Round Two in the Wardrobe Challenge, or I'm Super Impressed with Quilters

Just a quick post today, as I've got a massive amount of sewing to get done.  I just wanted to stop by and show some in progress shots, as this is something I've never done before.  Quilting.  I take that back.  When I was last pregnant, I got it into my head that I was going to make a quilt for my little guy.  I made four blocks before I decided that it wasn't necessary.  Granted I made my own design, and it may have been really complicated.  Anyway, one of the bottoms I wanted to make for the wardrobe challenge was a pencil skirt out of the last of my gray pinstripe.  But then I realize that I have a gray pinstripe dress that I never wear because of the shoulders always slipping off with the exact skirt for the bottom.  So I chopped off the bodice and finished the skirt.  Which means that I can't use it in the contest unless I want it to be my one 'premade' item.  So back to the drawing board.

This is what I came up with.  It is heavily inspired by a skirt pattern I saw here.  But as I'm not buying patterns, I am going at it without the pattern.  Also I didn't want chevrons, but stripes.  I decided to use the gray pinstripe with the last of my pink wool.  I wasn't sure if I had enough fabric, and how was I going to move around the pinstripe without wasting even more fabric, so I thought about revising my design to something simpler.

Here were two other iterations of it.  Squares instead of parallelograms.  I even went so far to draw out a large template with the squares.  You can see that I added blue to the design.  I wasn't to thrilled with the effect.  So I bit the bullet and cut out 240ish parallelograms, over a period of a couple of days. Then I pulled out my last bit of interfacing- luckily a giant rectangle of black lightweight weft interfacing.  Why would I interface you ask?  I'm a glutton for punishment right?  Well the wools are slightly different in their drapes/weights so interfacing makes up for that.  

Here are 12 of the 15 of the rows laid out on the interfacing.  I laid them out in the design, as I figured it would be easier to put together and not get lost in the design.  I left it overnight before I fused, to make sure I didn't put a horizontal where it needed to be a vertical.  And luckily my cutting table was made to be a giant ironing board.  That helped immensely.  I barely had enough of the pinstripe.  I had to use scraps at the end.  I dismantled the bodice of the dress and used every bit of it up.

Since I fused the pieces this morning, I have been slowly making the rows.  The squares would have been so much easier.  I could have fused them all in one big block and then sewn, but doesn't it look cool?  I hope it does!  Once the fabric is made, I will make a single seam pencil skirt with all the waist shaping done by darts.  This will save matching up the fabric as well as fabric itself.  Hopefully, I can get this done in the next couple of days because I still have 5 more things to make!  Ack!  We'll see right?  So a couple of other things- I broke down and took my tripod out with me to the park to see if that would make the difference in the pictures.  I think it did, here is my wardrobe challenge first outfit reshot:

I think part of the issue is that I rasterize all my pictures in a batch to make them all smaller.  I think this degrades some of the details- you can see the pixalization in the jeans a little bit.  Maybe I need to change the settings.  When I manually shrink the picture- it ends up 5x7.5 with 200pixel/inch- or 1000x1500 pixels.  When it does it in a batch, it stays at 72 dpi but ends up at 1000x1500 pixels.  I'll mess around with it some more.  I also have been figuring out different settings on my camera.  I'm usually fairly lazy and use the creative auto settings, but now I'm messing around with the portrait settings (it allows for f-stop manipulation, changing the ISO, etc.)  To be honest, if I didn't have two kids, I'd be more likely to shoot in manual, but that's life right?  I need to get back to sewing, but I'll leave you with some pictures of the little guy, as he is who I was practicing on.  Much better right?

Anyway, until next time happy sewing!  I have more pictures from the Pisanky egg festival, where we went yesterday, I'll put them up another time.  All I can say is that spring has sprung, and it's glorious!