children's clothing, kids clothing, sewing

Stella’s abigail dress

There were enough garments sewn and/or altered at Sewjourn to get me through weeks of blog posts!  Consider yourself warned.

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The pattern is Abigail by modkid.  I made the 3T size for Stella. I was able to use scraps left over from a t-shirt and a pyjama top – despite being bought about a year apart, they coordinated!  Beautiful quality cotton/lycra from Darn Cheap Fabrics (not from the $2 per metre table this time – I think they were around $7 or $8 per metre).

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Stretch fabrics make such comfy dresses for kids (and we all know how much I like comfy). This was an easy dress to assemble and will possibly fit for a couple more years – I can let the sleeve hems down and the dress will just become a tunic as Stella grows.

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This dress was constructed almost entirely on my Janome Mylock 744D.  In a previous post I mentioned how often I swore at my overlocker when I was at Sewjourn.  Well, now I have to speak nicely to it and apologise – because after I returned I made it into the sewing machine shop and bought some new overlocker needles.  And I put them in the overlocker.  And now it is sewing perfectly (although it’s still a bit noisy and I think that there are better overlockers around).  The moral of the story?  When your machine is skipping stitches and sewing badly – change the needles.  And make sure that you put in the specified type.  The HA-ISP needles have made all the difference to my overlocker.  And I’ve stopped swearing.