Happy Cyber Monday!

Woke up this morning to great reviews of my princess hat and recycling symbol bodysuit on Familylicious.

That's a great first-ever Cyber Monday for Teesies! Best of all: there's a giveaway involved, so click on over there and enter!

(What are you still doing here? Go visit Familylicious already!)

Guess what?

...I'm being featured on a review blog!

Check out Familylicious Reviews on Monday, November 30th for a review of my baby bodysuits and princess hats. There's also a GIVEAWAY, so make sure you enter to win a cute gift for someone pint-sized on your Christmas list!

Pink + sparkly = birthday present

One of my daughter's friends turned 5 this week, and the what-do-you-think-she'd-like-as-a-present discussion was short and sweet. "Angela likes princesses. I think she wants a princess hat."

Done and done! All I needed to buy was some good medium-weight fusible interfacing, since we already had scads of sparkly fabric lying about around here. (Those remnant bins at the fabric store? They're like heroin.) And thanks to coaching my teenage babysitter on SAT math over the last few weeks, figuring out the pattern for the conical hat was pretty simple:

1. Measure child's head, c
2. Determine height of hat, h
3. Calculate the diameter, d, of a circle with radius h.
4. Set up an equation: c/d = a/360. Cross-multiply, solve for a.
5. Draw a wide wedge of pie with interior angle a and radius h. This is your basic pattern piece to make into the hat. Cut one of these in interfacing, then add seam allowances around all sides and cut this piece in fabric. Cut a rectangular piece of sheer fabric with length h and width about 2h.
6. Hem, iron, sew two seams. I think the whole process took about half an hour, and we ended up with this:


(Oh, wow, I'm such a nerd. Does Omnigrid make a slide rule?)

That's one big happy family...

...wearing their family reunion sweatshirts (46 of 'em, to be exact). The project took over my dining room for about a week — boxes of sweatshirts, stacks of printed heat-transfer vinyl, an iron and a roll of parchment paper.

It was my first time working on sweatshirts instead of tees, and I still consider myself a novice when it comes to tees! Heat transfers work best when they're done on a hard surface, so my biggest dilemma was how to keep the bulk of the sweatshirt fabric from ruining the transfer. The solution: buy a cheap wooden cutting board and slip it inside the sweatshirts while ironing on the transfer. It worked great.

And the best part: this family was delightful to work with. I got to hand-deliver one box of shirts, which was promptly torn open (upside-down, even) by a pair of little kids who couldn't wait to get to their own pint-sized sweatshirts.

So we're now plotting a shirt design for our own family reunion next July....

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Or something like that. There were 16 separate requests on Etsy in the last month for adult-sized Lucy van Pelt costumes. 'Tis the season for crabby amateur psychiatrists, perhaps?

I just finished the second of THREE Lucy dresses I'm making this year. Pictures to follow, since I'm awfully proud of these! Dropped waist, ruffle around the neck, puffed sleeves, crinoline, covered buttons. Dress #3 is cut out and ready for assembly tomorrow.

And...tomorrow I get to help a friend's daughter with her "bright person" costume: mortarboard, brightly colored clothes, battery-powered lights strung around her neck, and a T-shirt that says "Bright Person" in garish rainbow letters. Now if we can just figure out how to rig a light bulb above her head....

Just wondering...

...whether McCall's always prints their pattern numbers exactly across the bust line. I just had to adjust a pattern for an A-cup (obviously not something I'm making for myself!) and the little half-inch strip I cut out exactly removes the pattern number.

Anyone know?

Oh, this has made my life sooooooo much easier...

EtsyHacks. Wow. I mean, wow.

Itty bitty khakis

I took down the listing for My Friend Mandy PJs last month and immediately got several convos asking if I'm still making the PJs. Yikes! There really are other Mandy fiends out there. Yes, I'm still making them — I'd just run out of the fabric that's pictured on the doll, and will have to take some new photos. In the meantime, the listing is back up, and there are now five different patterns available.

And then Dawn S. wrote, "Do you remember the outfit...plaid top, khaki pants, yellow backpack? It's a lot like an LL Bean ensemble."

So...I started sewing. I've finished a pair of khakis and just need to put snaps on the shirt. Would you believe, in all of the random odds and ends of notions that are floating around in my sewing machine cabinet, that I don't have the right size snaps? This morning I made a quick dummy backpack out of muslin. Allowing for naps, a preschool pickup, and a board meeting tonight. I should have a finished pack by sometime tomorrow. Watch for the entire hiking outfit to be posted in my shop later this week!

CPSIA compliance

I know, I know — it sounds boring, doesn't it? Last year's Consumer Product Safety Information Act, parts of which just went into effect last month, requires all manufacturers of articles for children to label their products in such a way that they can determine the source of the materials used to make the products.

Yawn all you want, roll your eyes all you want. I had a glorious time coming up with product labels. Well, glorious except for the incident with the hot iron and the polyester ribbon, which was hilarious in its own way, but you really had to be there. And now, when you order something I made after August 14th, you'll get a great little permanent tag with it that says you bought it from Teesies...which means that your friends, instead of having to ask you where you got that adorable baby blanket, can surreptitiously check a seam.