This is dress Q also from Japanese craft book ISBN 4579110544. I know this is a dress because in the book there is a little girl wearing it. It’s about the same size as top H so maybe H is a dress and not a top. So anyhoo…I love making clothes for Isabelle! I was trying to describe to my friend, Olinda, how happy it makes me. It’s like when Tom Hanks character in Cast Away makes fire and he is stomping around saying I have made fire!! Yeah…feels like that to me. Look what I have made!!! FIRE!! But instead it’s a dress. It’s totally corny but yep that’s how happy it makes me.

And ooooh elastic for the gathers in the pocket. It worked. I love how it looks. Aaaahhhh fire!!

I was surprised to find that no sleeves was actually harder to sew than sleeves! Same with the neckline. Harder than the gathered neckline. That’s because there is more folding, ironing, and sewing but it’s so clean looking. I can’t believe I made it. I messed up a bit though. I added the bias binding first when I should have sewed the shoulders up first and then did the bias binding as one strip instead of two. Oh well. Learn from your mistakes.

And can you see there are ties in the back?

I thought it would be too large for Isabelle. But surprisingly or not so surprisingly my giant baby fits it.

Oh and another happy thing. The fabric was only $1 a yard at Joann fabrics. ONE DOLLAR A YARD! I got a whole bunch of different fabric from that section. They aren’t cute like the fabric from Kitty Craft or Super Buzzy. I don’t love them but for $1 a yard you can’t beat that! I can’t wait to make some more clothes for Isabelle.

I get spam. It makes me mad. Not a lot of spam. Just from two certain companies, a yarn place and a pet place. I never purchased anything from them before. I have never heard of them before. It’s so irritating. Why do they think I would buy anything from them when they keep sending me unsolicited email? Hey idiots, who told you that was a good business plan, to just spam people? I mean seriously! It makes me hopping mad. I want to jump on their stupid ass heads. And I don’t want to push unsubscribe because they say you shouldn’t do that because then spammers know they are reaching an actual person and will probably send more spam. F. U. C. K. E. R. S. Sorry. I’m that mad as if you can’t tell from my jumping on their ripped off heads.

Why does it make me that mad? I don’t know it just does. I wanted to write them on their contact page over and over and over and just spam the shit out of them. See how they like it.

Ok sorry I’m coming across crazy now. But ask Olinda. I AM! Bwa ha ha ha!! Ok maybe I shouldn’t post this insane little post that I even made a little drawing for. Ah what the hell. Pushing publish now.

I finally tried my Gocco out last night!! It took me long enough. Everything I wanted to make was on fabric and I wanted to try on paper first so there it sat unused. I finally took Christine’s advice and just bought some index cards and did a test run, something that I didn’t have to worry about being perfect and just something simple. And I love it!! It was so easy. Mostly everything worked perfectly from the get go.

I wanted to test to see if a print from my inkjet printer would work so I printed out a little scribble and then drew my design around it with the Riso pen that came with the Gocco. Then I burned my master and applied the ink. Alan chose brown, or kaka brown as he called it saying I would probably use kaka brown the least. (But oh no, I just realized…I have kaka brown hair. I would totally use kaka brown all the time if I were going to make drawings of us!! Well anyhoo…)

Then I started printing. The inkjet printed part worked! But I didn’t want to print that part so I just covered it up with a little post it note which worked fine. I really didn’t think about lining anything up which DUH I should have. The design was very tight and close to the edges. I didn’t pay attention when I made my master so the index card didn’t line up to any of the lines on the Gocco. I tried using a sticky to align it but it was right on the edge so it didn’t work really well. I basically just eyeballed it. So print, print, print. Some of them were centered right and some weren’t. But that’s what happens when you eyeball stuff. I used up all 100 index cards.

Then when I was done I didn’t know what to do with my master. I wanted to save it and I vaguely remembered reading on Flickr Gocco pool about storing it in the freezer. But the problem. Flickr was down last night! I couldn’t look it up. So I didn’t know what to do. I just panicked a little and stuck it in the freezer. If it’s ruined that’s ok. It was so easy I’ll just make a new one!! I love it! I fell asleep with Gocco thoughts in my head.

And on a completely different subject. Here is silly Isabelle trying to sit on a balloon. She was doing this as I was trying to post so I just had to take some pictures and share.