Sewing :: Springtime Clothes for Effie ::

My iron has been in overdrive in the last few weeks. Anyone who knows me well will probably be surprised to discover I even own an iron. I do but it only comes out for 2 reasons, weddings and sewing. There has not been any wedding going to yet this year, but there has been a lot of sewing.

I purchased the lovely Simple Modern Sewing with a book voucher I received for Christmas, way back in January and have since been meaning to make some clothing for myself, so when Bex took up sewing clothing with a passion recently, I was inspired to join her. We took a trip to our crazy good, yet crazy full fabric shop and I purchased a couple of metres of cotton/linen blend in beige, for some skirt making for myself (more on that soon). With the fabric I had left over from that project, I decided to make a little romper with matching sunhat for miss Effie to wear on Easter Sunday.

I purchased this romper pattern from Puperita on etsy last year. I've made a couple of rompers for Effie with it, which I loved, though are sadly now too small and possibly slightly out of season. So I set about cutting out the patten pieces for the next size up on the Thursday night. I swear sewing is much more cutting than it ever is sewing. The bonnet is a free download available on the Purl Bee website. Which I also cut the pattern pieces for on the Thursday evening.

On Good Friday I picked out my fabric and got to cutting that out. I spent most of the day dipping in and out of sewing, when nap time allowed, or when Johnny was on hand to take care of the little ones. By the evening I had completed the whole ensemble. For someone who does not have a huge amount of sewing experience, I was pretty impressed with this.

For the bonnet I used some floral print fabric I had left over from a fat quarter I've had for years and years and some plain blue quilting fabric, I also already had to hand. For the romper, as I said, I used cotton/linen blend for the main body, for the pocket I used the same floral fabric as the bonnet, ideally I wanted to use the plain blue for the inside of the pocket and the lining of the bodice, but unfortunately I didn't have enough, so I used some more floral fabric I had in my stash. As you can't really see these bits I don't think it really matters and my main goal was to just use what I had on hand, but next time I'll try to get everything to match up a bit better I think.

Over all I'm massively impressed with myself and really pleased with the results. Both patterns were really easy to follow and included lots of pictures and instructions. The most difficult part was piecing together all the paper pattern pieces for the romper once I'd printed them off, as it wasn't always completely clear which piece needed sticking together where, but I got there in the end.

Details ::
Romper Pattern :: from Puperita here
Bonnet Pattern :: from Purl Bee here
Fabric :: various pieces I already had in my stash
Poppers :: KAM snaps from Plush Addict here