Stuff I've Made

Okay I know I've been a terrible blogger lately, but I thought I'd share with you some of the stuff I've been working on.

 

I made this with some fabric I bought while I was in L.A. it was 99 cents a yard and oh so pretty, though not the best quality, but hey 99 cents a YARD!

 This years Easter dress with embroudered lace, applique tulips and a peter pan collar. Super cute.

50's style dress for the antique expo.

 Gawain was helping me sew.

Jumper, there are some issues with top, but it's still cute.

 Patchwork dress made from leftover pieces of other dresses.

Cute cloak with patches. I picked the fabric up at the Goodwill, it was really soft and old and there were a few weak spots. That's why the patches look so random.

My Library, In Your Pants

So, "In Your Pants" jokes are not new, but I've recently become rather fond of them, in particular using them as the end of book titles ala John Green and Maureen Johnson of Nerdfighteria fame. I've started looking through the books I own to figure out which ones would have the funniest titles, and I think I've compiled a pretty good list.

 In Your Pants

In Your Pants

Actually this whole series is excellent as an In Your Pants joke.

Searching for Dragons... In Your Pants

Calling on Dragons... In Your Pants

Talking to Dragons... In Your Pants

In Your Pants

 

In Your Pants

In Your Pants

Now I can have a chuckle whenever I look at my book shelves. Tell me dear reader, do you have any books where the In Your Pants jokes are particularly ticklish to your funny bone? Please let me know.

Fairytale Dress

 

 Teaser from a photoshoot I did in the dress.

For Christmas my lovely friend Maura sent me some fabulous japanese fabric with a super cute boarder print. But she only sent me 1 yard, and the boarder was different on either side. But I did some creative cutting, and I think it worked out well. I designed the dress to be comfortable and warm, I used jersey cotton for the top, not something typical of lolita outside of cutsews and hoodies, but hey I'm a rebel.

Before I finished with the sleeves. I still plan on adding some lace to the bottom, but I haven't found any I liked yet.

In the top picture I'm wearing vintage gloves and beret. The green butterfly necklace is Tarina Tarantino. The bottom picture are my new rubber boots from mel. They've been super useful this winter, and cute, let's not forget cute.

Fun Jewelry

 

My mom has always though I was a little weird because often instead of buying art or jewelry I'd rather buy a book with pictures of art or jewelry.For example, when we went to the Melrose Tarina Tarantino store all I wanted was the "My Pretty" book, which they did not sell there. Lame...

Anyway, that's just me, and that's why I was excited to find this fine and vintage jewelry picture book. The copyright is 1991 but it's in very good conditions with plenty of sparkly inspiration.

On the left are jelly bellies, I'm particularly fond of the deer but it's priced somewhere between 100$ and 400$. I'll never have it, but I can dream.

Tea Cups

 

I bought myself a gorgeous tea cup over the holidays, I was super excited about it, it's seafoam with pink roses and gold accents, the inside is pearly lusterware. I love it!

In mid January a photographer contacted me about doing some stock photos of women drinking, and I of course thought about my new tea cup. Now I don't have a huge amount of time right now, I've just become the Director of The Kids Cooking Corner, which was where these photos were taken. Bob was really great and shot me in a two hour window I had open during the day.

Photographer: Robert Brown Stock

Model/MUA: Me

Chocolate Fest 2013

 

This year Brenna and I decided not to got lolita, but in twinsies since I had made two dresses out of the same material. She wore the short one, and I wore the long one.

We were trying to glare at each other but we kept dissolving into giggles.

JaCivas was giving out ganache samples out of giant chocolate cupcakes!

Sparkle chocolate!

After the festival we went out to lunch, and afterward walked down to Old Glory vintage. Awesome!

Sewing a Zipper

First off this is just a basic tutorial, I didn't use an invisible zipper, and the dress is not fully lined, but a lot of the steps still say the same. Of course you want to make sure you've got a zipper foot (or an invisible zipper foot if you're sewing an invisible zipper and you actually want it to be invisible). Open and close your zipper a few times to make sure there's no issues with that, nothing worse then sewing a zipper all the way in and finding out there's something wrong with it.

Open you zipper, fold the top flap down and pin about 2/8 of an inch down (you can pin it further down, just make sure it's the same on both sides, do not pin it all the way at the top), to the right side of the fabric zipper teeth facing inward.

Sew as far down as you want it to go, and then curve outward.

Essentially you can do this part at any time. I didn't put in full lining, but I put a little in the collar and you can use this same technique for regular lining. You fold back the lining over the right side of the of the fabric and sew down from there.

When you're done the top of the zipper should look something like this.

Okay, so now you want to do the other side, you of course want both sides to match up, so before you start sewing, close your zipper, lay your fabric out and mark on the zipper where you want  the opposite side to line up. Then open it back up and sew it as usual.

Made a video for this next step, it's the last step for putting IN the zipper and it keeps it from popping out when you're done.

You see that curved stitch is where I sewed the zipper in half. DO NOT SEW OVER THE TEETH! And the straight stitch next to it is how you keep the ugly bottom of the zipper from showing.

Should have ironed it before I snapped this picture, but you get the idea right? Hope this helps those of you out there who are maybe a little zipper-phobic.

Last Tip: Let's say you bought a zipper that was longer then you needed and you want to cut part of it off. Do not cut straight across, zippers have that zigzag cut to them because that keeps them from unraveling. So if you've got a pair of scissors that do that use them, if not do your best to cut zigzag.