That... is incredibly freaking cool. I want to do it!

I've always loved twirly dresses with fitted waists, but they were never around... until I started being pregnant and breastfeeding, which meant 99% of them weren't wearable! I have a bit of a mental block about sewing clothes for myself, but one of my New Year's resolutions was to make myself six garments this year. This is number one. (Yeah, I'm not exactly ahead of schedule...)

I designed it myself. The bodice was drastically altered from a rather ugly Ottobre button-up shirt pattern; the skirt was my first-ever circle skirt. Construction issues included an unflatteringly boxy top; a complete dismantling and feminising of the bodice; the subsequent addition of an invisible side zip so I could get back into it; a peculiar lack of fittedness once it was all sewn back together; a vague plan to shir the waistband; and finally the helpful suggestion of a friend, namely "Buy a belt". Well, duh. $2 later at the op shop, the dress looked a whole lot better.

Pardon the photos - my husband and five-year-old daughter took 'em, and their skill levels are comparably dubious.









I love the twirliness of the skirt. It could really use a tulle petticoat, but I'll buy one - I've worked with tulle a few times lately, and the stuff is the devil.

Anyway, it's not perfect, but it's one of the very few... indeed, possibly the only garment I've sewn myself which I feel able to wear out of the house without embarrassment. So that's a start!

Very nice! I love that pattern. Mum's made me two aprons from it, and I recently borrowed it and made one for a friend's wedding. I did do the pocket, but without the binding (satin binding around sharp corners... not fun).

Well done! My husband keeps pestering me to sew him some shirts. I have a bit of a mental block about it, but I've done a few for my son now, so I basically know how they go together. Well, minus the stand collar and cuff plackets...

Yours looks great!

Hee! No, just a ridiculously large Black Orpington. She's called Georgia. Arial (younger Blue Orpington) and Lucida and Wingdings (two Lavender Aracaunas) are behind her.

Thanks for the nice comments, everyone!

Lovely! And what gorgeous kids. Your daughter has beautiful hair!

Now that's a Disney costume I haven't seen before! Very cool. Well done.

'Scuse the mass post; I'm going through some photos in a lame, half-hearted attempt at organising them, and found a bunch of clothes I'd made.

Here we go...

This was a cute little spring jacket from Emma Hardy's Making Children's Clothes. It didn't fit for long, sadly.



My daughter is modelling a messenger bag I made for my nephew. Sadly, said nephew's father took one look at it, declared it a handbag and no son of his, etc, and banished it. I hear the nephlet has since unearthed it and uses it to carry around his toy cars, though. Heh.



Here's DD in a party dress I made from a modified Ottobre pattern. The skirt's a little longer and fuller than it should have been, to accommodate twirling preferences; and I accidentally bought fabric in a narrower width than the pattern stated, so I had to add the curved yoke thingy and do some fancy cutting to avoid running out of fabric!



And here she is wearing the apron I made for the birthday girl. It's meant to tie around the waist, not the bust, but what can I say - DH took the photo. A heavily modified version of another Emma Hardy pattern - I basically just kept her idea of a cutout neckhole and ties round the front.



I made this whole outfit for DS: the shirt before he was born, the biblet copied from one my sister sent me, the waistcoat and trousers from Ottobre.





Another waistcoat and trousies, both Ottobre. I love Ottobre! He's not unhappy in this photo, just temporarily worried that his tummy button has gone AWOL. Don't worry, he found it.



Another shirt and Ottobre shorts:



Going back in time a bit, a heavily-modified Ottobre overall pattern. These were made from the fabric of one of our groomsmen's shirts! They were big medieval-type shirts, so there was plenty of fabric to work with.





And a not-so-flattering shot of the baby in another pair - the same pattern, but much closer to the original.



And here's DD modelling the Snow White dress I made her for her fourth birthday. Naturally, the dress isn't ironed in the picture - the sleeves look better when they are. That was in May, and the dress is now distinctly worn and dingy-looking around the bottom, has been repaired twice, and is nearly too small. I'm making her a Cinderella costume for Christmas, based on the same pattern, but sized up and altered.





I'm pretty sure I've done more sewing than that recently, but that'll do for now!

A friend of ours had a surprise 30th birthday party, and the theme was "geek". So naturally, we dressed up geekily - my daughter in a Captain America tutu (her choice), DH as a Sith lord, and the baby as a Starfleet officer. True to form, I ran out of time to make my own costume and ended up going as a medieval/Renaissance... pirate... wench... gypsy... thing, in borrowed garb.

Upon arriving at the party, we found that the birthday boy's family had intended "geek" quite differently. They'd all dressed up Revenge of the Nerds style, with pocket protectors, taped glasses, op-shop-ugly clothes and, apparently following some stereotype of which I am unaware, fake freckles. (Seriously, is that even a thing? I can see pale skin, even pimply skin, but freckles? Since when were freckles a geek thing? I mistook one kid for Pippi Longstocking...)

And to top it off, the birthday boy's mother took one look at my Starfleet-clad baby and cooed "Awww, he's little Luke Skywalker, bless him!"

You can choose your friends, but they can't choose their family. Anyway. The baby.

His name is Miles and he has blondeish curls, so naturally I should have dressed him up as Miles O'Brien. But I've never been keen on that Engineering mustard yellow, and I couldn't find any in the correct fabric anyway, so I threw his odds of survival to the wind and bought some red.

Then it turned out I'd misremembered the uniforms, and didn't have enough red for a TNG-style uniform. Cue much googling, until I found a Voyager command uniform with minimal red. Not a huge Voyager fan, but meh; I figured it would have to do.

And here is the lad himself. A credit to the Federation, if I do say so myself.

Gorgeous! The cut, the fabric, the detailing, everything. It looks amazingly professional. Gives me something to aspire to.