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Sophie’s Universe #4

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And so I reach the end of the 4th part of this CAL. In this part we make the first flowers of Sofia’s garden!

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So many color changes and so many details make this blanket so addictive to make! I just want to get to the next round to see how it looks, and once there i just want to get to the next one and so on!

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I still have a lot of work ahead until I get to crochet the last stitch but I’m guessing I’ll be making another one after this one is made!

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And it’s turning out way better than I have imagined:

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And it’s time to start the 5th part!

Children Backpack Pattern!

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This week it’s back to school time in Portugal! And I had a costum order for a very special girl gooing for the first time to kindergarden!

children backpack

I made this backpack using my Back To School pattern and it keeps getting better every time! I love this pattern!

Children backpack

I made a matching piping cord and used sequins with flower and leaf shapes to add a special touch.

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I love this fabric and finding it was like a one in a million thing. I never saw anything like it again, but still have some of it om my backpack kits See kits here.

The pattern cames with an inseide pocket and it’s really usefull.

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I aldo made a bag for a change of cloths matching the backpack.

DSCN3192_1 The owl backpack was totaly loved and that’s what really matters and now this little girl is going happier to school!

Happy Back to School Time!

Pirate Princess Cake

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This is the cake I’ve baked for Sofia 2nd birthday. It’s a pirate princess, perfect for this summer days!

pirate princess cake

The princess was modeled in portuguese sugar paste.

princess pirate cake 3 The hair was made with an extrusor.

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I applyed the fondant only in the side of the cake and folded it a bit to the top. Then made the contour with the pink flowers and hided the rest with the “sand” made from cookies.

pirate princess cake 8

The tree is made with a wooden stick and the leaves were made in advance so they can dry enought to hold the shape. Even though, I had to make a couple of coconuts to apply under just to keep my leaves on place!

pirate princess cake 4

Baking cakes in summer hilidays is great because there’s a lot of hand willing to help! My mother molded the anchor and I added it a metal eddible finnish. There’s lots of glitter on the cake as my girls love glitter! All the flowers and strars were cutted by my girls, my niece and my aunt! Even my husband helped by rolling the fondant so I could have time to shape the doll!

pirate princess cake 5 Usually I cober my cake base with fondant but not this time. Again I used cookies to make a kind of sand! All the blue balls and strars were also made by other hands than mines and Mafalda glued all the stars on the balls!

pirate princess cake 6 The cake was a great chocolate cake with a m&m treasure inside! It’s always exciting for the kids to see all this m&m’s falling from the inside!

DSCN3114_1 And it was a delicious chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling! The best I’ve made so far!

 

Pirate Princess

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Can you belive that it’s been 2 years since my princess was born? I can hardly belive it’s been that fast! And she is just an amazing little girl, so sweet and funny!

We had a birthday party and I baked her a cake! It had to be a pirate princess cake, as she is quite a pirate but without losing her princess style!

She eved had an hiden treasure inside her cake!

And lots of cousins to play with! All under 8 years old! How lucky!

Oh my! My baby is growing up so fast!

Holland Designs Pattern Review

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Summer has arrived and it’s time for my usual blog summer break. I’m not a big fan of blogging on the summer months.

Mostley because I’m not at home so much time and I do craft a lot less. Summer is all about going out and having fun and I know you’re not arround as much as you use to, too.

Anyway I might came here if I do have something worth sharing. So, if you’re a subscriber you’ll know right away the
minute I post a new thing.

I don’t want to take this break with unfinished things and I do have a blogpost that has been waiting to long. I made
this projects in the end of 2014.

Having a sort of a photo blog makes me search for perfection when it comes to my photos but It’s not always easy to take photos. It takes time and beeing mother of 3 kids and having a full time job doesn’t help a thing. And even when I do have the time my models not always cooperate!

So today I want to show you my crochet sweaters made from Holland Designs patterns. They are written in american terms do if you’re not american you’ll have to convert the stitchs, but other then this the patterns are so easy and they make such a good looking sweaters!

I only have two photos to show but I made 3 sweater. 2 of them were made with the CROCHETED PEASANT TOP pattern and my goal was to use only yarns I had on my stash.

I made Teresa sweater in vertical stripes using two shades of pink because I didn’t had enought of each color to make a sweater. I’m also a little bit insecure when it comes to sleeves because I love 3/4 sleeves but in this case they ended up looking like the sweater is one size down her size! The pattern doens’t come with sleeves but it’s easy to add the stitches for the sleeves.

crochet girl sweater

I don’t like long sleeves on kids because they end up getting to dirty. But I made Mafalda sweater (no photo) with long sleeves. I used a black yarn because I had plenty of black yarn on my stash and I really wanted to spend it. I also
finished the neck cord with two big crochet flowers to add some fun!

Then I made Sofia a cardigan using the SHAWL COLLARED CARDIGAN pattern. This pattern also calls for short sleeves and I made hers a little longer to finish my purple yarn.

girl crochet sweater

Making cloths for babies is quite tricky because they grow faster than my crochet speed! I started this cardigan after her 1st birthday and decided to go for size 18 months. She did wear it in October but after it was too cold and in the spring the cardigan was to short! I should have made size 2, it would have been big in October but she could have wear it in spring and maybe in cold summer nights. Live and learn!

Both are great patterns and I want to make them again. Maybe this time I will allow myself to buy a special yarn!

And Holland Designs also has patterns for boys! No excuses this time! Come on, grab your crochet hook and have fun!

If you need any help I’ll be arround!

Mccall’s Sewing pattern M6685 & M6496

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In the end of April I was invited to a wedding and as soon as I got invited I start thinking in the possibility of making the girls dresses.

I was higgly motivated because I stumbled across some photos of a Cristhening dress I made as an order I took a few years ago. After all this years I finally agree I made a really good job back then! So I thought why not?

I had a litlle more than a month to pull this off! 3 dresses from scratch with so little time was very challenging but I made it!

First thing was deciding on the pattern. I endup buying my patterns on SewingPatterns.com, mostley because I’m very impulsive when it comes to sewing. I like to start my projects as soon as I can and use all the passion energy. I buy my patterns in a digital format nor in paper and this way I can get them as soon as I pay for them. I still have the hard work or printing and put all the sheets together to make that huge pattern sheet.

This process is quite simple as you get access to an account that stores all the patterns you buy from them and you can print them as many times as you want. Then you have to install a software on you computer and this is from where you’ll print the patterns in any size your printer can print.

You can print the pattern and cut directly from your paper sheet because you’ll be able to print it again and again! Or you can store this and use sewing papper.

This way I was ready to start ASAP! I ended upo choosing to Mccall’s patterns: Mccalls 6685 and Mccall’s 6496. I made Mafalda dress from Mccalls 6685 and Teresa dress was made with the bodice from 6685 and the skirt from the C view 6496.

mccalls6685

mccalls6685

mccalls6494

mccalls 6494

Sofia dress was made with m6494 but I made the bodice from view A and the skirt from view B. It was fun playing with the pattern pieces.

After choosing the pattern I chose the fabrics. I’ve been buying fabrics from Tecidos.com.pt, a fabric store based on Germany. It has a great variety of fabrics and has a reasonable price/quality relation. I do find that their shipping and handling time is a bit bigger than it could be, but it’s an EU store and so I don’t have to worry with customs charges and exchange rates. And around here it’s getting harder to find this kind of fabrics in local stores.

And in just a little more than 1 month I sucessfully made 3 dresses! I just couldn’t get my models to make a decent pose but they were quite bored at this stage of the wedding and it was to hot to exist!

They don’t look so bored from behind!

Sofia was always in a great mood! Just let her be and she’s fine!

I learned a lot making this dresses and specially I learned that I have to be quite carefull cutting my pattern pieces right. Sometimes I tend to be slopy and when I put the pievies together they don’t play along well. It happend when I was sewing the zippers and I couldn’t match the back pieces together in place! I had to make it right so I could sew the zipper and have a perfect clean finish look.

And it was also challenging to sew lace fabrics. It was my first time and they can be quite temperamental to work with but the good thing is that lace fabrics are quite good at hidding the mess 🙂 So no worries in here!

I am happy with the way they came out! And if I had to chose one as my favorite I would choose Sofia yellow dress. I don’t know if it’s because it’s smaller or if it’s because it has more colors on or simply because she makes it shine on her!

What’s your favorite dress?

Crochet baby blanket

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Every baby needs a cuddle, whether it’s a quilt or a woolen blanket. And I’m always jumping from quilts to wool blankets.

And this time I choose to work in wool and made a crochet blanket in harlequin stitch. It’s really simple to make and not it doesn’t get boring. It works in all color scheems and even works in a blanket for grown-ups! While on the photo my stripes are vertical the blanket is crocheted in horizontal stripes.

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I kept the blue as main color as this blanket is for a baby boy, but since I made Sofia baby blanket I’m in love with the trilogy gray, yellow and white. In fact this color scheme is the same as the one I used on Sofia blanket but the 3 shades of purple and pink have been replaced by shades of blue!

I also made a simple border with only a shell line around using the darker blue and ended eith a slip stitch in yellow. The nice thing about this border is that merges beautifully with the blanket.

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This is a very soft baby blanket and it’s big enough to wrap a baby and small enough to be easily portable with the baby!

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I have a feeling that I will make this project again!

Don’t you think this is the perfect baby gift ever?

Do you want to try this stitch? Fell free to use my free tutorial!

[cryout-button-light url=”http://meiasmarias.com/documents/MeiasMarias%20Tutorial%20Arlequim%20Stitch.pdf”]Harlequin Stitch[/cryout-button-light]

Cloth Diaper #2

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We are expecting the arrival of a new baby boy cousin. And of course, my hands are working hard crafting baby gifts.

I like cloth diapers. I like especially because I used many, as I always found them helpful and with the versatility needed to facilitate my mother routine with a newborn.

Cloth diapers also have a special meaning for me because they were the first things I sewed and embroidered without being in cross stitch. Cloth diapers taught me other embroidery stitches and made me want to learn other things, and it was a challenge to sew the first bias in this cloth diapers! They were a great school for me 🙂

So when there are new babies coming, as a rule, I like to offer cloth diapers.

However, this cloth diaper is larger than the usual, it looks almost like a small blanket so it called for something more elaborate than I normally do.

The car is one of my appliqque designs and it’s available in my store. I chose to sew it by hand, because my studio is still a work in progress and my sewing machines don’t have a place to stay yet!

I chose a heavy border to give it a blanket look rather than a normal cloth diaper. As this cloth diaper is bigger than normal it’s grat to use as a summer blanket: fresh and light but super cozy!

The crochet stitch I used was the pom-pom stitch and while it is very easy to make it’s time consuming. It also consumes a lot of wool! A whole 50gr ball of yarn. If I had 20cm left over it was too much! But it is very cute and gives a different and original finish to the project.

And it’s a good light blanket and it sure is unique! There’s nothing like a handmade gift!

Crochet Giraffe

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Maria is a friendly and playful giraffe that was born of something that was supposed to be and then it was not!

I’ve never crocheted a toy before even though I’ve tryed once and completley failed! And although it didn’t turn out just like I wanted Mary is perfect and it was a great challenge and a great learning time for me.

What I really wanted was to make a doll from a great designer, for which I fell in love for real, but I had never made one and before and so decided to try this one first before embarking on another pattern shop adventure. And I think a good part of me is a doll maker.

It gives me so much joy the process of making the all the parts, see the doll take shape and then draw them facial expressions. Just like with my waldorf dolls.

And I love the enthusiasm with which my girls follow the process, especially Teresa that was so anxious to play with it and ended up naming the giraffe as Maria.

Maria has stripes, many stripes, which is why it didn’t turned out just as I wanted. The truth is that when I was choosing the yarn colors I said to myself, over and over and over agian, that I shoul use only red or only orange, but in the end I could not resist and I ended up using the two colors, and the effect I wanted would had better results without the orange and without the red.

But for Teresa it was perfect, with orange and red. Simply perfect!

And Maria even went on a bike ride!

Teresa was so pleased to be able to play with Maria that was a pleasure for me to watch her playing! Do you see this pretty face?

Now imagine the look on Teresa face when I told her that Maria was a gift for her!

And once again my work gets properly paid!

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