Thursday, September 04, 2008
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Well, I had hoped for some more suggestions, but here is what you threw out there so far.
Like anything? Love anything? More ideas?
Love, Rachel
Sunday, August 31, 2008
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I have been messing around with Inkscape today trying to capture Esther’s beloved “Tunkey.”
With some help and guidance from my 5 year old daughter, this is what we came up with:
What could this look like as a fabric?
I’m going to tile this and see what happens.
Not sure about a background color. Any ideas?
Love, Rachel
Saturday, August 30, 2008
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You may or may not know about my daughter Esther’s fascination with the “Tunkey.” Refer to this post to catch up.
I was in the fabric store and low and behold I saw some tiger fabric. Esther was with me and before I knew it, she grabbed it up and was dancing around the store with glee. At that point, I knew I would be embarking on a tiger dress making journey. I was actually excited make this dress because it is entirely out of my element. I never work with animal prints because I’m not really attracted to them. However, I love working out of my “box” and challenging myself. You know what I mean, we all have our boxes.
The challenge was to combine two different tiger fabrics that didn’t necessarily go together. The fabric with all the tiger faces all over it was a bit scary, but Esther loved it so I needed to figure out a way to put them all together.
I also decided to use the faces on the back, but just had them peek at you from behind. (You can tell I didn’t put the hook in at the neck yet—sorry!)
And finally, it was important to lighten up this “heavy feeling dress” with a light and twirly skirt. And voila—it’s a tiger dress!
GRRRR!
Love, Rachel
Friday, August 29, 2008
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School is here! This year my daughter Rosemary does not have to wear uniforms to school—to her delight. I bought her some basics and told her that I would make her three dresses for school. She decided to design one of them which looked amazingly similar to her sister Esther’s colonial dress that I had made her earlier this year. She carefully drew her sketch and verbally let me know what all the details were. It’s the night before her first day of school and the pieces of her dress were in a pile on my sewing table. Even worse than that—I was really really tired.
I tried to carefully feel it out…how she would feel if she wore the dress on the second day and not the first. Her little face fell and she kind of whispered, “Well, I told all the kids already that I was going to wear this very special dress that I designed and my Mamma sewed for me.” My heart sank and I knew it was a big deal.
Kiss kiss, the kids are in bed and I begin to work on yet another colonial dress. Same pattern, different material, shorter sleeves. Amazingly I finish the dress (without all the fancy lace decorations) and hang it in her room ready for the first day of school. No matter that the skirt goes to her ankles and she’ll have to somehow participate in PE. No matter that she’s wearing a colonial inspired garment to school. It’s all worth it yet once again when her little eyes sparkled with joy and her wide smile filled with gaps grinned. Please ignore the wrinkles in the dress—she wore it for two days in a row (not to school though!)
Some tips for those of you wanting to sew this dress: McCall’s 5414
- Make a mock-up bodice first. With both girls, I needed to alter the bodice quite a bit. Rosemary is a size 7, so the pattern should have worked quite well for her, but it didn’t.
- Changes I made to the bodice pattern.
- I needed to shorten the waist in each of the bodice pieces. You can get a good idea how much you need to shorten by measuring your daughter from her shoulder seam to her waist. Then measure the pattern (make sure you eliminate the seam allowance of 5/8”). Make adjustments at the lines on the pattern that says “adjustments made here!”
- I also needed to raise the front bodice only about 1 1/2 to 2 inches at the shoulder. You may not need to, but keep an eye open for these changes.The back bodice was fine. The sleeve was fine.
- Measure your child from waist to floor before you cut out your skirt. The skirt lengths are VERY generous and you can save yourself quite a bit of fabric by doing this.
I know it seems like a pain to do a mock-up, but believe me, it will save you so much time, fabric, and energy if you just get it right in the muslin. Do it!
Love, Rachel
Saturday, August 23, 2008
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Do you remember the post where you all helped me pick out fabric for my Leo jacket? And the drama when I received it, rejected it, and tried again? Well, although it technically has been listed in our Mamma Made store, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the work of the fabulous Melissa Lee Photography to see what she could do with it. These aren’t necessarily the pictures I’ll be putting in my store, but I just love them. Melissa, you ROCK!
Yay Leo! You are so darn cute! Ella Rose is pretty darn cute too.
Love, Rachel
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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My daughter Esther is in love with Tigers…and Monkeys. Because she can’t decide which animal is better, she has created a new animal which in our house is called a “Tunkey.” In order to create this animal she ties her two stuffed animals together with a lot of hair bands. It works. She is constantly drawing this fantastic creature and gets discouraged when her Tunkey isn’t quite perfect.
I found this adorable monkey fabric at my favorite local quilting store and I decided to make Esther a dress. She is very excited about it, but I know that somehow if some “tunkey” fabric is mysteriously created it would be the best thing ever to this five year old child. My two nieces Lilly Hannah and Ida are on the job and at this moment in time are sending me some tunkey sketches. I’m excited to see what they look like. Until then, she is thrilled with simply a monkey dress.
Love, Rachel
Thursday, August 14, 2008
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We went to Indie Fest yesterday and we had a great time at downtown Disney. Here is a picture of me with all my kids except one.
It was a beautiful hot day and we had a really nice time. I was glad that I didn’t have high expectations of how things were going to go. It’s important when the word “Indie” is involved to keep an open mind and let things progress as they will. I learned that lesson from my brother Daniel. We had an outdoor show which was followed by two teenage girl bands. I’m going to stop there and just share with you our show.
Sorry that the garments are so hard to see in this video. I’m glad to have it for posterity. You look upon the blessings you have in your life, tangled balloons and all…
Love, Rachel
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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I received my yard of colors! Here is Esther showing them off.
She couldn’t resist dancing with the colors in the yard.
Each color block has the corresponding number to it. So the idea is to work directly from this color “swatch” because we know that Spoonflower is able to print these colors. By doing this you shouldn’t have any surprises when you open your fabric package.
I also received my bird swatch and I was very pleased. The colors were exactly as I projected. For those of you just tuning in, please check out my Spoonflower Fabric Development Series to see where we are at right now.
Here is a small swatch of the color image:
Here is the corresponding swatch of the printed colors:
Instead of working off your colors from your computer, we are now going to work backwards and start with the colors on the fabric.
Let’s work through a sample together.
I’m using the free art program Inkscape to develop my images. I’m going to work on my roaring lion image. I think it would be really fun to make some fabric out of this one. This is what I want my printed fabric to look like:
Here is the close-up tile:
I’m going to start with the single lion.
I’m going to “ungroup” the lion so that I can change the colors individually. To “ungroup” you select your image and go to Object-Ungroup.
Looking at my fabric, I’m going to try and match the colors the best I can. I’m going to start with the yellow body of the lion first. I found my color on my fabric swatch and I’m changing the color on my computer lion.
I’m working my way down through the mane.
Here is my final lion with all the color changes.
Just to let you know, the background will not be as dark as the original image. On my huge swatch, browns are pretty tricky and a lot of them fade with a grayish tone to them which I don’t really care for. I picked the darkest brown on my swatch without the gray tone. So, we’ll see what happens from here.
ORIGINAL LION COLORS
CHANGED LION COLORS
Now I need to put the lions back together, get my tile, and upload it to Spoonflower. If you need a refresher course on how to do this, visit Part 4 in my Spoonflower Series on Creating the Perfect Tile. There are so many cool things I could make from this fabric. I just love it. Thank you Lilly!
I’m getting the tile from my lions.
And here it is, my final tile! Now remember that Inkscape exports to .png format so you will need to convert this image before you upload it to Spoonflower. I am supposed to write a post on that, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been plowing through this Color Calibration very slowly! Ahhh!!!
I’m uploading my final .png lion tile to GIMP (visit Part 2 on Computer Art Programs). In this program, I re-save it as a .jpg. Done!
Nothing looks different, but it’s a .jpg now, believe me. I’m going to upload it right now to Spoonflower and get this fabric printing! I’m still waiting for my latest order of my happy lions. I changed all the colors on that image and I’m trying again! I can’t wait to make a dress out of that fabric, but I just wasn’t happy with the previous colors for what I wanted to do.
Here is the image I uploaded to Spoonflower to get my color swatches.
I ordered a yard. Feel free to upload it yourself and get yourself a color swatch to work from. (Thank you pagetutor.com!) Be warned, however, that Spoonflower will be changing their printers within the next couple weeks or so. You may want to wait until they do that.
When you upload it, make sure you upload the original size. That’s it for now! I’m very excited to see how my “ferocious lion fabric” turns out. Hmmm…what to make, what to make…
Love, Rachel
Thank you to Melissa Madison of Crab Apple Designs who has been following this series and wanted to share her amazing design! If anyone else would like to share what they are creating along with us, send your image to: info@mammamadedesigns.com.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
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I have been a bit lax in keeping up with my blog posting because Mamma Made is getting ready for Indie Fest USA in Anaheim, CA. We are going to have our first fashion show and I think (hope!) that it’s going to be a lot of fun. The Indie Fest is mostly showcasing Independent Films, but there is a spattering of bands and fashion shows that will be shown throughout the eight festival days. Pretty cool they chose us to be one of the twenty designers to be showcased and compete for some sort of a prize. Not sure what it is though.
Here is a quick photo of the girls practicing. You’ll notice that their hands are clenched in a fist. They are practicing holding their invisible balloons.
You never know about these Indie Fests. I’ve been to many many (because of Danielson Famile) and they are either super cool or super lame. I’ll let you know which. If anyone wants to come and see, we’ll be having our fashion show this Tuesday in downtown Disney at (I think!) 2:00ish. Come say HI!!!! Would love to meet you.
Come check out our 12 Looks for the show.
Love, Rachel
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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I love the feel of good quality material. I just do. I confess that the first year my daughter Rosemary went to school, I sewed her school uniforms because I just couldn’t handle spending $45 for a cheap polyester jumper. I would not have had a problem in the least if it was a good quality product though. Cheap fabric just bugs me. So, I confess, I’m a fabric snob. I only use 100% high quality cotton materials in the garments that I sew. If I'm going to take the time and effort, they are definitely going to last through it all.
This is a story about a dress:
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Rosemary who begged her Mamma to make her an Easter dress. Rosemary was three years old and like most three year olds, she loved to twirl. Her Mamma decided to make her sweet little girl the twirliest dress in the world.
Video: Rosmeary Twirling
Rosemary loved her new dress. She wanted to wear it every day. And she pretty much did because her Mamma didn’t see much harm in it. If anything, her Mamma wanted her to wear it as much as possible because it took forever to gather and sew on all those stinkin’ ruffles…ahem. Here are some highlights of the next couple of years in “the dress.”
April 2003
September 2003
November 2004
December 2004
Rosemary absolutely insisted upon wearing her fancy dress for her Pre-School Christmas show. One of the Moms came up to Rosemary's Mamma after the show and quietly asked her if she needed a real Christmas dress for her daughter. Two days later she handed her a bag of old polyester hand-me-down Christmas dresses.
Video: Rosemary Christmas Show
Rosemary of course needed to wear her "fancy dress" on Christmas Day.
February 2005
After wearing this dress day in and day out for three years, Rosemary's Mamma finally put it in the dress-up box because she couldn't stand to look at it anymore. The garment had been washed and dried hundreds and hundreds of times and acquired a genuine "vintage look" in a record breaking time-frame. Many people had complimented the little girl on her dress and asked her Mamma where she had found such an adorable vintage garment. The Mamma would just sigh and smile.
Alas Easter rolled around again and Rosemary asked her Mamma once more for a beautiful twirly "fancy dress" just like her favorite yellow and pink dress - only all in pink. Now the Mamma was much smarter this time around and refused her little girl. She was really sick of that dress.
Or did she?
April 2006
July 2006
Rosemary's Mamma is such a sucker!
Love, Rachel
So, does quality really matter? Well, it depends on the individual. There are two kinds of thought:
Kids are kids and they destroy everything:
It's true. Kids are kids and they ruin clothing. They play, run, jump, slide in the mud, dance outside barefoot in the rain. That is the job of children - to play and to play hard. Cheap clothes just don't last as long and you end up buying clothing more often. And do you really want your kids destroying an expensive garment that you paid for?
Rachel's kind of thought:
The garment is sturdy, well-constructed, and made with quality material. I did pay a bit more for it so my kid better wear it ALL the time. The side note is that it just happens to be cute at the same time. This garment will last through all three of my daughters. I like that.
Quality is a personal preference. There are strong arguments on both sides which I obviously didn't delve into in this post. Read more in my post about Fabric Choices And Quality.