The Lady Beekeeper

I love Christmas traditions.  Our family Christmas is steeped in tradition. As soon as December rolls around we count down to Christmas on our chocolate advent calendars and pick out and decorate a lovely smelling fresh pine tree. On Christmas Eve we gather at my parent’s house for roast beef, my mom’s killer gravy and all the fixin’s. Then we sit round the fire and everyone receives an ornament hand picked by my Grandma. On Christmas Day after opening presents we head to my grandparent’s house where the German traditions kick in. We hunt for pickles (and a piece of coal from my great great grandfather’s coal mining days) on my grandparents’ Christmas tree. Then we eat delicious German wursts, my Grandma’s swedish meatballs, fleischsalat (the best way to describe this is its like potato salad but replace the potatoes with bologna), multiple types of potato salad and rye bread. For dessert there is homemade stollen and too many types of Christmas cookies to list.

One of my favorite traditions, started by my uncle when he first was married, is to cut a slice out of the stump of each year’s Christmas tree and paint it with events that were significant that year. He then turns them into ornaments and hangs them up before Christmas. It is like creating a piece of a time capsule that you get to open every year. Everyone in our family, now grown, have also adopted the tradition. My parents decorate their foyer with them. Here are some of my favorites.

Tree trunk memory ornaments

Another German tradition we celebrate is Saint Nicholas Day. On December 5th we leave our shoes by the front door and when morning comes they are filled with sweets, oranges, apples, nuts and little toys from Saint Nick! I can remember being so excited that I was one of the few schoolchildren who received gifts from Saint Nick (it clearly was because my grandma, being from Germany, had some serious Saint Nick connections). Well I must have been naughty for the last decade because Saint Nick hasn’t delivered anything for me recently, but he always fills my husband’s shoes full of treats and silly things. Luckily my husband wears a size 13 so I get to share the treats!

This year Saint Nick delivered some silly Adventure Time boxers much like the ones I’ll show you how to make in this post! But before you go… a Christmas give away! What are your favorite winter holiday traditions or memories? Post them in the comment section below by next Monday. I’ll mail the writer of my favorite comment a silly Christmas moose like this guy. (And in case you’re wondering, your odds are pretty good since I don’t usually get many comments. :) ).

Christmoose

Note these boxers fit my husband (size 34 waist with what he thinks is a big bum) – if you need a different size, you can scale up or down an inch or two. I used one yard of 43″ wide fabric – but after washing my pattern barely fit so I’d recommend 1 1/3 yards. Wash and dry your cotton print so you already have the shrinkage taken into account. You’ll also need waistband elastic the width of the wearer’s waist minus an inch.  See the bottom of the post for the pattern and make sure you scale it to match the 2″x2″ square when you print.

1. Layout your pattern pieces onto your fabric and trace/cut. Tomorrow I’ll post the pattern, I can’t figure out the best upload format at the moment. My pattern includes seam allowance.

2. First I need to show you how I did the seams which look identical on the inside and outside of the boxers.

I’m not sure if this is a real technique – if it is I don’t know what it is called. If someone can tell me, that would be helpful. Since you don’t want an itchy piece of fabric tickling you in your boxers all day I used this seam technique everywhere except the waist and legs where I did a rolled hem. What you do is your take the two edges you want to attach and press one edge right side out about 1/4 inch. On the second piece, press the edge wrong  side out.

Two pieces to be stitched together, one pressed wrong side out, one pressed right side out.

a. You then lay the two pieces of fabric on top of each other so the unfinished edge that you pressed is sandwiched in the middle.

b. Pin and stitch very close to the folded edge on the right side of the fabric.

c. Then flip over and stitch very close to the folded edge on the wrong side of the fabric.

3. Use this technique to stitch the two side front seams, and the center back seam.

4. Before I did the center front seam I added the flap for the fly. I first pressed the rectangle of fabric on the boxer’s left front down, forming a center front line.

5. Next I stitched down the cut edge, leaving an inch at the bottom opened.

6. On the boxer’s right side I pressed the edges of the flap.

7. I then pressed a piece of scrap fabric into a rectangle to fit over the edges I pressed. I sewed this in place on all sides. This was to reinforce the flap. Somehow I don’t have a picture of this, but you can see it in this picture.

8. I pressed the seam below the flap on both sides following the procedure mentioned in step 2 above.  Then I pinned the boxer front all along the center front seam.  I then sewed the center front below the flap following step 2.

9. I basted the top of the flap at the waist. Then I stitched from where I had stopped in step 5 to the end of the flap in a slight arc.

10. Sew the crotch together using the procedure in step 2.

11. Hem the bottoms of the boxers.

12. Press under the waist of the boxers.

13. Add the elastic waistband. At the flap you want to sew the elastic to the boxers unstretched. For the rest of the elastic I followed an example I can’t find anymore.  I’ll post the link if I find it again.  Basically I sewed the elastic to the front of the boxers at the halfway point unstretched.  Then I folded the boxers in half and stitched the elastic ends at this point.  I pinned two more times between the two areas I stitched.  Next I stretched out the elastic so it was taunt with the fabric and then stitched.

Pattern Pieces

Last week I was honored to be the “Member Project of the Week” on BurdaStyle! I am not going to lie, I couldn’t wait for work to end to check all the nice comments people had left!  What a great community!  Anyway, as promised here is how I made the butterfly hair pin for my updo!

One day while I was scouring pinterest I came across this link to a beautiful origami butterfly. It looked like a cute accessory to the french twist updo I had been practicing for my Bal d’Hiver ensemble. It was extremely quick and simple to make so I am trying to decide what I can use a ton of them on. For those who cannot follow the pictures on Pinterest I figured some English instructions may be helpful.

Here’s how I made a 5 minute butterfly hair pin

Since this technique is basically origami you want to create a thin solid rectangular piece of fabric that is as close to paper as possible. I used scraps of navy blue polyester lace, nude polyester stretch material and some medium weight fusible interfacing.

I first cut each of my scraps into roughly 2 inch by 3 inch rectangles.

Next I ironed my fusible interfacing to my nude stretch polyester to produce a material with a paperlike stiffness.

I sewed my lace to the other fabric. And trimmed it to make an even rectangle.

Front view of rectangle

Back View of Rectangle

Next I folded the rectangle in half the long way with the right side facing out.

I ironed it flat.

I folded the rectangle in half again the long way.

I slipped my finger under the top layer of fabric holding down the corner and pressed down to form a triangle with a bit of the wrong side fabric showing at the bottom.

I ironed this flat.

I flipped the piece over and did the same thing on the other side.

I then took the right corner flap of the triangle and lifted it up to the top middle of the right side of the triangle.

This will form a 3 dimensional c shape with the wrong side of the fabric showing.

Follow the same procedure on the other side and stitch the center portion together with a couple quick stitches to hold it.

Finished butterfly

Attach the back of the butterfly to a bobby pin – or your project of choosing!

Join me next Monday for some holiday fun and a give away!

Burdastyle version vs. Mine (obviously I can’t compete in legs or shape with the model…)

My husband’s family is from Nashville and my mother in law ends up planning all sorts of fabulous social events for local charities. This means my husband and I get to attend all sorts of fabulous events. For instance we went to a real live white tie ball (which for those unfamiliar means my husband wore tails and I wore a ball gown)! Well this year my sister in law was presented at a debutante ball after Thanksgiving.  When my mother in law explained the proper dress for me was cocktail attire, I decided I would try my hand at sewing a dress for the ball.

I have been interested in trying the print-at-home Burda Style patterns for a while now and I thought this dress would fit the bill. So I downloaded the pattern and headed to JoAnn Fabrics for fabric. They recommended stretch fabrics so I purchased nude polyester fabric and navy polyester lace. I had several coupons so the total cost for materials (zippers and all) was only $39!

Close up of blue lace over nude fabric

When I got home I started tackling the print-at-home pattern. I love sewing, but my least favorite part of the whole process is laying out and cutting my fabric and patterns. Well given this, the whole print-at-home process adds another layer of boredom to my sewing excitement. The first problem with the whole process is that you must print out the pattern true to size on your printer. Following the steps to measure out a test square to make sure you don’t shrink the pattern are easy, but what they failed to realize is that you can’t print to the edge of the paper. Every home printer in existence has a non-zero minimum border of white space to which it cannot print. This means that the clever little triangles that you are supposed to match up on each paper are cut off on one side. You can mostly estimate where they are supposed to go, but if you are a bit OCD like I am this will be incredibly annoying to you. After printing you have to line up and tape together all the sheets of  the pattern which is similar to doing a really boring puzzle. My pattern was 40 pages long so this took an incredibly long time. And about halfway through I realized I really didn’t have to tape the entire thing together because some of the pieces didn’t even get used for my pattern. This just made me feel as if I had just needlessly killed a forest. Since the patterns didn’t have seam allowance built in I transferred the exact pattern to my fabric and then had to measure and add all the additional allowances. Overall this print-at-home process increased the time to sew this dress by around 2 hours. I’ll have to remember to account for this next time I try another print-at-home pattern.

The rest of the process proceeded smoothly and the directions were fairly easy to followm until I got to the neckline. As I was lining up the shoulders and high neckline I realized that the neckline was way too small. My neck supposedly fit the exact dimensions of the size in the pattern, but it was like they did not account for the fact that everyone has a round rather than flat neck. Even on my mannequin (who has an incredibly petite neck) the fabric in the chest became contorted and bulged from the fabric around the neck. So I completely reworked the neckline. As I was fixing the neckline I also noticed that the front darts did not produce anything near as form fitting as the picture. So I added an additional set of darts, along where I would have added a princess seam. Here’s how I did both:

For the darts, I dressed my mannequin (whose name, if you are wondering, is “old girl” as in “you are looking pretty good old girl”) and pinched and pinned fabric from the tip of both busts down to the waist along the princess seam line. I don’t have a picture of this part but here’s a diagram of where I pinned (modified from this website).

White portion is where I pinned new darts on the mannequin along the black princess seamline

I then removed the dress from the mannequin, turned it inside out and drew on the fabric in marker where the pins formed the darts.

Next I removed the pins and inverted the darts to the insides of the fabric (right sides together) matching the lines I had just drawn. I then sewed along my markings to form the additional darts.

For the neckline I dressed old girl in the dress again and marked on both shoulder seams where the tension was beginning to cause the weird bulging. Then I removed the seams I had made on both shoulders (including the invisible zipper) and again dressed up old girl in the dress. I repinned the shoulder seams.  Then I pinned along an approximate neckline in front and back and removed the dress again.

Repinning the shoulders and pinning a new neckline.

Here I went back to my pattern and took the measurements from my neckline and shoulder pins to approximate the new neckline to make sure I didn’t make anything uneven.  I used my drafting curves to choose an appropriate neckline for the front and the back.

Using drafting curve to revamp the neckline on the pattern

Then I transferred the whole thing over to a new neckline pattern (because I didn’t want to destroy the original pattern). To my pattern I also added seam allowance. Since I am all about saving paper I always use the brown paper that comes in amazon packaging for my personal patterns. It is wide and long and irons out pretty well.

Transferring neckline pattern

I also had to make a pattern for the front and back neck facing since my neckline had changed so dramatically. I simply traced the new neckline of the dress onto another sheet of brown paper and made a 2 inch semi-circular pattern strip.  I used this pattern to cut some lace for the neck facing. Since I didn’t think it made sense to make the facing only lace, I also cut out some lightweight sew in interfacing to back the lace facing.

I then proceeded to sew the shoulder seams and neckline as recommended in the instructions, but omitting the invisible shoulder zipper since the neckline was now big enough to fit my head through. For my new neckline I really had to clip my curves but then everything sat beautifully flat.

The one additional thing I did differently from the included instructions was to understitch the neckline. I wish someone had taught me this technique earlier because it really makes your neckline sit flat and look like a normal neckline rather than something homemade and wobbly. Here is a great tutorial.  Oh and I realized my needles were doing strange bad things to the super stretchy fabric so a few stitches in I switched to a ball tip needle which pokes between the knit fibers rather than piercing them.

Here’s some pictures of me modeling the finished product:

Front View

Back View

My beautiful sister in law in her ball gown.

Finished product at the Bal d’Hiver with my handsome date.

Next week I’ll show you how I made my cute butterfly hair accessory using scrap fabric!

Well, after 3 years living here I finally finished the master bedroom. It took me an entire year to settle on the right color of paint. Initially Will didn’t want to paint the room, so I decided I was going to find dark blue fabric with white accents to really compliment the while walls. That turned out to be more difficult than anticipated especially since my fabric choices were limited to the groupon deal I had bought. This store is extensive, and the fabric selection turns over repeatedly, but the closest fabric I managed to find at a reasonable price was the inverse of what I was looking for. This put a damper on leaving my walls white, and luckily Will was able to sympathize with my new predicament and begrudgingly agreed to helping with a new coat of paint. So then all that was left was the paint color.

I fantasized painting the whole room charcoal grey or navy blue but luckily Will actually had an opinion for once and dissuaded me. (I’m pretty sure he was just selfishly worried I would hate it and it would take another 10 coats of paint to cover over the dark shade, but I still give him credit for changing my mind.)  I decided I wanted a lighter shade of grey with blue or purple undertones, and left 6 swatches sitting on my dresser for almost a year before biting the bullet and buying a sample. I can tell you that this is one instance where the 18″x18″ sample was completely deceiving. After applying it to the walls and waiting for it to dry I was convinced it was too purple and that I had made a huge mistake. But being lazy and not wanting to sleep in the spare bedroom for another week forced me to live with it. The next day in the early morning I was once again in love with my wall color. With bright natural light the paint is exactly the color I had envisioned. Later in the day the walls change hue and finally when night falls the paint under the electric lights is an entirely different animal. Each wall looks completely different because of the way the light hits it. Despite the chameleon effect I’ve come to love the paint color. It is pleasantly calming!  Here’s the room reveal!

View from my side of the bed

Homemade curtains and newly install light kit on the fan. I can’t believe they didn’t have a light fixture before!

View of the zen corner

Close up of the new wall art over the bed

The Doctor and TARDIS

The Doctor

The TARDIS

Will and I have been watching the most recent Doctor Who reboot for the last few months, so naturally The Doctor came up as a costume idea for Will.  (The 11th is our favorite.)  But who should I go as?  My favorite companion never even met Matt Smith, so that was out.  I don’t have blonde curly hair like River Song (though this was super tempting) and I can’t cross dress well enough to pull off Jack Harkness.  But after all the companions have come and gone, whom is The Doctor left with?  Yes that’s right, Sexy.  (And my name is Lexi so that just works incredibly well.)  It always comes back to The Doctor and his TARDIS traveling through space and time…

For my Sexy (TARDIS) halloween costume I used this fabulous fit and flare Burda pattern 6744 with 100% polyester in TARDIS blue. (Just kidding about the color, but the girl in the check out line did ask me if I was making a TARDIS costume based on my materials alone so I figure it was close.)  The pattern was easy to follow and the dress came out perfect.  I did drop to a size lower than I measured out since I wanted it very form fitting with the stretchy polyester.

Finished dress plus some sexy socks

After I finished the dress I decided to pull out my embroidery machine and whip up a patch that reads “Police public call box” and another for the 11th Doctor’s “St John Ambulance” sticker.  The former was easy, the latter gave me lots of grief especially because I couldn’t figure out how to get the letters to center around a figure I wasn’t going to embroider.  Eventually I just gave up and stopped the machine after the letters printed.  If you want either pattern send me an email and I’ll shoot them your way.  All I did was embroider them on cut-away stabilizer that I then trimmed to form the basis of the patch.  I then folded the fabric around the stabilizer, pressed, and 1/8 of an inch from the edge.  I finally basted it to the dress.

For the Police call box notice on the TARDIS I used an iron on transfer.  I sized this picture down to 4×5, inverted it and printed it onto photo paper.  I then used my handy dandy paper cutter to cut it down to size.  I ironed it onto some cotton fabric then removed the paper backing immediately for “a matte” look.

I next cut some interfacing down to 4×5, put the iron on transfer over the paper and folded the edges back like I did for the “Police public call box” patch.  But here I didn’t want any pinholes to damage my iron on so I used tape to hold everything in place while I stitched around the edges.  When the stitching was in place I removed the tape.  It worked like a charm!

My basting cheat for the iron on transfer.

The last step was to add a lantern headpiece.  I tried a mock up using a water bottle and hated it, but I got the idea to use an old spice bottle from my last blog post.  I am really happy with how it turned out (and as a bonus it smells like cinnamon…)  If you want detailed steps on how to make it, read my “TARDIS headpiece” post here.

Oh and I won’t post me in the full costume before Halloween because in the words of River Song… SPOILERS!  But check back next Monday night and I’ll add it, but for now, here’s my mannequin wearing it…

Sneak peek of my TARDIS dress…

DIY TARDIS headpiece

Here’s how I made my fabulous TARDIS headpiece.

Step 1: gather these ingredients:

Supplies to make a TARDIS headpiece

• 16 gauge floral wire
• Empty plastic spice container (mine was about 6 inches high by 2 inch diameter)
• Paint of your choice (I used my husband’s burnished copper leftover from his miniature painting days)
• card stock
• Fabric covered 3/4 inch thick headband
• Glue gun
• Drill
• hand saw
• If you want it to light up (and who doesn’t?) you’ll also need:
• Velcro
• Battery operated tea light (they sell them at the dollar store…)

Step 2: Remove label from your spice jar and cut it down to size with your saw (I made mine xxx inches high).  Leave the screw top portion so you can open and close your lantern.  (Here is where I painted everything and let it dry for a bit before proceeding).

Step 2: Cut container down to size leaving the screw on top.

Step 3: Drill 4 holes equidistant from one another around the perimeter of the jar.

Drill holes for wire

Step 4: Cut two strips of wire and wrap them around the circumference of the jar.  Leave them on the jar.

Step 5: Cut indents into the top of the spice jar so a wire can rest there.  Insert a wire in one drilled hole, loop it over the top of the jar, resting in the indents and back into the drilled hole on the opposite side.  Repeat for second set of holes.  Glue in place on inside of jar.

Add wire strips around jar and insert into holes.

Step 6:  Glue circumference circles in place on the “back” side of the jar.  (Choose an ugly side).  Be sure to hide the glue under one set of longitudinal wires.  Add spots of glue to keep each circle sitting properly.

Glue holding wire strips

Step 7: Cut a circle of cardstock (mine was about 3 inches diameter).  Cut a slit in the circle and overlap cut edges to form a cone.  Glue together and glue to the top of the lantern on top of the criss-crossing wire.

Step 8: Glue one end of the velcro to the battery cover on the tea light.  Glue the other end of the velcro to the inside of the spice jar cover.  Glue top of spice jar cover to headband at desired location.

Finished lantern