Category: oliver + s

banded blue building block dress

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finally yay, Liesl’s new book is out!  i’m super happy to be on the blog tour for this one.

banded blue building block dress

it’s called the Building Block Dress, and i remember Liesl mentioning the fledgling idea for the book back when she visited Portland for quilt market in 2013!  i know she has worked very hard at getting this thing to print and it’s a really impressive final product – it’s been a long time coming and i’m excited it’s here.  it makes up for the (sad!) absence of new Oliver + S patterns lately. Continue reading →

handmade halloween 2015: vampire bat

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back with O’s Halloween costume!  for a long time he had told me he wanted to be a vampire this year, which i was pretty excited about.  thought it’d be fun to have a classic Dracula little guy.  but the week before halloween, AFTER i had already bought fabric for a cape and black trousers, he said no, he actually wanted to be a vampire BAT.  like the animal.  so i sort of went with a hybrid.

vampire bat costume

i started with his cape/wings, which i insisted on lining with the red nylon i had gotten at Mill End to look more “vampire” like.  i drew the pattern out on a big sheet of easel paper, making the wingspan match his armspan and sort of echoing the style of last year’s Toothless costume.  then i cut it out of some microsuede type fabric my mom had given me plus the red, sewed right sides together then turned, and quilted the lines in from the neck to each point of the wings.   Continue reading →

handmade halloween 2015: kid catwoman

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Halloween costume sewing seems to divide our kind into three camps: “i love sewing costumes!,” “i hate it, but do it anyway FOR THE KIDS,” and “nope, i’m going to Target.”

i fall in the first camp…within reason.  costume sewing is a fun creative challenge for me, and my kids play dress up pretty much constantly, so these are not one-time use AT ALL.  only the big kids got handmade costumes this year though; our little guy is suddenly a huge Curious George fan and borrowed a monkey costume from his cousins that he was thrilled about.  so anyway, here’s handmade costume #1 – Kid Catwoman.

kid catwoman costume
E settled pretty quickly on Catwoman once it was time to lock in the costume requests.  O’s superhero love has rubbed off on her a bit, and i made a slapdash Wonderwoman costume one afternoon for dress up purposes, but for Halloween she wanted to be a villain.   Continue reading →

britex lace flower girl dress

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Sometimes timing just works out perfectly.  My daughter was invited to be the flower girl in my husband’s cousin’s wedding early next month (she has been a flower girl a couple times before and SHE LOVES IT), and the bride asked me to make her flower girl dress (which I LOVE).

Lucky for me, the upcoming Britex sale category of poly/rayon/lace and my ongoing status as a guest blogger for them meant I had plenty of wonderful fabric options to choose from to make her the perfect summer wedding flower girl dress.

lace overlay roller skate dress

I decided on this gorgeous Floral Net Mauve Cotton Blend Stretch Lace – it’s a cotton/nylon blend mesh with embroidered flowers.  The bride’s colors include purple as an accent, and her dress is white lace and somewhat fitted, so I thought a simple shift dress would work nicely for Em. Continue reading →