I was tracing and cutting, and tracing and cutting, and I think I traced and cut too much. I thought I’d take it easy with this summertime KCW–a shirt or two, maybe a quick pair of shorts. Well, that turned into a shirt and pair of shorts for all 3 kids, make that two of each for everyone. And then, ooo that dress is cute, maybe I’ll make that too. Oh and I have those other projects I should probably finish. Which is why his large pile is staring at me.

In reality, this week I’d like to finish these four tee shirts for sure and….

and these four pairs of shorts. We’ll see…

Go check out my post on the kcw blog to see who got featured on day one. And keep up with all the kcw sewers on the new kcw community website!  Happy KCW!

In college I had a brief fascination with Rorschach and fell in love with his earnestly scientific, but mostly artistic ink blots.  After I graduated, I took them down from my wall and promptly forgot about them.  Until I saw Martha’s gorgeous take on them in her beautiful line of homewares. I would have liked to pull out my prints and put them back on the wall but I seemed to have randomly dispersed my possessions all over the country after college, so instead I just made some shirts with my kids.

I used this tutorial on instructables for guidance, but did a few things differently:  I taped my shirt around the cardboard instead of tacking it on; he says to not press hard when you fold the shirt over, but I found I had to; and you can see that I fiddled with the image–adding more paint after I already printed it and then folding it again, which will make the image shift a bit, but I sort of like how that looks.  The ones the kids did are more crisp and clear because they just did it once and they were done.

This would be a great project just on paper and it’s  a fun what shapes do you see game–without all the psychological baggage of course.

I kept my word and worked (almost) every evening this past week on my kid’s wardrobe.  Actually I had such a good time I’m going keep at it this week.  Mostly I used tutorials, but I’m working on some patterns too. The two skirts are from the twirly skirt tutorial by Erin from house on hill road.  It is a seriously twirly skirt–my daughter calls it her swirly skirt.  The tulip fabric I picked up at the thrift store and there was just enough.  A good friend gave me the fish fabric and even though there was only a quarter of a yard (about half of what is called for) it still twirls a little. I looked forever to find a tutorial for the shirts. I knew what I wanted, but didn’t want to spend 10 bucks on a pattern for something so simple.  I finally found it on Just Tutes, which is a fantastic resource for kid’s clothes (click here to go right to the shirt tutorial).  I made the yellow one first and it’s ridiculously small (I’m worried it won’t even fit the 4 month old babe it’s going to) and the second one I made is too big, so I’m guessing next time I’ll get it right.  That’s the problem with sewing at night–no one is around to try anything on.  The striped pants are for my son and I blatantly ripped off the design (and fabric choice too) from Leah of go monkey designs, but she did a much better job (serves me right). I traced a pair of my son’s pants for the little shorts and made up the cuffs and tabs as I went a long.  I used a contrasting bright green thread for all the details and damn if it isn’t stylish.  They turned out better than I had hoped and have been worn and washed many times already.

whew! if you’d like to see bigger and better photos head over to my flickr site.

Do you have any good garment making tutorials to share? I’m kind of addicted, so if you know of any good ones–for kids or adults–please leave a comment so we can all see. thanks.