The Winners Announcement!!

Hello! Are you excited? I'm excited. I REALLY wanted to take video of my kids rolling dice for the winners but that idea turned out to be... not good. You may not know this, but my other title is "Cat Herder" and  as you can imagine its often barely controlled chaos. So, to make sure this got done today I decided to go the random number generator route.  Also, PicMonkey helped make it fancy (if you haven't checked them out, you should).  Also, a couple posts had non-contestant comments. They were omitted and my list will be up last.

All the winners please email me your mailing address to ladykatza (at) gmail (dot) com. I will do my very best to get everything shipped out before we leave on July 7th.  Ok, on with the show!

DRUM ROLL PLEASE!!!  The winners are as follows:

For the "New Look Giveaway" First Giveaway it is:

Puddle Boots!

Number seven was listed as "Unknown" but a little sleuthing I believe they are actually PuddleBoots.

For the "That's So Seventies" Second Giveaway it is:

Njeri!

NJERI, COME ON DOWN!

For the "Little Darling" Third Giveaway it is:

Carrie B!

There were only two entries to this, which surprised me.  Great odds for the contestants though. CARRIE B, COME ON DOWN!

For the "Mad About You" Fourth Giveaway it is:

Carolyn!

CAROLYN!! COME ON DOWN!

For "The Slenderette!" Fifth and Final Giveaway it is:

Vickikatemakes!

VICKIKATEMAKES! COME ON DOWN!


*Wild applause for all the winners*  Congratulations.  Please PLEASE send me your mailing info ASAP. Now, as promised, here is a screen capture of my list.

click to embiggen

Somewhere Between OMG and WTF

Someone send help, or a truck of ice. Please.  I'll be serving up some Southern Tea (with honey, cause me and agave don't get along). As it is, all four of the cats have staked out the a/c vents for napping.

Morals of Silk

Donna from Nid de Tissus wrote a fascinating post about visiting a silk worm farm, or rather a museum.  Go check it out! Then come back cause it posed an interesting question for me.

Now, I know people who find the process of making silk to be cruel because you have to boil the silk worms in their cocoon to get the end product. I would like to put a bit of a different spin on it though.  If these worms didn't produce such a lovely fabric would humans have bothered to keep them alive for thousands of years?  Would they have, instead, been eradicated as pests?  Maybe the very thing we kill them for is what has allowed the species to survive.  I would love to hear everyone's thought on this.

In Which I use ALL the Machines!

Ok, first up, all give-a-ways are now closed!  I shall be rolling for the winners this weekend.  Also up for this weekend? Trying to finish the last of my knits that I cut out over a month ago, making my kids' beach outfits, and oh.. I dunno,  taking photos of all the outfits somewhere in there.

I might just pack all the un-blogged items  and take the photos at Jekyll Island, but that might be considered blogger cruelty.  HAHAHA.  Seriously, make this vacation get here or I might be on the news for all the wrong reasons. *ahem* Anyway.  So what's on my sewing table? Well, for starters, this:

These do not belong to my machine.

 See those little green bobbins?  Cute right? They go to my Mom's Viking (not pictured yet) and its a great machine, except I can't get it to wind a bobbin worth a tinker's damn. All the nicely wound bobbins in that box were done by Mom herself.  The one sticking up overfull and wonky?  Yeah... my attempt.  I've read the instructions multiple times and its just not working, and its not like I have an afterlife directory.  "Hello, Peter, yes please connect me to my Mom, I have an urgent sewing matter."   And quiji boards and seances are right out of the question too, so I had the brilliant idea to try and use my Brother to wind the bobbin.

On the left side of the ring, Brother! On the right, Singer overlocker!  Wadded fabric in the middle is one of four current projects. I'm a multi-tasker.

Small problem... they don't fit on the Brother bobbin winder.   Well crap. I know, I'll buy a Sidewinder!!  New problem... you have to get the DELUXE version for them to fit Viking bobbins. Which costs $66 instead of $26 dollars.  I think its a conspiracy against vikings. I mean the sewing machine, not my ancestral history.  Nobody pisses off those kind of Vikings, but I digress.  The whole reason I was going to use Mom's machine in the first place is because I just had it serviced and mine needs to go in the shop for some TLC.  Plan C, hook my machine back up and take over the kitchen table with the Bernina cover stitch machine.

Its a craigs list table. One day when I don't have  two dirt vortex catastrophe machines living in my house I'll invest in nicer furniture. And new flooring. 

Yes, I used all three machines. I'm just a few illegal immigrants short of a sweat shop. *badumdum TISSS*   So for those of you asking, no I'm not giving up the old serger because I've discovered having both is very convenient.  I have finally gotten the hang of making the cover stitch work on this machine, mostly.  You do have to fiddle with tension settings when changing fabrics.  The vaguely Asian looking knit below is being used to make Simplicity 2369 view A. The photo is the back side of the knit, its black and red on the correct side and a very yummy feeling microfiber knit. Unfortunately, its probably a polyester of some sort and won't breath well. Bad for outdoors in our insanely hot and humid weather, great for work.

Cutting knits is fun!

The reason for the cover stitch machine was to finish the hems on another dress from Vogue 8679. The hem turned out lovely, but the photo is really dark.

I then went to do a finishing stitch on the Simplicity dress front wrap piece and sewed it  wrong, not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES.  Coverstich seam ripping will make you want to rip your own hair out.  The fourth time was passable and I said "to hell with that" and left it.  No photo, at this point my son was awake, playing video games (his natural state) and asked "Are you yelling at me?"
"No, I'm yelling at inanimate objects".
"Oh good, glad to see you are feeling better",  (its been a bad couple of weeks) he says.  So yelling at inanimate objects is considered an improvement over the last few weeks.  This is why I need a real vacation, ya'll.  I'll also accept care packages of chocolate and vodka cocktails. But not molotov cocktails, those are illegal and make the postal workers crankier than me.

So, anyone else have seam ripping nightmares to share?? What's your favorite cocktail?

Quickie

This is just a quick post to remind you the last give-a-way closes in less than 24 hours. I'll be doing the dice rolls and announcements by this Saturday.

 Also, I finally made some progress on the kids' projects, including a muslin on my daughter's bra top and getting Simon's shirt cut out.  As expected, the size 8 (chest 26") had almost eight inches of ease.  EIGHT.  I know its suppose to be a loose style but that's absurd.  Oh, and Simon got a haircut.  This was the best photo I could come up with:

Meatloaf AGAIN?? 

That's pretty much his natural state.

In any case, I have lots of photos on the DSLR and more to write about but this  will have to suffice for now.



Anyone else have the "Its summer and I don't want to be at work" blues?

Give-A-Way Five! The Slenderette!

Well, isn't this fabulous?  Not only that its a 42" bust! That's right, I pulled out another large vintage pattern for ya'll. Isn't it lovely?  This has two views, a sheath dress and an A-line.  The soft pleats in the front can be embellished.  Another great pattern for dressing up or down.  All the pieces and instructions are present.

STATS:
Bust: 40"
Waist: 32"
Hip: 44"



Rules To Enter:
Post a comment!
Follow me and post a comment!

Rule to get TWO entries:
Post about it on your blog and then post the link in the comments.

Winner Will be chosen by roll of the dice. 


Entry time will close June 26rd 11:59PM Eastern

Changes and Notes

Hello Everyone!  You might have noticed I changed a few things.  I'm trying to update the graphics to look slightly better than a trained monkey apprentice's work.  Let me know if anything is really wonky on your system.

Ok, first big note of interest, the FIFTH give-away.  I can't for the life of me remember what it was suppose to be. I'm not kidding, really.  I shouldn't be surprised though cause, for some reason, I always stress out at mid-year review time. Self reviews, does anyone else hate them?  Anyway, I'm gonna rummage around and find something awesome and I'll have it up by noon today.

Next up, my current sewing projects. Vintage beach outfits for the kids! If any of you have been following me on Pinterest you may have noticed a couple of cute summer kids patterns in there.  Check out the patterns and fabric...

Aren't these great?  Felicity's fabric is a print from a fabric my Mom bought what I was her age, so its from the 80's. I'm reclaiming some purple linen blend that was going to be a paper bag skirt for me until I realized that would be a disaster.  The blue Hawaiian fabric for Simon is a Japanese cotton I found on Etsy.  The pattern is a size 8 but I'm hoping, based on past experience with vintage children's patterns, there will be HUGE amounts of ease.

Now, in case you are wondering why I might be making beach outfits, there's two reasons. I live near a lake and its less than three weeks until ISLAND VACATION!  We're heading out to stay at a friend's beach house on Jekyll Island, just off the coast of Georgia.  A little neat bit a trivia, the very first International Telephone Call was placed from Jekyll Island.  Not remember the date at the moment, but it was early 20th century. As someone that works in Telecommunications, I think its very interesting.

Anywho.  I'm starting on these this week and I'm going to do my very best to document working with these patterns.  Its going to be my first attempt at shorts with pockets and cuffs. I'm trying not to be intimidated. Weird, huh?

So, those of you in the Northern Hemisphere*, what do ya'll have planned for summer?

*Ya know, the international nature of the internet is just kinda awesome.