January 2015 Sewing

Most of the sewing I did this month was in the form of shoes. The doll sewing group had the theme of shoes for our Sew Along. It was really nice to be able to see what everyone was making and to get advice from those that had more experience with shoes.

For my official Sew Along project(s) I made 6 pair of shoes- a mix of styles. I wrote a post about sewing them thinking I was done sewing and moving on the other projects. Then I tried a new pattern and that sparked an idea to make something different. That idea reminded me of the City Outfit from American Girl and that inspired me to create an outfit this last week. I proceeded to write up a blog about that outfit too. I decided to combine the two posts into one longer post for today.

So here is a recap of my doll sewing for this month:

Sewing the shoes

First I want to acknowledge that successfully making shoes is very hit or miss for me. Also I am still struggling with being neat with the glue aspect of the process. That part is no surprise to me since I have never really mastered the hot glue gun. I tried a couple of other glues this last week and they simply set up tooooo slowly for my taste. So I am still fighting with the hot glue gun. I did quickly discover that my new glue gun is much hotter than my old was (you can probably guess how that discovery was made)

One big admission here- for every pair of completed shoes that I am posting photos of I threw away at least as many if not more.

And of course I had to make shoe boxes for all the shoes too.

All the shoes with their shoe boxes

So the shoes I made in no particular order:

The flats- I tried a couple of different patterns I had on hand and found that my “re-draw” of an old one was the easiest for me to make. I ended up with 3 pair of these. They are all made of satin type fabric. I went to the store to look for a black but also picked up a beautiful purple (my favorite color) and a dark gray. These are all lined with an inexpensive lining fabric in an off white. For the insole on all of these I used a piece of paperboard (actually from a Bisquick box) with a piece of fleece on top and this was all covered with a piece of the lining fabric. I like the slight padding on the top of the paperboard and found that fleece can be cut with my shoe sole die in my Big Kick just like the foam and the paperboard- saved a lot of time. The shoe upper was glued to this piece and then a bottom sole made of a thick piece of craft foam was glued on. On the black pair I decided to see if I could use an open embossing folder in my Big Kick to emboss the bottom. I need to play with that a bit more but I think it has promise. All of these shoes then had a trim added to the area where the sole met the shoe. On the gray pair it was made of 3 pieces of embroidery floss braided together. For the purple pair I used 6 pieces to make a thicker braid. The black pair has a purchased trim. 

 

The tan pair of shoes is made from the Liberty Jane pattern titled Janes. This was a fairly easy shoe to put together. The fabric is just some tan colored pant weight fabric I had in my stash. The insole on these is made of paperboard. And the trim is a piece I got at Joann Fabrics.

The blue sneakers are also from a Liberty Jane pattern and are made of some old jeans with some cotton fabric to accent them. The pattern called for narrow bias tape but I couldn't find any and rather than wait until I could go to town I just cut some from the accent fabric. I used the same fabric on the insole and at the last minute decided to use it for the toe cap also. I like how it turned out. For the trim around the sole I used strips of thin craft foam. For the laces I remembered that when my daughter was a teen she liked to collect ribbon to lace her shoes with. I had some blue that I thought looked really cute with this pair.

The brown boots are made again from a Liberty Jane pattern- Slouch Boots. This time I pulled some of that wool I picked up a couple of months back and lined them with some pink and brown fabric from my stash. The fasteners on these are those plastic snaps from Joann Fabric that are sold for baby stuff I love how they come in so many colors. 

 

Black and red outfit

One thing I had noticed when I was watching the unboxing videos on Youtube as people received their new girl of year dolls this year was that so many people had also purchased the City Outfit from her collection. I must say I watched all of these videos as I was very impatiently waiting for my doll to arrive. It took mine almost 2 weeks to get here!

Anyway I had not purchased any of the clothing (I did write a blog on what I did purchase and it is here) so I took another look at this very popular outfit in the catalog. It is really cute but I really wasn't tempted to order it. Then I decided to take some of the elements and make an outfit that was inspired by this outfit.

Here is the result of that inspiration.

I actually started out thinking about the shoes in the outfit. I had just finished making my first two pair of shoes from the Plain Janes pattern from LJ and I got to thinking that adding some contrasting color on the toes would be pretty easy. Also I wanted to play with that pattern some more.

So after a trip to the fabric store for some solid color quilting cotton in red, pink, and black (¼ yard each) and ½ yard of some off white cotton I was ready do tackle the shoes.

black and red pair

Lately rather than running small pieces of fabric through the washer and dryer I have been getting the fabric really wet and then using my dry iron to press it until it is just a bit damp. That seems to be working fine and it sure is a lot quicker. Since I was afraid of the colors running I would have probably had to run all 4 pieces separately to be sure none of the fabrics leached dye into each other. Since I didn't have anything else to wash with them I felt that would have been a lot of electricity for such a small amount of fabric.

pink and red- more like the AG version

So when I was sure the fabrics were dry again I cut both the pink and red off so that I had a piece that was about 10” by 8” next I cut a piece the same size of the red and then split it the long way so I had 2 pieces that were about 10” by 4”. I used my sewing machine to join a red strip to each of the other colors. I pressed the seam toward the red and ran a top-stitching line along the seam. (Note next time I will be top-stitching closer to the seam)

I had already printed off another copy of the shoe pattern and drawn a line on the it where I wanted the two colors to come together. I very carefully lined up my line on my pattern with the seam line on the fabric strips.

For the insole of the shoes I used a paperbacked fusible to attach my lining fabric to the plain side of a piece of a cracker box. I then ran this through my die cutter with the Punch Place shoe sole die. While I had the die and the Big Kick out I cut out 4 soles from black craft foam and then gathered some scraps of black craft foam and cut some partial soles to be cut later for the heels. 

 

I pretty much followed the pattern as it is written for the shoes. After all the glue was dry I tied some small ribbon bows and glued them onto the shoes with fabric glue.

Now for the outfit:

The top is my favorite t-shirt pattern. I started several years ago with the pattern from Joan Hinds Contemporary Wardrobe book and I have been tweaking that pattern ever since. I now have it just the way I want it and it is used often. I have even made several different necklines that I can use depending on what style I want. For fabric I used one of those cheap t-shirts from Joann's. They were on sale a while back and I picked up several in different colors. I buy the biggest size I can get (I get several doll shirts out of each shirt so it pays in the long run) This time I used the shirt hem for all my hems so I just had the seams and the neck edge to sew. 

 

Next I dug out a homemade stamp in the shape of an open heart and stamped the finished shirt with black fabric paint. When it dried I coated the image with some fabric glitter glue and added fabric glitter that is black. I love the sparkle!

The skirt is actually a skort (you know- shorts on the bottom with a skirt on top) I had been meaning to try this pattern for a while and I think it turned out really cute.

So that is my version of the City Outfit. What do you think? What would you have done differently?