Sew Easy?

When I was little, my mom used to make adorable dresses for me all the time. I wanted to see if I could make something for Eliana, so I started with a pattern that had EASY written all over the front.

I picked this cute little jumper from McCall's (#M6193) and found a fun multicolored polka dot fabric.

The whole process was only 8 steps long. How hard could that be? Well, kinda hard. I'm not going to be winning Project Runway any time soon. But this is certainly doable.


Step 1: Use the pattern pieces to cut out the fabric. Since I think I may want to use this pattern again, I had to figure out a way to cut out the fabric without cutting the pattern size lines. So I used a yellow sharpie to trace the pattern onto the fabric and then cut on the markings. Since the part you cut ends up inside a seam, you won't see it at the end.

Step 2: Stitch up the sides of the main jumper body.

Step 3: Iron the interfacing. I had no idea what interfacing was. It's really just a stiffener that you iron on to the back of a fabric to give it more stability. Iron the bumpy side of the interfacing to the wrong side of the fabric.

Step 4: Stitch the interfaced pieces to the main garment. Stitch with right sides together and then flip it around. This part was a little challenging because I'm only good at sewing straight. Rounded edges are still a bit tough.

Step 5: Topstitch the neck and arm holes. This took me way too long. Probably because I thought it would be fun to use a contrasting thread color. I used pink instead of brown so I had to redo it a bunch of times to get it to look right. Again with the rounded edges.

Step 6: Hem the bottom.

Step 7: Add the buttons and button holes. My sewing machine instruction book had a couple good tips here - by taping the buttons in place and taping a pin to the machine foot to create a shank, it helped make the button process easy. I dropped the feed teeth and used the zigzag setting to get the machine to stitch the buttons in the right spot.

 

Step 8: Add button holes. I used the button hole maker steps on my sewing machine. Again, I had to do this several times to get it right. I am getting quite handy with the seam ripper, however.

There were a couple of extras steps involving adding patch pockets to the front, but I decided to leave them out. I started to make the pockets but got frustrated when I couldn't make them perfectly round.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There were a few things that were difficult to understand, so I'll probably stick with the "easy" patterns for a while.

The pattern also included an adorable little jacket - we'll see if I can pull it off.