Kids Clothing Week Challenge Wrap-up

I didn't officially join kcwc (kids clothing week challenge), but here's what I sewed in the month of October.

I bought nearly all of the fabrics that I used from SAS fabrics, an odd jobber near Los Angeles that sells leftovers from the garment industry by the pound. The fabric often has oddly-shaped chunks cut out of it or stains or writing or rips. This makes pattern layout challenging at times. But, at $3.49/pound, this piece of good-quality cotton French terry was worth the effort. Besides, I couldn't resist fabric printed with the fashion capitol cities of the world.

A pound-sized piece was enough to make this jacket made for Iris. She picked the buttons out. They also came from SAS (25 cents each).I lengthened the jacket in Burda 9574 to waist length and the sleeves to full-length.

There is an interesting double dart detail at the sleeve cap. Overall, this is a very well-drafted and quick pattern.

I used Kwik Sew 2666 again for two pairs of shorts. The black double knit rayon/lycra might have come from Kashi at Metro Textiles, but the turquoise cotton rib knit came from SAS.

It's baby season at work so I pulled out some of my Kwik Sew favorites, Sewing for Babies/Toddlers/Children.

If you want to sew quick basics for kids, you couldn't go wrong with these books. Here are line drawings of all the things you can make with these books.

I used some remnants to make 3 pairs of baby pants, 2 small, 1 large. They were a hit.

Los Angeles is the epicenter for the "premium jeans" craze. Much of the sewing and "distressing" takes place in Gardena, CA, near SAS Fabrics. Scraps of really nice denim are sold for $1.50/pound at SAS. I bought two 24" long, full-width remnants ($1.75), cut out two baby pants (L) and have enough left over for another pair of baby pants or a girl's skirt.

I tucked this note in with the pants.

An estimated 10% of Los Angeles’ landfill waste is textile*, much of it from the garment industry. Some factory waste is collected by odd-jobbers and sold by the pound at centers throughout the region.

The fabrics for these pants come from this type of pre-consumer waste. The thread and elastic are scraps left over from other projects. All components of these pants were diverted from the waste stream.

Dress your baby in garbage! ;-)

* This is from a 1991 estimate, before much of our apparel industry went overseas. However, a recent EPA study showed that over 5% of municipal waste nationally is textiles. LA, which has become the largest remaining garment manufacturing region in the US, will likely have somewhat higher than 5%. Fortunately, we have an economic ecosystem diverting scraps from the waste stream and I am happy to be part of this food chain.

Dennis Ritchie, RIP

I just want to point out that, had OS X not been founded on Unix, I never would have switched from PC to Mac or bought a Mac for my daughter's first computer. Unix and open-source compilers changed everything. It made it possible for millions of tinkerers to tink. We didn't buy a Mac because it was cool or because we liked black turtlenecks. We bought them to mess around under the hood.

I am astonished at how little attention Dennis Ritchie's death has generated in the lamestream media (a phrase I learned from Eric). If you don't know who Dennis Ritchie is, read this eulogy at ZDNet, Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, dies.

Iris and I had fun messing around with "Hello, world" in Perl last year. When she saw me on my MacBookPro working the exercises in a Perl programming book, I started expanding the program with questions and decision trees. I had the code in one Xterm window and ran the code from another one.

She watched the effect of the code changes on the behavior of the program and exclaimed, "I see how they made The Moron Test."

Well, not really. The Moron Test was likely written in a proprietary API, application programming interface. APIs have been proliferating like tribbles of late.

Us old-timers prefer open source ubiquitous languages. Our memory banks are too full to cram in every API du jour.

Byron Lars

This post is for sewing geek goddess Carolyn, who shared her delightful new BIG-pocketed skirt today.

I once saw clothes in a boutique with four sleeves--two where they normally go and two more growing out of the side seams to tie as a sash. The label said Byron Lars. Imagine my delight when Vogue Patterns started offering some of his designs in the mid 1990s. Sadly, they are different from the ones I saw in the boutique. These are the two I have in my collection, Vogue 1419 and 1529, circa 1994 and 1995 respectively.



You can find lots more on Flickr, Ebay and Etsy.

I, too, am working on my own skirt with BIG pockets. Actually, they are sleeve-sized.
I'm still playing around with the design, trying to incorporate the shirt collars and sleeves.
I found two identical shirts at Goodwill. I didn't like the original Kelly green and white check, so I over-dyed it with turquoise. I found some turquoise washed rayon challis and a remnant of silk/cotton jacquard in the same lovely color in my collection. There are definitely possibilities here.