How-to: Organic Terrycloth Hooded Towel with Applique

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World back in 2013.

There's nothing like hopping out of the pool and into a comfy, soft, bounteous towel. But big beach towels are hard for little kids to manage, and that bleached, dyed terrycloth can be scratchy and harsh on damp, delicate skin. 

It's an organic terrycloth hooded towel to the rescue! This hooded towel isn't for babies--if you start with your own organic terrycloth fabric, you can sew this hooded towel with proportions perfect for big kids. Organic terrycloth won't add any extra chemicals to your kiddo's tender skin, and it's softer than those cheap-o novelty beach towels. 

And just in case there's any doubt who that awesome hooded towel belongs to, there's plenty of room on the back for a monogram, done superhero-style in the case of my superhero-loving kiddo, who's decided that her hooded towel does, indeed, look a LOT like a superhero's cape. 

 Need a superhero cape/hooded towel for your own kiddo? Read on for the tute: 

1. Take your kiddo's measurements, and figure out yardage. First, measure your kiddo's height--look how she's grown! 

Your hooded towel will be in the shape of a square turned diagonally, so this height measurement will be the diagonal length of the square. To calculate the length of each side of the square, use the Pythagorean theorem, in which c equals the diagonal and both a and b equal the lengths of the other two sides of the right triangles made from the square with that diagonal. No, you don't want to do that math? Fine, use this square calculator, but don't forget that your geometry teacher TOLD you you'd need the Pythagorean theorem one day! 

Using the Pythagorean theorem, and then rounding up to the next inch, I discovered that each side of my square needed to be 36" (do not include a seam allowance here or anywhere else on this project); this was a yay, because it meant that I could sew the entire hooded towel for my seven-year-old from one yard of organic natural terrycloth. 

Now, measure the top of your kid's head from front to back; this will be the altitude of the right isosceles triangle that makes up the hood. To cut a right isosceles triangle to this altitude, fold the remaining terrycloth to the bias, measure the altitude, and cut. 

Fold the terrycloth to the bias to measure the altitude of the triangle formed by the fold.

2. Make homemade bias tape. Cut printed or undyed organic flannel on the bias at a width of 4", then make bias tape out of it. You will need enough bias tape to cover the perimeter of your square and the base of your triangle. 

3. Sew bias tape to the hood. Just sew the bias tape to the base of the triangle; the other two edges of the hood will be covered later. 

Sew bias tape to the base of the triangle forming the hood, then pin the raw edge of the triangle to one corner of the towel.

4. Attach the hood to the towel. Line up the two raw edges of the hood with the two raw edges of one corner of the towel. Pin well. 

Sew the bias tape around the perimeter of the towel.

5. Sew bias tape to the towel. Sew bias tape entirely around the perimeter of the towel, mitering the corners (here's how to miter corners with bias tape). When you come to the hood, you'll be encasing both the raw edges of the towel and the raw edges of the hood with that bias tape. 

I basted the applique to the towel’s back, then went back over it with a satin stitch.

6. Applique the hooded towel. Your hooded towel is perfectly serviceable at this point, but it might still need some personality. You can cut a monogram, or really anything that you wish, out of flannel, center it onto the back of the hooded towel, and applique it on using your machine's satin stitch. NOW it's got some personality! 

The Kid and I Made a Duct Tape Dressform

 

You might remember that Syd has a passion for fashion design, yes?

She and I are especially happy that now she's homeschooling again, she's once again got plenty of time to dive into all these big passions of hers. Along with her academic work and her everyday art projects, I've been encouraging her to design and make some bigger, more ambitious art projects. The planning and troubleshooting are great skills to practice, and the projects, themselves, are always sources of inspiration for Syd to teach herself something new. The four-foot-tall acrylic painting on canvas that now hangs in our front hall taught Syd not just a billion more things to know about acrylic painting, but also got us discussing and making decisions about how artists obtain and use reference images, and what's acceptable professionally versus academically.

So when Syd started thinking about planning her next Trashion/Refashion Show design, I started thinking about ways to make the project even more open-ended for her. We decided that one good way to help her elevate the sophistication of her designs is to make her a custom dress form.

And what should we make this custom dress form out of?

DUCT TAPE!!!!!

We used this Etsy Labs tutorial as our spine, but I got the expanding foam idea from this tutorial.

I bought this set of duct tape way back when the kids and I were making duct tape wallets and I wanted them to have a lot of color options:

Five years later, I still have some remnants of the least popular colors from that set left. I've been using them whenever I need duct tape, of course, but this project used up every single last little bit, and I'm pretty thrilled to 1) have had just the random supply that I needed when I needed it, and 2) have all those rolls of duct tape GONE!

Syd put on a baggy old T-shirt, and we had a hilarious time wrapping her in tape. That morning was definitely a contrast in homeschooled kids--Will, hard at work on her calculus homework, and Syd, hard at work on being mummy-wrapped in tape. 

Side note: personally, I find the calculus easier to mentor. Will's kind of homeschool work is easy for me to identify as "proper" work, and I have really been struggling to find my legs homeschooling an art kid whose schoolwork looks so different. She's over there bopping along, listening to a podcast and drawing in her sketchbook, working hard on improving her draftsmanship or whatever, and I'm over here trying equally hard not to nag her about reading the rest of her biology chapter, or working on her poetry essay. Anyway...

After we finished wrapping the kid in duct tape, I cut it off her and we taped it back together and stuffed it full of newspaper and expanding foam.

Three expanding foam pro tips:

1. Buy the kind that says minimal expanding, or it'll expand so much that it will warp the dress form.
2. Resign yourself to using the entire can at once. I used half a can, then cleaned it off according to the directions and set it aside. But when I came back to it, I couldn't for the life of me get it going again! I had to go buy another can, and they're not the cheapest thing at Menard's. This time, though, when I got through half a can and felt like the dress form was done, I handed the rest of the can off to Matt and was all, "Pretty please go wander around outside and fill in cracks and stuff." I think the chicken coop will be insulated exceptionally well this winter!
3. Do NOT be this kind of fool:

You know I'm not squeamish about getting my hands dirty, and I have zero problems walking around for days with hands stained by fabric dyes, permanent markers, or other colorful mishaps. But not only did this stuff NOT come off for many, many, many days, but it also irritated my skin the entire time, and when I got desperate and tried applying straight acetone, I irritated my skin even more. 

Just... wear gloves, you know? Not that hard. Please remind me of that often.

It actually wasn't a bad thing that I ended up using two cans for this project, because the waiting period allowed me to see what spots still needed a little more foam after the previous batch had fully expanded. 

I wasn't sure if sometime Syd would want to do more with the dress form's neckline, so I left it unfinished but later put a piece of cardboard over it to keep the newspaper stuffing inside:

Once upon a time I bought a yard sale dress form that hasn't ever gotten much use because it's never mimicked the size of anyone I'm sewing for, but it does have an excellent stand that works perfectly for this project!

That wider PVC pipe goes through the dress form and is adhered inside with expanding foam, so it can't be removed. The narrow PVC pipe fits inside that wider one, and over the metal rod of the stand, so it can be removed if Syd wants to work with the dress form on a table top. But Matt also cut it so that when you put it on the floor stand, it exactly matches Syd's height!

And yes, I've made her pose for MANY photos with her dress form twin. It's hilarious.

How to Sew a Reversible Skirt

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

It's business on one side, and a party on the other!

Or in this case--it's Girl Scout khaki on one side, and pretty pink on the other!

My kiddo wanted a dressier version of her Girl Scout uniform, but I also know good and well that she is simply not going to wear a khaki skirt for any reason other than a dressy Girl Scout occasion. I'm not one to enjoy sewing something that will get little use, so yes, I made her the khaki skirt that she wanted, but I made it reversible, with some pink prints from my stash that I know she'll enjoy wearing every other day.

Want to make your own reversible skirt? It's not hard, and it's a great stash buster!

You will need:

up to 2 yards of two different fabrics. I'm afraid that I went overboard and sewed this skirt too large, but to be fair, Girl Scouts wear those khaki uniforms from the 6th grade until they graduate high school and bridge to adults. It was boring enough to pick out khaki fabric the first time--I don't want to do it every year until my kid graduates! This particular skirt used two fabrics that were 22" x 72", but I could have halved both measurements and still had a fine skirt for an eleven-year-old.

1/2" elastic. 

measuring and sewing supplies.

1. Measure and cut two identical skirt pieces. Each should be the desired length of skirt + 1.5" and the desired width (two to three times the wearer's waist measurement) + 1.5". To make sure that the two pieces are absolutely identical, I like to lay one on top of the other and cut them simultaneously.

2. Measure and mark the hem/waistline. You will overlap these skirt panels when you sew them together, with one skirt panel folded over the other to make the skirt's hem, and the other skirt panel folded over to make the skirt's elastic waistband casing. You will see, then, a different-colored bias hem on one skirt and a different-colored waistband on the other.

Measure and mark 1.5" from the bottom edge of the skirt panel that you'd like to use for the bottom hem, and 1.5" from the top edge of the skirt panel that you'd like to use for the elastic waistband casing.

3. Sew both skirts. Sew each skirt panel into a tube by sewing the short sides together and finishing the seams.

4. Sew the hem and waistband. Place the two skirt pieces wrong sides together, and overlap them by 1.5" inches. The skirt that will be folded over and sewn to make the bottom hem should overlap the other skirt piece by 1.5" at the bottom, and the skirt that will be folded over and sewn to make the elastic waistband casing should overlap the other skirt piece by 1.5" at the top--the marks that you made in step 2 should help you with this.

Fold the bottom hem up, crease it, then fold it again to the inside and edge stitch it, encasing the raw edge of the other skirt panel.

Turn the skirt inside out, then fold the top waistband hem up and crease it, then fold it over again and edge stitch it down, leaving an opening to insert the elastic.

Attach a safety pin to the elastic, feed it through, sew the ends together, and sew the opening in the casing closed.

And now you have a reversible skirt! You can use this method to alter the matching skirts from this tutorial, and outfit a whole troop of Girl Scouts.

How to Sew a Pompadour

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

It's not just a fancy hairstyle!

Madame de Pompadour lent her name not just to the bouffant hairstyle, but also to the practical yet lovely little drawstring wrist bags that allowed one to both wear a fancy ballgown (with no room for pockets!) and carry a lipstick and some cash for gambling with.

Pompadours are still lovely and practical to sew and to carry, although it's probably less advisable to take them gambling with you. But they still go well with an outfit that doesn't have pockets! A pompadour is also a handy change purse or bobby pin carrier to live inside your backpack, and if you think very large-scale, you could turn one into a handy travel play mat and storage bag for a child's toys.

Even better, a pompadour is also dead simple and super quick to sew! If you're making a smaller version, it's easy to use stash fabric to sew one. To make one for yourself, you will need:

Compass. This is the circle drawing tool, not the finding your way in the wilderness tool.

Two Complementary Fabrics. The original pompadours were fancy, made of fabrics like velvet and silk. Those are still appropriate, especially if you're sewing a pompadour to match a formal gown, but you can also use more utilitarian fabrics. The two pompadours in this tutorial are both sewn from quilting cottons.

Buttonhole Foot. Or the endless patience to sew a buttonhole by hand!

Grosgrain Or Other Ribbon. Choose something sturdy rather than delicate here. Silk or cotton ribbon can be dyed to match your fabric.

1. Measure and cut two circles. The pompadour is simply two circles of fabric sewn together and cinched with a drawstring. It can, when completely loosened, flatten completely, and so its maximum dimensions are the dimensions of the circle that you choose.

Use your compass to make a circle template (mine is approximately 12" diameter), then measure and cut two circles of fabric:

 This is not me, but my 11-year-old. The pompadour is her hands-on project for the Rococo period in our History of Fashion study.

2. Sew a buttonhole at each end of the "outside" fabric. Mark and sew the buttonhole about 1" from the edge at each end of the fabric:

Later, you'll be sewing a channel for the ribbon on either side of these buttonholes.

3. Put the two fabric circles right sides together, and sew all the way around, leaving an opening for turning. Use whatever seam allowance you prefer for this.

Use the opening to turn the pompadour right side out, and a blunt pencil to help you push out the seams so that you have a smooth circle. Iron the pompadour flat, tucking in the raw edges of the opening as you do so, then edgestitch all the way around, closing the opening and giving a neat, finished edge to the pompadour.

4. Sew a channel for the drawstring.  Sew two complete circles around the circumference of the pompadour, one above the buttonholes and one below:

5. Insert the drawstring. Measure two lengths of ribbon that are the circumference of the circle (here's a calculator to help you!) plus 2-4". Use a safety pin as a bodkin to draw the ribbons through the channel that you sewed for them.

Each ribbon will go in and out of the SAME BUTTONHOLE, and then will be knotted to itself:

When you're finished, you will have a ribbon loop at each end of the pompadour; pull them both, and the pompadour will draw tightly closed. Loosen them, and it will open up!

How to Sew a Poodle Skirt

I  originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

You guys, if you have never read about the history of the poodle skirt, I need to start you off with the information that it is just about the most fascinating thing EVER.

Basically, back in 1947, a woman wanted something awesome to wear to a holiday party. Being of a DIY mindset, she made herself a circle skirt out of felt (no seams!), then decorated it with cute appliques.

As you can imagine, knowing how ubiquitous the term "poodle skirt" is today, her creation went over very, very, very well.

What you might not have imagined before, however, is that it's not just poodles that were on the poodle skirt. In fact, that first Christmas skirt didn't even have poodles on it at all! Throughout the poodle skirt's massive popularity in the 1950s, people felt free to personalize it in whatever ways that appealed to them.

Think cacti. Or horses. Or Elvis Presley silhouettes. Cartoon mice. The Eiffel Tower.

So when you think of a poodle skirt, you really should be thinking of a simple felt circle skirt with novelty felt appliques.

Easy to make. Endlessly customizable. NOW you want to make one, don't you?!? So let's do it!

Tools & Supplies

To make a poodle skirt of your own, you will need the following:

• Felt. In Step #1, you'll do the calculations to learn how much felt you'll need for the skirt. You'll also want felt in the appropriate colors for all of your appliques.
• Matching thread. I don't use interfacing when I sew, because it's costlier and less eco-friendly than doing without, so you'll want a matching thread to sew your appliques to the skirt.
• Measuring supplies. Get yourself one of those yardsticks with a hole at one end (or just drill the hole yourself). You also need chalk and scissors.
• Stencils and templates. I freehanded some of the appliques on the particular skirt that I'm showing you in this tute, but other appliques came from Google Image searches. I'm not selling the skirt, so it's cool.
• Sewing notions. See Step #1 for these, too.

Directions

1. Calculate the measurements for your skirt. A circle skirt is exactly what it sounds like--a skirt in the shape of a perfect circle, with another circle, cut out for the waist.

So first, stop and think about how you want to get the skirt onto your body and keep it there. The skirt in this tute has an elastic waist, which means that I cut the center hole large enough for my kid to pull it up over her hips, and then I sewed 2" elastic to it for the waistband. This is a great solution for a kid or a teenager because as the kid grows, it's possible to remove the waistband, enlarge that center hole (provided that you've left the room and the skirt is long enough), and add new elastic. I  fully expect my kid's poodle skirt to last her through adulthood.

If you're already an adult, however, you can instead cut that center hole to size and install a zipper. It's more work, but the skirt would be less bulky at the waist and you could make it with a smaller piece of felt.

Either option is totally up to you!

So decide that first, so that you know the measurement for the center hole. The measurement will be the circumference of the circle that you want. In this case, I want a measurement of 24" so that my little noodle can get the skirt up over her little noodle hips.

Now, either do the math or plug that number into this circle calculator. The number that you want to get from this calculator is the radius. A circle that is 24" in circumference has a radius of 3.8". If you're going with the elastic waistband method, go ahead and round up to the nearest inch, which makes my new radius 4".

Next, decide how long you want the skirt to be, measuring from the waist to where you want the bottom hem to hit. I wanted another 20" of length. To find the total radius of the circle that you need to cut, you need to add that radius to the radius of the center hole. In this case, the total radius of my circle is 24". Double that number, and you'll have the total dimension of felt that you need in both length and width. Fortunately, felt comes in up to 72" widths, so you can make a pretty good-sized skirt from a single piece of felt.

Once you have your yardage, fold it into quarters. The very center of the piece of fabric will now be one of your corners. Place the hole in the yardstick right at this corner, and use it as the pivot to mark your total radius measurement in chalk. You'll see a perfect quarter of a circle marked out. Do the same thing, this time measuring the radius of the center hole. Cut them both through all four layers of fabric, then unfold the fabric and marvel at your perfectly-measured and cut circle skirt!

2. Add felt appliques. With the skirt unfolded, create and lay out the appliques until you're happy with their placement. You can also add other embellishments, such as the necklaces that I put on both of the unicorns, and a rope ladder from one of the caves.

When you're happy with the placement, pin all of the appliques to the skirt.

3. Sew the appliques to the skirt. Felt doesn't unravel, so you don't have to satin-stitch these appliques in place. With matching thread installed, I set my sewing machine to a stitch length of 3 and a width of 3, then zig-zagged around each applique. I highly recommend a walking foot for this.

4. Add a bias tape hem, if you'd like one. Again, felt won't unravel, so any kind of hem is completely optional. However, I thought that this skirt did look much more finished with the addition of a double-fold bias tape hem in a complementary color. I'd have had to stitch the appliques all around the hem, anyway, so it wasn't that much more work to add it.

5. Add the waistband of your choosing. For the elastic waistband on this skirt, I cut a piece of 2" elastic in a complementary color to the exact waist measurement (22.75"). I lapped the ends, marked both the elastic and the skirt waist at the quarters, pinned them together at the marks,  then zig-zag stitched them together, stretching the elastic to match the skirt as I sewed. It took less than ten minutes!

While felt is a very sturdy fabric, if I were you I'd remind whoever plans to wear the skirt that felt is also quite delicate. I know people were wearing these all throughout the 1950s, but people took better care of their clothes then, and also Velcro wasn't commercially available until the late 1950s. Velcro will pull at felt something terrible, so be careful when it's around.

Felt also doesn't wash well in a washing machine and doesn't dry well in a dryer. It'll be okay if you wash it on cold and hang it to dry, but it's better yet if you pretend like you're wearing your poodle skirt to a sock hop every time you put it on and treat it accordingly.

Trashion/Refashion Show 2019: Gibbon Girl

It's fun to see how Syd has grown in the nine years that she's participated in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show:

2011: Fairy Princess

2012: Rainbow Fairy

2013: Rose Dress

2014: Upside-Down Orange

2015: The Awesomes (with WILL!!!)

2016: The Phoenix (which I sewed while sick with the flu)

2017: Supergirl of the Night (the last design that I helped Syd sew)

2018: Medieval Maiden (the first garment that Syd constructed completely independently)

And that brings us to 2019: The Year of the Gibbon!

These are Syd's application pictures, and every year they suck, because February is rarely well-lit. Oh, well. You can still see that Syd's vision is a caped black tunic and leggings (upcycled from a few black tops and sweaters that we thrifted). The highlight of the garment is a pair of sleeves that Syd can make look ruched, but can also make look like this:

She used a pair of pants for those sleeves, and later altered it so that she could have a secret pass-through for her hands when they're in their super-long formation.

Syd really, really liked the idea of sleeves that drape like a bridal train, but she also intended from the beginning that they could be fully weaponized, like so:

I love seeing her have so much fun with her design. From the very beginning, Syd's garments have always been playful, and most of them embrace big, powerful movement.

Her garments are never something that you simply wear; they're something that you DO:

 Our town's Trashion/Refashion Show is happily well-situated within our busy spring every year--it's generally about a month after cookie season, and about a month before Syd's birthday party. It's nice, because as soon as we finish planning for one thing, we can move right into the next!

The day of the fashion show is the hair/makeup call, then the stage rehearsal, then cooling our heels in the house while the other acts rehearse--

--then the pizza party--

--then the fun time of squeezing into a few square inches in the overcrowded dressing rooms backstage--

--and then I go sit in the audience with the rest of the extended family, and Syd?

She shines.

Here are some cheater pics that I took during the dress rehearsal:

And here's the real show:



This year's official show photographer has been taking photos for four years now, and he also created the slideshow that played between the acts. Check out this awesome tribute that he made for all of the Trashion Kids--he made a whole slide for each kid that he'd seen come back every year, and here's Syd's!

Look at how she's grown. Syd actually HATES it when people tell her how much she's grown (it's Nutcracker-related trauma on account of they cast by height and they're always looking for the shortest kids and it sucks), but look at the kid in those photos. She has grown! Syd has always been an artist, but she's become such an able DIYer, too, confidently constructing her vision garment from top to bottom, shoes to hairstyle. Those leggings? She sewed them from a stretchy black sweater, sure, but she also did it WITHOUT A PATTERN. No template. She didn't even trace another pair of leggings! She just... started cutting, sewed them up, and boom. Perfect leggings.

Perfect leggings. Smoky eye shadow that she applied herself. A garment with sleeves fit for royalty and suitable as long-range weapons.

I absolutely can't wait to see what this kids does next.