Scrap Sunday: and yet another neck warmer

Posted on 07/02/2016 by atelieroursonne

I am really trying to post more often, I have so many exciting things going on. And a lovely babysitter which would normally allow me to sew, just sew, every Monday from 9 to 12.
So, I am very excited and started several projects at the same time: The BIB project (sounds like a new and upcoming indie pop band but really it is about creating the perfect bib before the young man outgrows his reflux), a little red riding hood costume with added welt pockets to practice welt pockets before making my own coat, the perfect breastfeeding top that is not a pregnancy-breastfeeding combo as I am NOT pregnant anymore and certainly do not want to look like it, a couple of baby presents for all these babies recently born, a knitted dress for my niece’s first birthday and a knitted cardigan for a 2 year old (an actual order!)
I should be able to finish all of them tomorrow between 9 and 12, no?
And I will write 500 posts about them in the next couple of days. To be ready for new projects next Monday.

But back to Scrap Sunday.
I was lucky enough to get my preordered copy of Kinderleicht! Naehen mit Jersey fuer Babys and Kids by Pauline Dohmen (klimperklein) a couple of weeks ago (oh, I almost forgot, you can add a babycoat to my list) and finally managed to make a little triangular scarf out of left over fabrics. It is very pretty. I didn’t intend to let Mr. Reflux wear it as it would be a waste, plus it is a bit unsuitable for our needs. But it is pretty and I kind of want to keep it for ~~myself~~ him.
So we will see. But I really made it to be teamed up with a little hat and to go to one of those new babies as a welcome present.

As you can see, it is double sided and therefore reversible. And will make a perfect little baby present together with one of klimperkleins cute little hats, like these if you remember:

I seem to not have shown you our current one yet, we are getting lots of compliments for this one. Also a proper Scrap Hat, actually:

Progress update

Posted on 16/11/2015 by atelieroursonne

I have started to write this progress update a few days ago, before the shocking attacks in Paris and initially I found it inappropriate to post about silly things like crafts as if nothing has happened. But I guess it is the opposite, we can’t stop doing the things that we like doing. A lot did happen and it doesn’t only concern people in Paris or France. It concerns all of us and the European idea of humanity, no borders, freedom and tolerance has been threatened once again (in addition to the inability of the political system to deal with the refugee crisis with dignity and as a unity).

So my thoughts are with those who have lost innocent family members or friends who were enjoying a nice time out. I really hope together we will manage to ensure a future for our children in a world of freedom and tolerance.

Following the progress post as I had initially written it – happiness and sadness so close together.

Once again, I have missed one or two posts on Sunday, but I have been rather busy lately and I guess, it is time to update you a bit.

So, as you might remember, the extended family has been waiting for a couple of babies to arrive and I am pleased to say that they finally did. One more finally than the other.

Whilst I was busy waiting and my mum – who had come over to be on stand by for childcare – was busy rescheduling and rescheduling her flight back home, I made a few little things to keep my mind off the waiting game.

So, I have started to use up the left overs from the baby blankets – I still haven’t written a proper post about them, have I? But you might remember this progress picture:

Anyway, I have started to knit cardigans, using a wrongly ordered blue merino (the colour was too close to the dark blue one I had already bought) as a base colour, adding some stripes in the blanket left overs. A third one with green stripes is still in the making.

I also made a few more hats for my nephew and nieces using up some jersey. They requested beanies and as I am obsessed with the idea of reversible hats (no ugly seams inside plus getting to use two lovely fabrics instead of just one), I went for the version with ribbing at the bottom. I am not entirely convinced about the ribbing but I haven’t seen them on the heads in question. The pattern is the same klimperklein e-book as before.

The stripy one is for my oldest nephew, both fabrics are left overs from shirts that I had actually made for him, somehow I did not photograph the red and blue version

Then we have the girly one, left over from my daughters clown leggings and one future left over from a lovely fabric that I bought for myself.

And last but definitely not least the hat for the 4 year old. Left overs from shirt and leggings for my son and future left over of many little boy and baby boy things.

My husband loves the fireman one. He said he wants one for himself. I laughed politely. He said, he is serious. The man who never wears the boring stripy shirt I made for him. Clearly I do completely misjudged his taste 🙂 And I guess, we are a perfect match.

I also made a corduroy dress for my daughter using a Burda pattern.

Again a fabric that I kind of bought for myself. I actually want to have that dress (Told you, perfect match 🙂 ), well maybe a slightly more grown up version (basically without the rig rag and the buttons. But definitely with the pockets). But I don’t quite see the corduroy working as a breastfeeding dress plus I am planning to be covered in milk and vomit for the next few months, so I decided to make a dress for my daughter to be able to enjoy the fabric.

Maybe one word to the pattern: The front is not put on fold but two pieces sewn together which makes sense for one of the proposed fabric mix versions but not for this one. I really wonder why I am still not confident enough to see that right from the beginning and alter the pattern according to my needs.

Oh, and before all of that I had also made two more bags as birthday presents. One for the lovely mother of the little girl I had made the very first one. As she kept using her daughters bag, I thought it was about time to make her her own.

and one for my daughter’s birthday. She has basically asked for it since May, when I had made the very first one of the series. It only took me about 6 months. Not bad. And I think I have now more or less ticked all the things of my to do list I had posted a couple of weeks or months ago.

As you can see, going 10 days past due date made me finish quite a few things. When everything was done, all I could do, was going to my knitting class, listening to a few horror induction stories, which seemed to scare the young man so much that a couple of hours later I had to rush (and I mean to rush) to hospital to quickly (and I mean quickly) give birth to a beautiful baby. 10 days after his due date and 2 days after the appearance of my equally beautiful new nephew who – much better behaved – was only a couple of days late.

And obviously it is now time for a new to do list, especially as I am unable to remember anything at all.

Downsizing: Klimperklein jacket modified

Posted on 27/10/2015 by atelieroursonne

We are a bit short of baby clothes because I lent them to someone a few years ago and never got them back. So I decided to use up the lovely Viking jersey initially purchased for my nephew’s birthday jacket to make a baby version of the same Klimperklein pattern.

Klimperklein is the brand of an amazing woman with 5 lovely children who still manages to create lovely patterns for baby and children clothes. Her blog is in German and I think the e-books are also only available in German but they are brilliantly written and with so many pictures that even those professional looking jackets were fairly easy to make. So I guess, what I am saying is “Learn German” 🙂

So far, I have made these for my children…

and this one for my nephew…

I love the colour combination of this one, I made the cuffs and the hem (I really have no clue how you call the red piece of the main body: hem, waistsomething? Help, anybody, please) slightly wider as I had one of the pattern pieces accidentally folded on the wrong line and the main body would have gotten too short. Oops.

But back to the modified baby version. As you can see the original klimperklein jacket has a zip and in my case a hood but there is a collar version too (and many more options to choose from).

But I thought for a baby, none of these things are very suitable, all I wanted was a simple jacket with snaps, normal neckline and simple hem and cuffs. Something like this:

At first glance it is what I wanted but actually I have mixed feelings about it so lets have a closer look.

The most important modification from zip to buttons or snaps is obviously that the front pieces have to overlap rather than just meet in the centre. So I added 2cm to the original front pattern and the initial zip facing to make sure that I would have a wide enough button border.

First jersey snaps of my life, 10mm from Prym, I think I want to find slightly smaller ones for those children clothes. Also, I need to get stronger, they are slightly on the loose side I think.

Instead of using a ribbing for waist and arms, I just added 2cm seam allowance, neatened the edges with the serger, whilst at the same time closed the seam between the button facing and the hem

Usually I am using the twin needle to give the hem a professional finish…

but as I have recently noticed that these seams seem to fall apart easily (not sure what I am doing wrong) I wanted to do something different and went for another stitch.

So, I ironed the hem to the back, estimating 2cm instead of using a ruler. But then suddenly I took it very seriously and actually tacked on the serged edge to give me a line to follow when sewing on the right side, making sure that I am really sewing on the serged edge… Which was a good plan but I never actually compared the ends of my tacked line and also got a bit caught up when finally topstitching it with my fancy stitch. So….. good idea but really bad execution led to this:

Whilst I am really unhappy with the result (especially as this was a very obvious danger and something I knew about), I think that it has been a necessary mistake to be made once. And hopefully I will forever remember and for once really learn from it 🙂

The other section that needed alteration was the neckline. My initial idea was to use the pattern for the hooded jacket and cut the neckline without seam allowance and to finish with some bias binding. But when I stitched the facing to the front openings, I thought it would be clever to just continue the seam where the facing goes into the neckline to make the whole bias binding attaching more straight forward. Which was a big mistake. Obviously, if you are stitching facing to jacket right side to right side and then turn it, you will loose the width of your seam. So there will be a gap or maybe rather jump between the part of the neckline with facing and the part without facing.

It wasn’t a big deal, it just meant that my whole neckline became slightly wider (which does matter in the case of a tiny newborn jacket), but at the same time I realised that actually I would prefer a normal neckline with facing all around. So I copied the neckline from the pattern to make a back neckline and elongated it to hide the ends on the already existing neckline.

As the initial facing gets really narrow the result looks a bit silly. But again, the learning curve here is really steep. If I ever make a baby version of this jacket, I will make a proper facing, widening the neckline part of the button band facing and make it longer, to make sure it would go around the whole neck. This might result in a waist of fabric but I guess, once the pattern is perfect you could split it into three sections and safe some material.

Now that I have shared all my mistakes with you – maybe one last thing I would like to add: I made the smallest size 56 which corresponds to something like 1 month or 1-3, I forgot, but to me it looks really really huge. I don’t think it will fit for the next couple of months but I will find out I guess…. considering that I still need to get the future owner out, I am actually hoping it will only fit in a couple of months 🙂

Back to the start of my sentence: Now that I have shared all my mistakes with you, I would like to point out that I am still pleased with the result. I kind of want to make another one just to see that correcting the mistakes will lead to a perfect baby jacket but then we won’t need two of these. Maybe someone else could step in and use my mistakes to make their own perfect baby jacket, please?

Learning from mistakes

Posted on 29/06/2015 by atelieroursonne

With the end of the (school) year being so near and the associated imminent closure of our nursery, I am getting quite nostalgic. To avoid being depressed I thought I’ll turn this rummaging in the past into something positive by looking at the things that went terribly wrong (don’t get too excited, nothing to gossip, I am just talking about craft projects, the actual purpose of this blog) in order to learn something from it.

left of 2 sleeveless cotton Little Rascal

eyepatch for a pirate

attempt to mend trousers

jersey raglan shirt

dungarees in the most colourful cordoruy I could possibly find

right of 2 itchy woolen jumpers

This is actually a random selection, I guess there would be many more but I haven’t always taken pictures.

What is wrong with these things? I am glad you’re asking. I was thinking hard and long about it. They haven’t been worn EVER. Or just a few times in some cases. And what they actually have in common: They were all made for the same person. Who will always try on things happily whilst I am making them but just politely says: No thank you! when they are finished. Have I learned from it? No, I haven’t.

I have just stupidly made a beautiful jacket using a klimperklein pattern. Or rather e-book with lots of step by step instructions.

You might think that this is a really nice jacket and that anybody would love to wear it. Well, you’re wrong. “No, thank you. Maybe I’ll wear it tomorrow!” Still polite but making me hope for another opportunity which won’t really happen is actually rather cruel. Do I sound bitter? No, don’t worry. I am totally over it. Really. And let’s face it, there is another very important thing that all these things have in common. It was always me choosing the particular project and even fabric. Not once I had actually been asked to make all this useless stuff. So I guess, the only person to blame is myself.

So lets quickly look at the bright sight. The e-book is amazing, it offers lots of choices, different pockets, with or without lining,….

I have in fact made already a second one, same concept but different fabric and size. And this one actually gets worn a lot (fabric chosen by the jacket owner)

We’ll see if I have learned anything, next project will be something made of a fabric bought on request. I’ll keep you posted.

PS: I just got a picture of the birthday boy. He liked the pick and mix shirt so much, he did not want to take it off at night and slept in it 🙂

Atelier Oursonne

handmade for you

Tag Archives: klimperklein

Scrap Sunday: and yet another neck warmer

Progress update

Downsizing: Klimperklein jacket modified

Learning from mistakes