilting was done on my Bernina 790 Plus. The large throat space made it more than easy enough to wrangle the quilt through. I didn’t feel like hooping and using the embroidery module to quilt it. That just seemed like too much for something that was supposed to be a simple quilt. So I just used a bunch of different decorative stitches to straight line quilt it, with the lines spaced 2″ apart.

Each printed strip was “stitched in the ditch”, and each solid color section has a different decorative stitch.

I used the dark purple for the binding, which was made from 2-1/2″ strips. Since I literally knew nothing about making quilts other than that you pieced with a 1/4″ seam allowance, and needed batting and a backing for your quilt, and that you needed to do some sort of quilting to hold everything together, I watched a couple of videos on making a quilt sandwich, straight or serpentine line quilting, and attaching binding.

I bought this pretty batik when my local quilt shop was going out of business. I was sad to see them go, as it was the store (at their old location) that I bought both my Babylock serger and Bernina sewing machine from. It was also were I had purchased all the pretty Tula Pink fabrics I’ve used to make dresses for myself and the girls.

I used Warm and Natural 100% cotton batting, and various colors of Guttermann thread, as I tried to match the thread to each of the solid colors, using turquoise in the bobbin, to match the backing. The finished quilt is around 50″ wide (though it started out at 52″). I lost a bit of width when I “squared up” the quilt before binding, by 76″ long. It is the perfect size to wrap up in while drinking my morning coffee and snuggling the cat.

I’m an early riser, so it’s generally still dark when I’m drinking my coffee. But my husband managed to catch a photo of me when it was light enough outside.

The cat loves the quilt as much as I do. It’s soft and cozy, and has only grown softer with each washing. It’s not a fancy quilt, just a very simple basic design that serves its purpose. The colors make me happy, and the scraps of fabrics used remind me of the people I love and previously made things for.

You know what else it did? It opened my mind to giving quilting a try. Am I going to turn into someone who makes quilts using EPP, or a flying geese design? Extremely unlikely! However, there are plenty of modern quilt designs out there if I don’t want to just make up my own. And as you may have guessed by the fun tertiary colors and scraps I used, I’m a big fan of Tula Pink designed fabric. So much so that I’ll share the secret that I’ve already completed my second quilt, and purchased fabric for a third!

I’ll have to figure out a system to get some photos of the second quilt, as it is larger than this one. But I look forward to sharing it in the next month or so, because it’s much fancier than this one!

So, don’t be afraid to try something new. Even if you think it’ll never be for you, trying it in a simple or different way, in colors that you love, may be the start of a new passion! Thank you for reading and sharing my love of sewing, fabric, color, and trying new things.