The corduroy that kept on giving

I’m back from another blogging hiatus, though I have good reason for this one. Namely, her.

She was literally born on the USA’s Labor Day, which amused me, as I’d been joking about that outcome all summer. I think this was physically the hardest pregnancy out of the three, but it was the easiest labor (surprisingly, since I didn’t have time for the epidural again, but I was more mentally prepared for that possibility this time!) And it’s also been the easiest recovery. Somehow, I managed to fit back into several of my non maternity pants within the first month, which has never happened before, so I guess everyone who told me the bump looked “all baby” was right. Baby girl is doing well, too.

The projects that I’m sharing today are the last ones that I finished before her arrival. My husband had expressed a wish to have a vest to match the boys’ clothes after my mom made them matching Twig & Tale Trailblazer vests last year. So one of his Christmas gifts this year (from my mom, haha, but with my blessing) was two pieces of fabric to make those vests: a black fine-wale corduroy and a quilt cotton with logos from his favorite hockey team. I meant to sew them up back in February, when the Sewcialists were running their menswear theme month, but I was so sick back then from the pregnancy that I couldn’t manage it. So I spent most of August doing them instead.

After I cut out the three vests, there was actually quite a bit of fabric left, especially the corduroy! So I also cut out a vest for myself, deciding to line it with a brocade that had been in ny stash for ages to glam it up a little. (This was a mistake, but more on that later.) And then I still had fabric left, so I turned to another Twig & Tale pattern, the Petal dress, to use that and more of the hockey fabric to cut out a little dress for the baby. That pretty much finished it off. And as someone who often struggles with having leftover yardage in my stash for years, it felt good to use it all up at once!

Constructing the vests was mostly straightforward, though time consuming, as I did all four vests assembly style. For the guys’, my husband requested no collar, but I left the collar piece on mine. (Also a mistake.) The most difficult thing was handling the zippers. I had a hard time with shortening the separating ones. The first adult-sized one I attempted got ruined, and for my younger son’s, I had to resort to hand-stitching hooks from a hook and eye set at the top to function as a zipper stop. But after that, things moved along pretty quickly, and I managed to get them all done with a little more than a week to spare before my due date. These are the two boys’ vests.

And then here’s the dress for my daughter. I finished everything except the snaps by Labor Day weekend (my diaper snap stash was at the point where I was one black snap short, so I had to get one from my mom!) She’s too small to model it as of yet, since I was thinking ahead to the winter and made it in a 3-6 month size. The dress is reversible, and Doug is looking forward to having her watch a game with him while wearing it! Or maybe just wearing it out in public to troll the Flyers fans. I think he enjoys that aspect of being a Pittsburgh fan in the Philadelphia sports market. It was also super easy to make, so I don’t think this will be the last one I make for her!

 

Back to my vest. It looks nice here, but there were multiple issues with it. The one that I could live with was the sizing — the hazard of guesstimating my size while in the third trimester was that it was a little big overall, especially at the waist.  But since this was a layering piece, that was ok. I also found the collar a bit irritating when zipped up, but that was an easy fix by just leaving it more open and letting the brocade show, like I’m doing here.

The issue I can’t live with is how it handled going through the wash. I wore it for the second time this past weekend to go hiking at a local state park, and got sweaty enough that I figured I’d better clean it. My husband mostly handles the laundry around here (I procrastinate on it too much for his minimalist ways, he’d run out of clothes), and so I didn’t notice this until last night when I sat down at my serger. The corduroy tore away from the spot in the hem where I’d hand stitched it closed after turning the lining. After taking this picture, I also noticed that the brocade shredded at two spots around the zipper stops, pulled apart between the collar and main body of the lining, and half of each armhole. So now I’m thinking I might have to just completely trash the lining and sew a new one out of some quilt cotton or flannel or something, it’s completely unwearable as is. I guess the upside of that is I can make the waist fit better, since it was roomy enough that I could zip it up over a 9+ pound baby in a wrap carrrier, without the pattern add on that allows for that. And maybe ditch the collar.  Though that means I’d have to shorten that zipper again…

But to end this on a happier note, here’s the outtake of the 30 seconds the boys were willing to wear those on the hike, and my husband being a much more accommodating model.