Miss You Sew Much

I left work early yesterday to get home and meet Spud's bus. It arrived at 4, and at about 4:30 he informed me that his costume for the 'wax museum' at school had to be brought in early. How early? "Tomorrow!" Uh. OK. I'd planned on a nice relaxing evening.

Instead, we had to figure out what Thomas Edison usually wore (vests and bowties, turns out), and then run to the store, get a pattern, fabric, yadda yadda yadda.

Finding a vest pattern in a boy's size 12/14 ain't easy, come to find out. There was a nice one that also came with a bowtie pattern (7030), and it had boy sizes and man sizes -- but that chasm in between was where Spud fit. Meh, no sweat, I'll just fudge the pattern and add a few inches. They also had a nice black woven cotton/poly blend that was almost like a micro-faille, and this cute plaidish lining that was on clearance for a dollar a yard. Whew.

Back home, I let everyone know to leave me alone...I had to WORK! The good news is, things went off without a hitch. The vest and bowtie are made. The vest actually looks FABULOUS. The tie is a little bit hacked together in the back, but no one will see that. It called for TWO layers of tie, each one with batting inside it. That sounded rather foppish, frankly, so I went with ONE layer of tie, and interfacing instead of batting. Nice and small and cute. Basically, for the tie, you cut out a rectangle, baste batting to it, then fold the edges into the center...so you're folding it in half, but the seam is in the center back. Stitch closed, and turn. I did that, and it looked like he was going to be wearing a black maxi-pad under his chin, so I put the kibosh on that. :-)

Then you just pinch the 'tie' in the center, wrap around it a little tube that you make (which is the 'knot'), and then you're supposed to slip-stitch the 'knot' closed. Yeah, I just zig zagged it...it's the back surface of the tie, and it's against his neck, so no one will see it. :-) Then, instead of hardware and junk in the back? Yeah, Velcro. And it's even WHITE Velcro, because I didn't have the wherewithall to dig out the black. It was midnight by this point. But you know? It came out pretty nice! (And even though the photo, which was taken in low light -- it was MIDNIGHT! -- makes the vest and tie look brown, I assure you they are actually black, and not wrinkled.)