School's out

Yep, already. With the possibility of a plastic bag ban looming here in California, I'm hoping that the teachers didn't mind getting tote bags for their end of year gifts. Plus some English chocolates - I figure that if my kids drive me to chocolate most days (ok, every day), their poor teachers could probably do with some too...

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Teachers must get really sick of apples, but I had a wee bit of the apple fabric and just couldn't seem to stop myself. This one was for one of my son's First Grade teachers:

Reversible to this, if she wants to avoid the apples:

This one is for the substitute that filled in for his teacher who went on maternity leave:

Spotty this time:

This one was for my daughter's preschool teacher:

Reversible to this:

I'm sorry for the poor pictures. I didn't remember to take any until it was already late evening, so the lighting was dim and I didn't bother ironing after flipping the bags. The grass, though, would have looked just as bad earlier in the day....

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Hopefully I won't be disappearing on you like last summer, but it's taken me almost a week to post this. Summer preschool, baseball practices, baseball games, swimming lessons, World Cup football (I'm sure that England are adding to my grey hairs), family barbeques and a wee picnic on Father's day have already helped the first week zip by. My air conditioning was fixed today (yet more grey hairs). My oven is still broken (but no one seems to be missing my baking particularly). I think that I'm just about ready for summer now.

Flower power

Sewing machine.... ✔
Fabric, matching thread, button, lining fabric.... ✔
2 ancient zippers... ✔
Screwdriver... ✔
Pliers... ✔
Permanent marker... ✔
First Aid kit... ✔
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It was one of those projects. It started innocently enough. Despite my good intentions to use up more of my stash before doing any more fabric shopping, I found myself in need of cheering up beyond the powers of chocolate and the next thing that I knew I was at the 'good' fabric shop. I was behaving myself, keeping to the cheap rows, but then I caught sight of this blue floral fabric (Lil' Plain Jane by Michael Miller) by the door and had to have it. Far too many others had thought the same thing, as there was barely any left on the bolt (and no other bolts to be found - believe me, I stalked all the other customers, checking their trolleys. Yes, I am that person at the fabric store...).

So here's the pattern I put together. The fabric was half an inch (just half a bloomin' inch!) too narrow to be able to make the back in two pieces with the flowers matching up, but three pieces could be squeezed out. This is my first attempt at a proper zipper (using this tutorial) and a sewn button loop (using this tutorial). The full lining is plain white and most likely there is an easier way of putting in a lining in a zippered dress, but for some reason I forgot about internet search engines and just made up my own way. The topstitching shows up on all the flowers, too.

Sewing the zipper went well: it turns out that my sewing machine came with a zipper foot - who knew? But ancient zipper #1 decided to wait until it was sewn in before the metal zip bit broke into two pieces. No, I don't know how or why, either. So, that's where pliers, screwdriver and permanent marker came in handy - removing the zip bit off ancient zipper #2, then bending it into place on the installed zip, then colouring it to match. I thought that that was this project's swear words allocation used up.

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Until I burnt my hand on the iron. Please ignore the creases in the pictures...

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Translation of the day:

UK English: trolley = shopping cart in US English

UK English: tram = trolley in US English

UK English: off one's trolley = crazy / insane / silly in US English

UK English: tick = ✔ = check in US English