Back to School outfit

Last year Lilo made her Back To School outfit - she was so proud of it.

Lilo’s first day of school was on Tuesday – Grade 2, it’s hard to believe. She was really excited to start, she said she was sad summer was over but excited to meet new friends.

Like every kid she needed a first day of school outfit, so I had an idea: since Lilo had been bugging me all summer to teach her to sew so this would be the perfect opportunity for her make her first day of school outfit.

I thought a simple elastic waist skirt would be easiest for a first sewing project. The skirt is made with 1 piece of fabric, and a fold over self waistband - a cute easy skirt.

To add some interest to the skirt she added some fancy ribbon. She choose the flag ribbon probably because of the Olympics that just past, and because flags are cool.

I helped her pin the ribbon the edge of the fabric. Lilo did a great job sewing it on –well at least you can’t see any uneven stitches on the ribbon so it looks great.

After the ribbon was sewn on, Lilo she sewed the rest of the skirt up and I ironed in between.

When we got to the hem Lilo really wanted to try out a fancy stitch on my machine. I ironed the hem up and pinned it, then from the right side of the skirt using the ribbon as a guide she sewed the hem. It was a great idea to use the honeycomb stitch (Lilo’s choose) and since it sews much slower than a regular straight stitch and it was easier for her to control – plus it looks cool.

Lilo was super proud of her first skirt that she made by herself.

To go with the skirt she needed a cool top. I showed Lilo this lined paper idea from Pinterest and she loved it.

I’m glad I actually checked out the blog post at U Create Crafts since I usually just look at a picture and wing it and then wonder why it’s not working. Ok, so I did wing it at first by trying to draw the lines on the shirt with a fabric marker and ruler but it didn’t work – the lines were all broken and didn’t look good. So I tried the actual directions of using tape to create lines and then Lilo painted them blue. Once dry we removed that tape and put on more tape and painted the red stripe. Then Lilo decided she wanted to write something on the paper so we wrote out School is cool. I did the writing since it was tricky with the shirt being so stretchy that the letters were going all wonky. I ended up using the squeeze paint instead of the fabric marker to make cleaner lines. To set the paint I ironed the back of it when the paint was all dry.

I thought my girl looked super cute on her first day of Grade 2.