Inspinration: Battle of the blogs

Two years ago, Cas en Nina organized a super cool competition for 10 sewing bloggers which was won by her. This cool Battle of the Blogs is back, and I am part of it! Today, the first round starts, and me and nine wonderful blogger colleagues are showing you what we made with the one meter fabric that we received from Cas en Nina. We were allowed to combine the meter with other fabrics, and I went all the way and made my four kids each all something with the lovely Znok flowers that I got.

Let's start with the tunic I made my eldest. I used the Mini Swagger pattern by George and Ginger, this one was the high on my sewing list, and the first pattern I cut from my fabric. I love the look of this patten. It has the flare of a dress with circle skirt but needed much less fabric than a dress in her size would usually take. If I would have made both circles in flower fabric, It might have been a different story, but like this, I had enough left for more garments. Make sure you check out the small doll in the third picture, on her own, my daughter sewed her cloths by hand, and those clothes might be the garments in this post that I am most proud of.

For my son I sewed a Dimo shirt from Harristar designs. This is actually the fourth Dimo that I sewed, but I have not come around to blogging the previous ones. I bought the pattern when I was preparing for our sewing weekend, I actively searched patterns that would be perfect for scraps. I sewed two during the weekend, you can probably spot them in the overview picture that I posted then. I love seeing boys in flower fabric, but until now, I had not sewn something with flowers for my son, he usually turns down my plans. Now I did not ask, and just sewed. He already wore the shirt to school, so I think I can sew him more flowers in the future.

For my middle daughter I used my knitification powers to slightly hack the Azure party dress by Ainsley Fox (price is in Australian dollar) into a knit dress. I omitted the zipper and instead of piping I used ribbing strips. I really love the effect and it was so easy! I just folded a ribbing strip between the layers and serged the seam as usual. The skirt is a very flowy fabric, officially it is a lining fabric, but I bought it to recreate the feel of this dress. The fabric is rather see through so I put a pink circle skirt as lining, so this dress can twirl!

These first three garments where planned before I started cutting my fabric. The last one, the dress for my youngest was not. She is small, and I figured I would come up with a plan for the scraps. After cutting the tunic and shirt for my son, I saw that I would be able to cut a circle skirt from the large piece that was left, and I went for it. I was thinking of maybe switching in the circle skirt into Azure dress, but I realized it might not be long enough (I kind a forgot to add hem allowance). So, I went back to my original skirt idea for my middle one and moved over the circle skirt to my smallest.

I had made a mistake in cutting one of the Dimo sleeve pieces. I had printed a much smaller sleeve size and actually cut it from the fabric before I realized my mistake. I was bumped, because I wanted to use as much as possible from this fabric and could not stand it even though it was really a tiny piece and I had cut it from a scrap of flowers. I decided to roll with it and use the too small sleeve for my youngest. I cut another and winged a bodice combined with some other scraps (I was down to the last scraps, so I could not have mirrored sleeve and a flower back, which I forgot to make a picture of). The skirt is long, but that is how she likes it, this way she will be able to wear it for another year.

While sewing these garments I made pictures of my latest favorite circle skirt hemming technique. I recently read a trick on how to gather the edges with a serger and it works perfectly for me. I could not find the post anymore where I read it, so I just made pictures and a small tutorial to show you. Like I wrote a while back, I gave up on getting pictures of my middle one without leggings if she does not want to. These leggings were not an ideal combination with the dress, but just pretend it is not there. My kids where doing the same with me during the shoot. It is so hard to get them all to look at you at the same time. In the end it turns out that I like the ones with the worse poses the best though, it really shows them how they are.

Like I said at the beginning, I sewed these garments as part of Battle of the Blog, edition two. For round one we all received one meter of fabric of our choice from Cas en Nina. In the webshop you now get a 10% discount on with the code BATTLE on MONALUNA en ZNOK fabric. Curious to see what the others received and what they sewed, check out the overview at Cas and Nina. Make sure you vote for your favorite, the price we can win is amazing!