Happy New Year!

OK, well, I'm a couple days late, but better late than never, right? Our New Year's celebration was pretty quiet. With three young children in the house, our days of crazy, stay-up-all-night type celebrations are a thing of the past. But, we did enjoy a delicious cracked crab dinner, an annual New Year's Eve tradition in our house.

I spent most of my free time last week trying to track down suppliers of bamboo jersey. This is not an easy thing to do! Life would be so much simpler if I was opening yet another quilting fabric store, but really, does the world need another one of those? Besides, a huge reason for opening my own online store is that I can never find the fabrics that I want to sew with, so I may as well become my own source! Anyway, bamboo jersey, despite being the "in" fabric right now, is very difficult to come by. I did find a few wholesalers, but they want enormous minimums that are prohibitive. I mean, do I really have room in my garage for 500 yards of fabric? No, I do not. But I did manage to find a few that have smaller minimums, so I will not despair!

The other thing that sucked up an inordinate amount of my time last week was trying to find a good banner image for my Etsy shop. Do you know how many days, even weeks, of your life you can fritter away looking at images online? I only checked out two places, Dreamstime and iStockphoto, but was absolutely paralyzed by the number of images available. Too many choices! I still have not made a decision, which is why this blog does not have a fancy banner on it. Sigh.

Anyway, on to sewing-related matters. Last week, during all this indecision surrounding suppliers and images, I managed to sew an outfit for my little guy, or "Skoobers," as I like to call him. Both the pants and top are from Ottobre 4/06. The pants nearly ended up in the garbage, however. They call for tremendously complicated front pockets, which I was totally intimidated by, but I screwed up my courage and pressed on. Well, my brain could not wrap itself around the construction of them. Usually, Otto instructions are so terrific that illustrations are not needed; this was a huge exception. In desperation to save the pants (I didn't have any more of the black sweatshirt fabric left), I just hacked off the offending pocket area, then replaced it with another blue side panel. Success! Sort of!

Ottobre 4/06

Embroidery: Huups

Also, I wanted to post a picture of my daughter's Christmas Eve dress, since I'm rather proud of it. Unfortunately, she was WAY too excited on Christmas Eve to even consider getting a good picture, so no modeled shot. This will have to suffice:

Modkids Kyoko