Black

Then I changed the serger thread to black.

First up, I made a pair of black stretch pants for Iris using Kwik Sew 2893. She has grown since last summer. Rather than trace out a new pattern in the next larger size, I just used the old one from last year and added a 1/4 inch at the outer leg seams and an inch at the hem when I cut them out. It worked fine.

Costuming done, I went back to her fall wardrobe. When we cleaned out her closet, she sent a lot of clothes off to her cousin. The poor girl was down to only 10 skirts/skorts*.

Kwik Sew's Sewing for Children gives simple instructions for altering a pants pattern to make a skirt. I liked the pockets and the elastic gathered back of Butterick 4845 and decided to do just that. I had thought about adding front pleats to balance the fullness in the front and back of the skirt. Then the August 2009 issue of Burda Style (formerly Burda World of Fashion) arrived.

Iris was ready to wear the 08-2009-145 skirt as short as in the picture. I wanted it to be longer. We compromised by agreeing to ruffles. It was anther opportunity to experiment with the ruffler foot. (Click through to see a video of how the contraption works. Fascinating!)

I had another topological lapse, which resulted in a ruffle seam in the center front instead of the center back. I started sewing at 8:45 last night and finished 90 minutes later. Sigh.
I piped the pockets in hot pink. She complained that she only likes side seam pockets. Grrr.
There was much discussion over at Miss Celie's Pants and Sigrid's about the the new name and format for Burda Style/WOF/WTF. I tend to glance briefly at the crafts, but have never made any of them. The 11 pages of crafts did seem a bit excessive. But, it is a theme issue about British style. Making kooky lamps out of chipped china fits right in with the theme. Here's the table of contents. There is one sweater pattern, but it's still very sewing heavy. I looked at several other issues from 2009 and they all had a similar number of patterns.
I pulled out the oldest BWOF in my collection, June 1995. (Actually, I had some older ones in German from the 1980s, bought when I lived in Germany, but they didn't survive my many moves since then.)
The table of contents also shows many pages of crafts and knitting patterns!
The back had a garden theme.
The cross-stitch chart took several pages and there were several more pages of recipes.
The 1995 issue had 114 pages overall while the 2009 issue had 112 pages. But the 1995 issue had more non-sewing content and about the same number of sewing patterns. It's a wash. I like several of this month's patterns well enough to want to sew them up soon. What matters most to me is not how many patterns they give overall, but how many patterns they offer that I want to sew. Anyway, the issue was in my house only about 3 days before I sewed up the first item.

* Iris had 17 skirts at the last Wardobe Maintenance post in 2008.
Since she was a toddler, I had always refashioned thrifted denim skorts for her. See #1 in Sunday Hike, #2 in Photo Catch Up and #3 (oops, never got around to posting that one).