My good friend was expecting her second baby any day but never found out the sex of the baby so I had a bit of a challenge figuring out what to make for her. Weeks ago I had ordered an adorable crochet sock monkey hat & diaper cover set that I found on Etsy and thought that would make a great little gift for a boy or girl, plus Halloween *is* just around the corner! I love this photo from the Etsy website!
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| Sock Monkey Set from Treasured Creation |
Still, I wanted to make something for my friend as well and it occurred to me that she had been looking around for a comfortable bedtime nursing bra, one without complicated clips and straps. Well, I thought, that might be an interesting little sewing project and decided to go in search of some pretty but comfortable fabric.
And so began my first real project with knitted fabric. It was quite frustrating at times. I read online that you should never use a straight stitch on knits because the thread will just break when the fabric tries to stretch out. Instead there's an overlock stitch or a stretch stitch that most new machines have. Of course, with my Singer Featherweight I have limited options so the best I could do was use my zig-zagger attachment (recall the stapler-sized attachment I have which moves the fabric side-to-side to compensate for a machine that can only do a straight stitch).  |
| Reversible top |
The thing I like about my zig-zagger is that it is COOL. I think it is so clever how these mechanical attachments work and allow the Featherweight to do so many of the things that a modern machine can do. The disadvantage is that for certain light fabrics (or stretchy, in this case), the zig-zag stitches come out pretty uneven because the fabric doesn't clamp very well, making the side-to-side movements quite inconsistent.
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| Reversible top |
Since I knew I wouldn't be doing a terribly nice job of finishing the edges I decided to make this a reversible bra to hide all seams and then added some cute pink elastic lace trim for accents. Originally I sewed in a cream-coloured elastic along the bust line but the results were pretty horrendous as the fabric flared out in bizarre ways. Finally I gave up, ripped out the elastic, and replaced it with wider pink lace instead.
My friend's baby came two weeks early and we found out that it was a healthy, beautiful baby girl. Perfect, I thought! I decided to whip together a matching pair of bloomers with the fabric left over from the nursing bra, which is what you see below. After first cutting out the pattern for the bloomers I thought they looked quite huge and wondered if my friend would know it was for the baby and not herself! Luckily after putting in the elastics the bloomers shrunk down to a reasonable size and there could be no mistake that these were for the baby :P
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