Feeling quite proud of myself

Monday I woke up and thought: just this one last free week before school obligations bring me back. I'll just relax.

Then a few hours went by and I was BORED! So I thought I'd use up some of hte excess material from the bassinett and make burp clothes or something. Then I went to the fabric store where there was a sale on everything! So I bought a pattern and some material and had the ladies help me find the notions to match. At first I was going to get two patterns, one for my baby and one for Jen's baby girl. But I didn't want to purchase material for the pattern I chose for my baby because the lady said I needed a stretchy fabric and I thought I should start with a simpler, non-stretchy one. i've never sewn from a pattern before, but I figured that since it's a pattern, its like following a recipe and you can't really go wrong.

Wrong. I probably spent an hour just reading the directions trying to make sense of them. I couldn't get ahold of my mom to ask questions and I really didn't know what I was doing and what alot of terms meant. But I figured I'd start and maybe the rest would start to make sense. It did.

I might have spent two hours on the sleeves (hey, they had gathers AND elastic and they are so super tiny sewing on them was ridiculous).By the time husband came home I was mostly done, just the buttons and holes were left. I felt so good, we went back to the store to buy material for the jacket. Then we came home and had dinner and about 9pm I figured i"d finish it off.

Wrong again. Spent about an hour and half doing three buttonholes. I had a lot of thread explosion and I kept rethreading the machine and practicing on another piece on which everything went fine, then I'd do on the actual material and SPROING thread everywhere. This morning I was up for the challenge again, and did the other 4 holes in about ten minutes and the buttons went well, and it is DONE! here it is:


And here is the picture from the pattern. You can see what the jacket looks like:


So I learned many things (including that if you are going to put in elastic, don't sew the pocket closed, what "finshing an edge" means, how to do buttonholes, how to do buttons properly, and that tiny things are a b**** to sew). Back to work!