The Dress Does not Make the Quilter

July 20, 2025July 21, 2025 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

Well, actually Rabelais said “The dress does not make the monk,” but since I’m not a monk like Rabelais — although I do sit monk-like day after day at the sewing machine — I prefer my variation for the title of this post.

There comes a day when an occasion arrives and even though Thoreau cautioned us to “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” it was time for a new dress for a granddaughter’s wedding, even though I’m aware that I’ll be mostly on the sidelines as this newer generation Does Things Differently so I need to get with it and adjust. But still, maybe it’s that I wanted a new dress? And that my sister had been making a lot of outfits from Merchant and Mills patterns and I Wanted In On The Fun.

*The Beautiful Bride, from her IG account. Her mother is a photographer, so they snapped the bridal portraits early.*

IDK how you feel about me sliding a dress post into a quilting blog, but this is what I’ve been doing with my sewing machine and time. The idea was to make a wearable toile out of each of the three patterns I was auditioning. Which meant that the dresses made from the flat folds picked up for cheep at M & L fabric shop probably wouldn’t fit me as well as I would want them to, which is why I’m not modeling them in this post. I also remember why I leapt over to quilting long ago: The Fitting Question. I remember at age 20 feeling like I was as large as a barn. And at 30, I thought I was zaftig. Oh, honey, I now want to say. You looked fabulous. The problem is that I was trained to sew on that 20/30-yo person, and now this person (some years down the road) is not who I know how to sew for. But I’m trying.

Dress Number One

I need to take out most of the extra ease I put in, but I wore it out anyway, along with beads from a quilt show. Jewelry rights a lot of wrongs.

Dress Number Two

Again, I put too much ease into this wearable toile (again, struggling with fit), and if I choose this one to make for the wedding, I’ll make it more like the pattern. I got all my patterns from Hart’s Fabrics in Santa Cruz, California and they came lickety-split, especially considering that Merchant and Mills patterns are from England.

In five years of owning my sewing machine, purchased in December 2020, I’d never used my buttonholer. I had to watch a video online to figure out how, but it worked like a charm the other night.

Dress Number Three

I’m still in the middle of Dress #3. It’s a Simplicity pattern I’ve had forever, and is a plain-Jane shirtwaist dress. I found two lengths of this blue-and-white fabric in my stash. Guess I forgot and ordered it twice, but it came in handy when I needed to make one more wearable toile. I’ve re-cut the sleeve piece twice; I like my sleeves a little longer — like to my elbow — but we’ll see how this turns out.

Pockets

I don’t know about you, but to me a good pocket is mandatory. I traced off an old pattern to make myself a basic pocket pattern, and here it is for a Free Download:

OPQuilt Pocket_Pattern Download

It basically looks like what’s in the photo, above. I used fat quarter-inch seam allowance on the outside edge, but you can cut it larger, if you want.

For placement on your dress, when holding up the main section of your pattern to your body, bend your elbow and figure out where you’d like your hand to slide in. Think also about where the bottom edge will be; you don’t want to be reaching down to get the car keys out of your pocket. Then mark that.

I sew the pocket onto the side of the dress in a 1/4-inch seam, press to the pocket, then serge that section only. After pinning the side seams/pockets together sew about 1″ below the top edge of the pocket piece, then all the way around the pocket, then to a point on the seamline and then down the seam to the hem. Like this:

Serge or zig-zag the raw edge. Or as Merchant and Mills patterns say, “Tidy up the edge.”

You can also stabilize the pocket by sewing it into a waist seam. To adjust for that, grab a pencil, like the one from your Dad’s art box, and draw a curvy line upward. Try to make it match your waist seamline. This is the cheesy way. Watch the following Video (That May Confuse You or Help You) to see it done more professionally than just a pencil line: How to sew a waist-anchored pocket (this also helps you draft your own)

What else?

Whichever one I think will work best will get sewn up into a light blue linen print I’ve been hoarding for a couple of years. Then I think I’ll sew a skirt or two when I return. I’ve seriously neglected my wardrobe the last few years, and I generally hate all clothes in the stores. (Or maybe it’s just trying them on that I hate.) Thankfully my sister is cheering me on, and my husband is an angel and has learned to say nice things about my wearable toiles, such as “You’ve never looked better,” and tries not to choke as he delivers his scripted lines.

I’m skipping my A Quilting Life QAL update post this month, mainly because I haven’t yet worked on it. I’ll just do both July and August together, after I return from the wedding of this lovely grandchild #3. And then I’ll launch back into some of my Economy Block sewing, too, as well as some quilting on the New York Beauties. Oh! and seaming together my Posh Penelope. August will be busy!

It’s heating up here…enjoy your July–

Pocket Links

Reforming a pocket to get anchored at the waist, from In The Folds

Design Your Own In-Seam Pockets

Professor Pincushion Talks You Through Adding a Pocket

Bernadette shows you the same thing, but also how to figure out where to put the pocket

Pioneer Cosplay

May 8, 2018 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

Recently a few of us here were involved in the Heritage Day Celebration, honoring the early pioneers in this valley. It happened last Saturday, on a mildly hot day. Good day to be wearing all these layers, right?

pioneer dress 2018.jpg

Didn’t Thoreau say something like “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”? I think the dress looks like a cross between Mary Poppins and the mother from Little House on the Prairie, an ancient TV show that forever colored our view of what women in the 1850s wore around the farm, and notable for the final show: they blew up all the set houses with dynamite to keep them from the local evil corporate guy.

We hosted a “quilting booth” but instead of that tired old trope of setting out a quilt top so people could mangle it with their stitches, we ran a hexie booth, based on the research I found that quilters at the time were doing English paper piecing.

Quilt of the Mormon Migration_EPP (1)(1).jpg

We had some work to do. We, meaning, several of us who have attended our quilting group for many years, plus some others we ~~conned into~~ asked to participate.

Pioneer_0a

First, combine four patterns to make a pioneer outfit (seen above). Then start working on the demo goods: hexies.

Pioneer Hexies_1 Pioneer Hexies_2

I appliqued them to a tote bag I picked up a couple of years ago at Quilt Market, figuring the “maker” theme was a good fit for hexies.

Pioneer Hexies_0a Pioneer Hexies_0b

We figure we glued up about 500 hexies, total, between this and what Leisa did later on. It was so good to have these!

Pioneer_0

It was a team effort: our friend Dennis brought us tables and chairs, and Leisa was the “set decorator,” using quilts from near and far. We arrived at 7:10 a.m. and left at 2:20 p.m., the right amount of time.

Pioneer_1a

We also had some modern hexies there to entice the participants; that is Laurel’s beautiful Modern Millefiore Hexie quilt on the left, with Simone’s hexie pillow (pattern here), and other props.

Pioneer_2a

We had Color-A-Quilt pages for the littlest visitors, as well as create your own quilt block (below). We had to remind them that it was a visual treat–take a photo with your phone sort of thing–as people kept walking off with my design boards. That is Julie’s hand you see there, making a mock-up. She kept these two sections rolling the whole day.

Pioneer_2

Pioneer_1 — from l to r: Cindy, Julie, Denese, me, Laurel and her husband Ralph, Leisa, Simone

The original crew, plus my husband, Dave (who is taking the photo). We swapped out two for four others mid-day; we were swamped, so were glad to have them. Here are some photos from our day:

Pioneer_2b

Pioneer_6 — We were suprised by the number of teens — and teen boys — who sat down and made a three-hexie patch from start to finish.

Pioneer Hexies_3.jpg

Most did not look like this–they sewed them up properly, although sometimes with an interesting twist or two, but we thought this won the prize for “Most Interesting Hexie” of the day. We had to teach many how to tie knots (about half had no idea how to do that), and we saw that lots of youngsters (and oldsters) liked to be able to sit and sew, a skill not often available to them in other places.

Pioneer_3

We had a sample quilt set up in a hoop in case anyone wanted to try hand-quilting. Most were more fascinated by the hexies. And most wanted to pick through the baskets of cut fabric squares and glue their own shapes, too.

Pioneer_4

Pioneer_4c

I love sharing our craft with some new quilters!

Stats: 3,000 paper hexies purchased
60 needles (only 35 were brought home–don’t know where the rest went)
3 needle-threaders: one from Clover, my friend Laurel, and my husband Dave
2 ten-gallon jugs of water
4,000 cut squares prepped up: fabric donated by Paintbrush Studio and Primitive Gatherings
Project boards that are not dusty: 0
Number of pioneer outfits that will never be used again: 7

Quilts

Summertime Quilt Fun

July 22, 2015July 22, 2015 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

Our quilt guild organized a tour of Hoffman Fabrics this past Monday. I jumped at the chance to go, as I’d passed up several other opportunities. I decided that it was summer and it was time for some fun. So I left the sewing chores behind and drove down to Orange County to meet up with the rest of the ladies.

We were ushered into a seating area, where a Hoffman employee gave a sneak peak at some of the lines coming out soon. The one above is a digitally printed fabric, which allows for greater color variation than screen printing, and is done in Pakistan.

I love their screen printing, which is done in Japan.

They printed all their batik basic colors onto fabric, which someone cut up, interspersing with gray to create this quilt (below):

I liked a lot of their Christmasy Momento line.

This hedgehog is from the Forest Friends line. Very cute.

We watched a video on how they make their batiks, which all starts with a design being translated into a chop (above). This is then dipped in wax, applied to the fabric, then overdyed.

Sometimes the fabric is dyed first, then stamped, then they remove the dye, as in the case above.

I went gaga for their new Me + You line of batiks–so modern looking. Here’s another view:

Our group saw a lot of samples; here they are stacked up at the end of the presentation.

Then over to the receiving section, where all these bolts come wrapped in plastic.

One woman said she’d like to sneak out one of these scrap bags, maybe by stuffing it into her bra.

Wherever you look there is beautiful fabric.

I laughed when I saw this: fabric draped over shelves, hiding the mess from the world, like just I’ve done more than once.

Lisa and I were on the tour together. Here we are walking from the loading dock area down to the front of the warehouse.

Such beautiful prints!

The company’s batik lines got their start by a couple of the sons who were surfers, and who wanted to proudly wear their surf fashion. The surfboards decorate their offices now.

We all could have watched this all day long, but it was time to go.

In other summer fun, I finished my block for my Mid-Century Modern bee-mate Susan, of Patchwork’n’Play. She chose the Stepping Stone block. All of the links to the tutorial, plus tips are on our group’s blog, The Mid-Century Modern Bee.

It was waaaaay past time for a new nightgown, as you can see by the vintage pattern above (the last time I made this was 18 years ago!).

Instead of tucks, I like to add braid. This is also a vintage braid from my stash, with embroidered edelweiss flowers — a reminder of Austria, where my husband and I went on our honeymoon many years ago. We’re coming up on twenty-six years of wedded bliss next month.

We had our reception after the honeymoon, at a friend’s home. If we look tired, we are, as we arrived home the day before from Austria and are majorly jet-lagged. I still think he is the most handsome man around. And yes, I did make my wedding dress, although it is not at all like the fashion today–it was made of French laces with entredeaux and ribbons and insertions. I still have it and love to look at it and think of the girl who made it, so many years ago.

And then I had another quilty issue that had stumped me for a while: why didn’t I like rosette #3 of the New Hexagon Millefiore Quiltalong? The above photo is someone else’s beautiful rendition, but somehow it just didn’t “work” for me. I couldn’t figure it out.

I went online and looked at lots and lots of other Rosettes on our Facebook group, and still just didn’t like it. Then I found this photo:

These were made by the woman who makes samples for Katja’s shop in Canada, and look what she did with hers (on the right, above). She simplified those outer blocks. Bingo.

So in the papers for Rosette #2, I found the shapes, and used them and loved what I saw. Here’s the first version, above.

Second version, with darker “middles.” And below, in all its cluttered glory, is the design wall with the full shape. I’m still not too sure about those far right-hand hexagons, but I’m withholding my judgement on those until I see how they fit with the rosette next to it. . . which is still a long way off.

I’ll work on getting these stitched together over the next few weeks. Katja will be releasing Rosette # 8 in about a week. That means that, wow, I’m only five behind!

Our Four-in-Art Challenge Reveal is coming up also in a week, and I’m not at all behind on this one. I also have another tutorial for Circles Block #14 coming up as well. So even though summer is a relaxing time, the quilting calls my name and brings an order to my life and to my days. I feel fortunate to have some “summer” time with cloth and thread and design and stitching–hope you feel the same!

Quilts

Sewing Sewing Sewing Along

November 9, 2014November 3, 2014 Elizabeth E.12 Comments

To get you back in the mood for this post, here’s my son’s pumpkin. Did I tell you he has a great sense of humor and can write computer code that drives websites?

First up is Keagan, the Egyptian Princess. I visited my daughter’s home in October and went right to work. We had to double-line that white sheath because, well, it was white. Keagan and I talked over costumes, looking some up on Pinterest before she went to school and then I headed to JoAnn’s. I hate paying a billion dollars for patterns, so picked up one of the $2.99 Quick and Easy patterns that looked like it might work, and added on enough at the bottom to be long enough. I used the bodice of the dress to fashion a collar out of paper and tried it on her. Keagan had a few suggestions and I trimmed it to her specifications.

The drapey thing was pinned on in the back with a safety pin, then wrapped around some rubber bands. Her mother and dad fashioned some gold bands for her (one solution is to cut a Pringle’s can into sections, then spray-paint gold) which she slipped over to hide the hair bands. She also had some on her upper arms to complete the look.

Maddy wanted to be Elsa. She had VERY detailed instructions, and since she was recovering from a tonsillectomy I had her at my disposal for measuring. The dress had to had see-through sleeves and silver at the top of the bodice, and Maddy was very specific about the drapey overcoat thing, wanting it to flow from her shoulders, but since I only had one day to get both costumes done, I went with a “coat-type” construction, made out of organza so it would have some body.

We cut out a giant silver snowflake by tracing it onto the paper side of fusible web, adhering it to the silver lame. We cut out the lame, peeled off the paper and fused it on. Because the lame and the organza are kind of “open” this process left a residue of stickiness. I told my daughter she’d better wash her ironing board cover so it wouldn’t stick to anything she ironed after that.

I’m told both costumes were a hit.

Here they are with their brother who was a Mad Scientist-Zombie Guy. Maddy is not wearing a crown (it’s a bush behind her). Sure looks like a crown, though.