only two more days and the peanut will be ONE YEAR OLD! holy crap. we managed to make it through her whole first year without any fatalities. amazing. i'll have photos to post after this weekend. tomorrow we're heading upstate to my parents' place for some R&R before the big party on saturday. KP's hoping to golf with my parents and i'm hoping to get a little knitting done. we'll see. it's a whole new house to explore now that she's crawling.
mobile!
here she is in action. i can't stop her now! good thing i ordered a baby gate from amazon yesterday.
in honor of the peanut's big day, i made myself that skirt. the drafting turned out pretty good and i got to work last week on the actual sewing. had some problems with the zipper, of course. i guess you can't install a regular zipper like an invisible one like i thought i could. lesson learned.
skirt done!
here it is! it fits reasonably well and it's lined with the cotton sheeting that i used as a template. check out that blind hem stitch! i used this tutorial to figure it out. in the end, my zipper looks passable.
my zipper install
but here's what i'm going to do different for the next skirt.
- install the zipper along the center of the seam. i used this video tutorial to install it and she had it placed to the side of the seam. well, it didn't turn out that great and i think that my stitching would be straighter if i placed it on center. if anyone has any tips, please pass them along.
- i'm going to make the rise the same in the front and back. currently, my pattern has an extra .5" rise in the front and 1.5" rise in the back. this is what my measurements said to do but i think that i can cut it back to .5" on both the front and back and just use one pattern piece.
- i'm going use this technique for hemming a curved hem. MY GOD i wish i had seen it before i tried the first time. my first hem was ATROCIOUS. so much so that i ended up hacking off the damn curve along the bottom. i made the hem straight and, while it doesn't look bad, i think that it would look better curved.
- still gotta cut out a little more on the hips. man this patterner's got HIPS!
- i'll make the next one a little shorter.
so all in all, a good experience and i like the outcome. now what? i think it's time to cast on for the second sock. this one's a little lonely.
in randomness, one of my favorite authors, arthur c. clarke, died this week. i distinctly remember reading childhood's end and rendezvous with rama as a teenager. ah, summer reading on our sun porch back in michigan! these two books really ignited a spark in me for great science-based fiction that has yet to die out. i really loved this article at wired about him. he was a truly great man and will be missed.
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