A Tale of Two Ties

Lil man went back to school today. Naturally though we added a bit of excitement by my alarm not going off in the morning [I definitely set one not that Rikki believes me!] Anyway that meant I was woken up by lil man at 8 o'clock. Bearing in mind he has to be at school by 8.45 and neither me or Rikki had slept particularly well, that left us with a bit of a rush on our hands to say the least!!! 

But we made it and now I'm sat without a lil man to annoy me / snuggle me. I've been trying to convince Rikki to watch Moana with me but apparently after six weeks of Disney movies he's not watching anything with a singing, dancing or a happy ending! 

Anyways on to the ties. Me and Lil man made these one afternoon of the summer holidays. The weather was rotten and he was reaching fever pitch so I decided to let him have his first ever proper go on my sewing machine.

Cheifly his job was the lower and lift the presser foot, press the reverse button , take the pins out and guide the fabric. He did really well actually and he listened really carefully to make sure he was doing it properly.

I chose the patterns, Rikkis is made from a pattern from the sew everything book , and Lil mans is drafted to his exact size using freesewing.org. I'd been planning on making them matching ties for a while but I was going to scale down Rikkis tie pattern. Luckily the drafting website saved me a lot of time and effort! 

The fabric I used it a bit thick really but I chose it so it would match my dress. [Wearing matching outfits as a family is way way underrated by the way!]

You can see the difference in scale here. As I said the fabric was a bit thick so it makes quite a big knot, but it did mean I didn't need to use interfacing. The cotton on the inside of the tie tail is just a scrap from my quilting drawer. I didn't follow the instructions on freesewing.org, the website has you sew the end so you can't see the tie lining edge but I was sewing with a small child so I just went for a simpler option. 

I used my labels from the dutch label shop as tie keepers which I think is a really cute feature.

They did take a lot of pressing but we were both very pleased with how they turned out!!! Plus it was nice to see him getting excited about sewing and letting him do something very grown up like sew on my machine! 

In other news:

I'm looking forward to getting back on schedule with blogging and sewing again.

My friend turned up yesterday with some wool, curtain fabric and buttons that he'd pulled out of his mums loft. I love it when people think of me when they find hidden crafty gems or stuff they are getting rid off. 

I went to see my mums neighbour and we had a really great chat. You might say she's the one who properly got me started on the whole loving to sew thing! But I'll cover that in another post!

Plus in that post you will see one of the biggest projects I've ever done [and on the tightest deadline] and its not ever for me!!!

Much Love 

Frankie 

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