Year: 2009

bags and purses, kidswear, life
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Collarless boy’s suit and bags for shogakko (elementary school)

Sidra is going to elementary school this month and there are tons of things to prepare. The school requires the student to have a lesson bag for their art and crafts stuffs, another bag for uwabaki (slippers to use at school), and yet another type of bag for lunch set. I’ve been planning to make all of them myself and also a suit for Sidra to wear at the opening ceremony. The fabrics had been bought since a month ago, but as usual when faced with a deadline, I usually got lazy and keep postponing things until the last minute. […]

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kidswear
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Dinosaur bag tags

Tomorrow is Sidra’s birthday and also his first birthday in Japan. The end of March to the beginning of April is school holiday in Japan, so he will always be celebrating his birthday at home. Fortunately, the moms from his kindergarten class are arranging a picnic tomorrow, I think it’s great because Sidra can spend his birthday with his friends. I’ve been planning to make something for Sidra’s friends, but as usual I got lazy and keep postponing until the last day. This morning I woke up thinking that I should just buy some cookies and candies for the kids. […]

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womenswear
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Little black dress

This black stretchy lace fabric had been in my stash for a while, and I didn’t really know what to do with it. Yesterday I suddenly got an idea and proceeded to make it. This dress is actually very simple. I traced the top part from a T-shirt, and that’s the only part of the dress that used some kind of patterns. The cape/sleeves is just a long rectangle, about as long as the cut I had (about 2 meters), then I gathered one long side and sew it to the neckline of the dress. The other long side is […]

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bags and purses
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Lesson bag and PET bottle case

I made this lesson bag and PET bottle case for Sidra to take to his class excursion. Actually I should’ve made them earlier when he started his school year. He won’t be using them in shogakko (elementary school) next month because I’ve prepared other fabrics to make various bags for his school needs. So I count these as a practice to make the next bags. The fabrics are leftovers from previous projects. The denim has been used for this pants , this dress and this apron set , and the striped fabric has been used for this bag and this apron […]

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womenswear
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Flower dress

I was looking through my stash when I found this colorful batik fabric. It was bought about 3 years ago for several occasion where I had to wear Indonesian outfit in a 1 month exchange program in Netherlands. I never had the opportunity to wear it again after that, but I really like it so I brought it when I moved to Japan a year ago. The fabric has big and colorful pattern, so I decided to make a simple dress out of it. I didn’t use any pattern and just cut the fabric into 4 rectangles, sewed into a […]

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life
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Shrink plastic keychains

I found these sheets of shrink plastic in a 100 yen store for, uh, obviously, 100 yen each. These are basically flexible plastic sheets which, when heated in an oven, shrink to small hard plates without altering their color or shape. Each package contain one A5 (148 × 210 mm) size plastic sheet, two B6 (125 × 176 mm) size sheets, and two keychains holder. I ‘ve been curious about these shrinly dinks and I thought Sidra would love playing with them too. I told Sidra to draw something on white paper, then trace it on plastic and color it. So […]

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knitting and crochet, womenswear
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Short scarf

I’ve used this pattern to make a long grey scarf from 3 skeins of wool tweed yarn. There’s something about the pattern that makes knitting it very enjoyable, so I wanted to make another. This time I make a short scarf from one skein of Noro silk garden lite yarn, knitted with 4 mm needles. It took quite some time because me and Sidra got sick and all, but finally I finished it! After washing and blocking, the scarf became softer and quite comfortable to the skin. I’m kinda satisfied with this pretty little thing, and as it is short […]

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life
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Featured in German Burda Modemagazin!

A few months ago, I got an email from Burdastyle that they wanted to feature this ‘Sailor-collar jacket and wide-legged pants’ in the German fashion sewing magazine, Burda mode, for a section about fashionable kids creation. So I sent them the picture as requested. This morning, Burdastyle sent me two scanned pages of the magazine in which the sailor jacket is being featured. It’s in Burda Modemagazin, 2/2009 edition. There it is, my son in the page of a German magazine! The text says: “Novita Estitis Junior-Seemannsoutfit ist zwar nicht berufsbindend, aber auf jeden Fall professionel kleidsam.” I don’t know […]

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knitting and crochet
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Bather bunny brooch

The problem with having a kid in the house is you get a lot of outgrown clothes in such a short time. I can give them away if the conditions are still good, and use the stained ones as rags. But there’s still too many of them, and I don’t need that much of rags either. So today I made an experiment with one of Sidra’s shirt. I cut it into long strip of fabric, about 1.5 cm in width, and crocheted it into a circle using 10 mm hook. Then I took an acrylic drawing that my husband made […]

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