From time to time I’ve been pleasantly surprised by things I see at Old Navy. Their prices are reasonable and quality is not bad at all. I’ve also found that their nicer things sell like hotcakes. You snooze you lose!

Look at this! I should sign up R for ballet lesson so she can wear this. Wait, I saw this one a week ago and the bigger sizes are already sold out! I really like the grey one, but it’s totally gone! I’m totally kicking myself. Okay, I guess ballet lessons can wait…

I love the ruffle details on this one. The ruffles at the neck has two layers, one wider on the bottom. That’s ingenious!

And look at this one with all those ruffles! Any girl will look like a doll in this dress.

Aren’t these dresses amazing? These are things that I can actually afford! It’s really hard to resist buying and keep on sewing when they make things this cute and affordable. I have to say Old Navy have got some great designers. I will definitely keep checking for ideas.

It looks like R is having a very big belly, just like her brothers when they were babies. Her pants are all too tight but too long. It’s almost impossible to find pants that would fit her waist not having to fold up the pants several times. I made these leggings for R, since she’s getting bigger and bigger everyday and most of her pants are too tight. I think they’re size 86 from Ottobre. Both pairs are 100% cotton ribbed knit fabric from a fabric coop. The second pair actually is the same fabric that I used for the binding of the sweatshirt dress I made. Now I have a set! I used a zigzag stitch to attach the waistband and a double needle for the hem. They came out pretty nice. However, I’m not so crazy about the elastic. It feels very hard. Most of the baby pants I come across have elastics that feel much softer. These are probably too long for R. Okay, I should have made them shorter but I was in a rush as usual and was too lazy to measure her legs. As usual, I need to work on the pictures. I just purchased two work lights from Home Depot for lighting. Hopefully I can come up with better pictures.

I can’t believe that it’s been over 2 months since I have sewn up anything or updated this blog. Did I really have that much to do, or was I just being lazy? Having three kids is definitely not an excuse to stop doing things that I enjoy. A while ago I got some soft sweatshirt fleece from Walmart’s for $2 per yard. It’s probably some polyester blend but it feels very soft. I wanted to make some sweat pants for the boys. I was too lazy to copy from theirs so I used this pattern from Ottobre. I omitted the elastic cuff at the bottom.

With more than enough fabric, I decided to also make a pair for R. Well, it’s not really a girly pink color but R has enough of those and I’m never fond of the pastel pink anyway. I always prefer something other than pastel pink for R. I figured that as long as the shape is girly than any color would be fine for a girl. The pattern is from the same issue of Ottobre. This is my second time using this pattern, but I guess I forgot to post the previous pair I made with some velour.


Even after 3 pairs of pants, I still had some fabric left. Then I decided that I could use it to test out the Nasta pinafore dress (04-2008-3). Okay, this color is not exactly what I imagined for that dress, but at least if I didn’t do a good job I wouldn’t be wasting some nice fabric. Surprisingly, it came out better than expected. Sorry for the bad picture. I notice that pictures don’t come out good when I use flash. This dress was very easy, except the pocket gave me some trouble due to the fabric I used. The colors from the binding really made an otherwise boring dress with an ugly color into something unusual. What do you think?

Normally I would buy a piece of fabric just because it looks nice. I would have an idea who it would be for (M and/or J if boy print, R if girl print, or me), but would not have a definite piece of clothing in mind. This proves to be not such a good strategy, since I now have such a big stash of pretty fabrics and have no idea what I’m really going to make. I thought about coming up with a project before buying the fabric, but that plan got derailed every time when I saw some really nice fabric that I had to have at the time otherwise it would be gone forever. Anyway, I looked through some Ottobre magazines and tried to pick out something simple I could make and this is what I came up with:

It was quite easy to make, even though I had some problem with the binding and had to rip out seams quite a few times. The fabric is a cute C&C cotton interlock print. It’s very thin. I don’t know this brand of clothing well except that I have seen it at Bloomingdale’s and thought that they were a bunch of overpriced t-shirts. I just found out that they also make kids clothes and saw this tank top at Nordstrom for $48! I like this style since the straps can be adjusted. That means R will still fit into this next summer.