Over the Holidays

During the month of December I usually take a break from the Irish Dance work to focus on family and the holidays.  Sometimes that includes some sewing projects as gifts or other requests from customers.  This winter so far I’ve done a few really fun projects.  The first was right after Thanksgiving.

Tara was asked to dance in one of the local Nutcracker productions.  She was a doll that Herr Drosselmeyer presents during the party scene in the first act.  Now they wanted her to Irish Dance during this section as something different.  The music that she danced to is the soldier’s music which is very fast and dramatic.  Now we know it would be kind of inappropriate for her to Irish Dance as a soldier, so thats where having her be another doll was decided.  I got to make her costume, which was pretty simple, but so much fun.  Here are some pics….not great cause she hates when I take her picture in these kinds of situations, and we’ve already determined that at best I take terrible photos!

The skirt is short black, and has a red silk underlayer.  The back has a beautiful embroidered patch with some tulle sewn underneath that hangs down.  The embroidery on her sash was adapted from her most recent Irish solo costume that was designed by Taoknitter Arts.  Ann let me make this costume piece with the embroidery I already had!!  I made the ruffles for her neck and hands to finish out the “doll look.”  She was thrilled with her costume and had a great time doing the production.

This picture is really dark but you can kind of see the tulle in the back, and how she wore ballet pink tights with her ghillies!!!  What a look!!!!

Then of course we had Christmas here at home.  We love our small family tradition of the kids receiving new pajamas on Christmas Eve and taking pictures of them both.  It’s one of the ways we mark the passage of time and how much they’ve grown each year.  I have fun trying to find coordination pajamas…..nearly impossible as they are teenagers!  I find the smallest detail and if there is something they both have……then Viola!  They match!!!

Pretty sure this year there was the color black somewhere in each of their sets.  Perfect match!!!!!  I of course love making them do this….I think they secretly think they love it as well!  So this is our official Christmas 2011 photo!

Once the big holiday was over I needed a little boost to get back into sewing mode.  I had been to a lovely Christmas Party at a friends house and got to meet the Mom of a little girl whom I’d been seeing pictures of for a year or two.  Our mutual friend who was the hostess of the party would have the little girl occasionally, and as she is adorable in all ways, she would send me cell phone pictures to make me jealous!!!  So I asked the Mom if she would mind if I made a few dresses for the child.  I already had the patterns as I had used them for my neice, they were cut to the right size, and as all good sewers I had the perfect fabric waiting!  So here are my random act of kindness dresses…..

This is a classic pillowcase dress, although I don’t use an actual pillowcase!  I love this retro ice cream cone fabric paired with the primary color dots!  What little girl would not be excited to wear this to the ice cream parlor for her special treat!

This is the front and back of the Flower Picking Dress.  This one is a nice sweet girly dress as from the description I was given would suit this little one perfectly!  The back of the dress has a hidden snap under one of the button to make putting it on nice and simple.  If Mom has any sewing skills or the inclination she can move these buttons to make the dress fit for a long time to come!  I hope I get pictures of this little doll when she is wearing the dresses.  If so, I’ll post them here!!!

Now it is time to get back to work.  I have a nice pile of Irish Dance dresses waiting for me.  I have gotten my sewing karma back and am ready to go full swing!!  Hope everyone had a Happy Holiday Season!  Thanks for checking out my site!!

Post Oireachtas Round-up

It always takes a little while after November before I am ready to go back and revisit the Oireachtas.  So many hours worked, expectations to meet, deadlines, and then there is my family!  So hard to make it all work at the same time!  I know that is no different than any other working Mom, yet somehow I expect to manage…..usually what suffers are the homemade dinners, can’t cook when I am working those 15 hour days!!!

So how did this year go?  I’d say pretty well.  Here are a few photos.

These are the TNG school dresses that I embroidered.  They are fabulous!!!  Of course with Taoknitter Arts and Mary Jo Farr we had a great team!!  The girls look amazing, and I hope they feel that way too.  This was a tough job.  Each dress took about 45 hours of embroidery, that also includes the before and after work that had to be done before I could send the pieces off to MJ.  I still have more of these to do, and I really am excited to see lots of girls wearing the dresses.

Here is Brittany in her new dress.  Designed by herself, digitized by Taoknitter Arts, embroidered and made by Murphydresses.  There are so many great things about this dress.  Her design is just perfect for her.  She is a Senior lady and I think she hit the ball out of the park.  The fabrics are beautiful.  The skirt and sleeves are a bright copper polyester lame.  Now lame is usually not a great choice for dance dresses, but this is not tissue lame.  It’s a polyester, that is bonded on both sides, making it much more durable.  I would not suggest it for a young child who may not give it the care it needs…but for Brittany it is perfect.  The others are black micro-velvet, white crystal satin over white satin, and some silk that you can’t see on the cape.  We did several rounds of measuring and muslin bodice fitting, and still the fit was not perfect.  The length was great, but the bodice and waist were bigger than needed.  That was explained by some generous weight loss  (she looked amazing!!!!)  So after Philly she is having a seamstress who lives closer do some alterations to make the fit just right.  Can’t wait to see her when that part is over.  The colors look excellent on her, and I love the blend of tradition and modernity!!

This is my darling who danced at her 7th Oireachtas.  As always the dancing was great, the friends were wonderful, the weather was perfect, the mother daughter bonding was excellent…..and we look forward to doing it all again next year!  She loves her latest dress, so it might take an act of congress to get her to plan a new one…..either that or Ann (Taoknitter Arts) will come up with a new design that we will fall in love with like we did this one!!!!  One thing we do know….Red will absolutely be the color!!!

2012 will start off with finished up the current batch of TNG dresses.  Then I’ll check in with a really sweet pair of sisters who are the TCRG’s of a school up in Oswego, NY.  We’ve begun the design process for new dresses for them, and they have been busy fundraising to pay for them.  We will have a shopping trip for fabric and see where the timeline will take us.  As always please feel free to contact me through the tab above if you have any questions!!

Just checking in…..

Have finished the few dresses for TNG for their upcoming Oireachtas. I’m sure that now the embroidered pieces are being furiously sewn together and fitted for each dancer. What an exciting time! I am deep in the middle of a beautiful solo dress for a lovely young woman who just recently made it to Open Champs!!!! Congrats to Brittany for that accomplishment. The dress is coming along beautifully!!!! See you in Philly!!!

Here is a photo or two….

Here we are further along in this next photo….

Just like magic…..except for all the hard work!  Thanks to Taoknitter Arts, and Brittany Wolf for digitizing and design respectively.

Thank You

I would like to publicly thank my customers the Wolf Family, Lory and Brittany for making a very generous donation to Clann Na Cara to help towards rebuilding our school.  It is greatly appreciated and such a surprise and kind gesture!!!

Clann Na Cara dancers completely lost their dance studio and all of its contents during the recent flooding in the Northeast. The entire Binghamton, NY and surrounding community was hit very hard by the floods, with too many too count people losing their homes and jobs. After spending three days cleaning out their studio so it can be repaired or rebuilt the kids went out into the community to dance and help raise money for their school and neighbors. They truly are a family.

 Some of the dancers who performed today!

More about the flood….

First the funny…..we had to completely empty our fridge and freezer after not having power for so long.  We tried to keep things cold with some generator time and dry ice…but after almost six days I did not trust anything in there to be safe.  It was tough throwing away all that food, for many reasons, but we did it.  So this morning in anticipation of going to the grocery store to replenish I cleaned the whole thing out with clorox wipes.  Now my dressmaker friends will appreciate this, cause I’m sure they know what I found in there while I was wiping everything down.  Yup it was half a blue sequin!  Gotta love it.  There is humor even in the tough times.

Now for the sad.  My daughter still Irish Dances.  She also does some other dancing, but has been doing this the longest.  For the second time in her life her dance studio has been destroyed by flooding.  ( The other studio she currently dances for, Perkins School of the Arts,  also received a lot of damage but not to the extent that nothing is salvageable.)  She dances for Clann Na Cara in Vestal, NY.  It truly is a school that is a family.  We all feel the same pain of not having a dancing home any longer.  The kids kept many of their awards there, we stored dresses there, had a large bin of shoes, the stages, the sound system, the posters and pictures of the kids at various events.  It’s all gone.  We get to go in tonight for the first time to help clean stuff out.  Not sure of what to expect, but I know how bad that neighborhood was hit.  Parts of it are still underwater, and other parts are closed because fecal material covers everything.  (EWWWWWW!)  So I am imagining many many fundraisers in our near future to rebuild our studio.  Until then I know we are all searching for a place for the kids to have classes.  And yes, I did say this is the second time……it happened before with a different location in 2006.    Same kids…..different school that eventually closed and left the area.  It’s difficult to face it all again.  But we will.  It’s the Irish way right?!!!!

What a week I’m having!

Yes it has been quite a week. I am counting my blessings as my family and home are safe and sound. I live in a little town called Apalachin NY.  We are part of the town of Owego which is just west of Binghamton, NY and if anyone has seen on the news we have been hit terribly hard by the recent flooding.  At our home we received over ten inches of rain within 24 hours. (Since my wonderful husband is a meteorologist we keep up with rain totals….if anyone wants exact # I can get it!!) We were without power for almost six days.  The kids have had only one day of school.  Life as we know it just stopped. So many people around us have lost everything, and the hardest thing is that in 2006 we had a similar although not quite as bad event.  Some towns were only just recovering, and now must start all over again.  It is heartbreaking.

We also had no mail which seems really strange because you just count on getting mail! If anyone is interested in seeing pictures of how things are up here have a look at Press and Sun Bulletin that is our local paper and they have a gallery.

My production schedule is a little behind right now. Thankfully my work items are all safe and sound.  I’ll catch up as quickly as I can, I appreciate the patience of my customers!!!

The Making of a School Dress

There is a lot that goes into making a new school dress. Whether it be a brand new design or just a new batch of the standard costume. Some great posts describing this process have already been written so I know I don’t have to go into that here. Let me just say that it is a fun process. Sometimes it goes great, sometimes not. Lots of different reasons for both. Right now the work is continuing on the TNG school dress. This is a collaboration between MJ Farr, Taoknitter Arts, and Murphydresses. I mentioned in an earlier post that I am doing the embroidery. I wanted to update the photos of the work done up to this point. I am waiting for the skirt designs….but wanted to see how the top half of the dress was looking so I got out ye old dress form and pinned the pieces on. Here is how it looks….

This is the sleeves, front bodice, and both back bodice pieces. It’s just pinned and clipped, but it does give a great impression!!

Here is a close up of just the front bodice.

Here is a close up of one of the sleeve appliques.

I am really excited for the skirt pieces. This is a work in progress so things may change, but that is part of how it works. When you see it all together you can really imagine the girls wearing these costumes and feeling like they can dance like winners!!!

TNG School Dresses

Taoknitter Arts and I are working with MJ Farr on some new school costumes. They are traditional and modern all at the same time. Here is the beginning of the test embroidery for the first dress.

I can only say that this design is so impressive! The girls will feel like champs!
The embroidery for these birds took a lot longer than I would have thought. Each sleeve took about 2-3 hours. I seem to be good at underestimating how long embroidery will take!!! Maybe I’ll get better in a few more years. Next is the bodice. Can’t wait to see it all finished.

The next embroidery project has begun!

This is another collaboration with Kirations and Taoknitter. I have been working on the skirt pieces. Here’s a preview!!!!

And here is the long view!!!!

Very fun! Each ruffle uses a full spool of the green thread and needs 3 bobbin changes! Talk about intensive. It looks amazing….probably even better once I get all of the solvy off and the black velvet really stands out. More to come…….

Colors can lie!

Colors can lie! I’m not sure what these colors look like to you on your computer. On mine they look like blue, orange, and black for the fabric. In reality, the colors are a bright pink, purple, and a sparkle black fabric. I do lots of chatting with dancers over the phone and online when it comes to dressmaking, fabric selection and color. Usually I try to meet with them and find a way for us to see the fabrics and colors being selected. Sometimes it means sending swatches in the mail. It can take a while to agree on colors and fabrics for different projects. It is important not to take for granted what you might see online. Ask questions if what you see does not meet with what you expect. I have had to reassure customers that the colors they see online are not the “real” colors. It can mean a small panic attack when someone sees something they don’t expect!!

Now this sample from the same dress shows up accurately. Bright pink fabric with black stitching. So you never know! It works both ways, the dancer needs to make sure of the colors as well as the dressmaker. Just a verbal, or even sometimes photographic example may not always be enough to make sure we are all talking about the same thing!