Mermaid in progress

Ah, it's nice to be back sewing again. I haven't sewn much since I started knitting, but I do always sew around this time of year. It's costume time! E will be a mermaid. She picked out the fabric from my stash. It's a woven blue fabric where some of the threads are metallic blue. The overlay is white and the sequin trim is fuschia. I am using pattern 4043 from Simplicity. I do not like their sewing instructions with this pattern. I made the top in the order that I thought it best to sew. I also didn't like how some sequins were put on during the construction. I saved that to when the whole costume was put together. Speaking of sequins, there must be an easier way to sew them. The only ones that were machine sewn are the ones on the bag. The rest were hand sewn onto the costume. Thankfully, they were already strung together. I still have more embellishment to do. I need to buy ladder/butterfly/novelty yarn! When I started knitting, I told myself that I wasn't going to get sucked into buying that stuff. Now, I need to buy some for the costume.

I started the costume Saturday morning and worked on it all weekend. The basic costume was done during the weekend and I've been hand sewing sequins on it since then. This is how far along I am:


It's a very cute pattern. There is a slit in the tail section on the right side where her legs will stick out. She has tried walking in it and walks just fine. The little loop off of the fin goes around her wrist. There is also a hook sewn on the left side of the waistline to hold the tail if she doesn't want it around her wrist. The shell bag was part of the pattern. That's very cute. I added a magnetic closure at the top. E will be only wearing this indoors. If she had to wear it out, I would probably make her a shawl or shrug to wear over her shoulders and arms.

I'm knitting a sock out of some Fortissima graffiti yarn. I just bought a lot more sock yarn. I've found that I really like self striping/patterning sock yarns bettern than handpaints. Handpaints are pretty to look at, but I like the bold stripes and patterns better.