my beautiful balloon

Some friends of mine had a baby girl recently. Meanwhile, I had been dreaming about hot air balloons. So beautiful and also a little bit spooky. 


A project (and a baby) was born.

I got drawing and made a design I was pleased with. 

This was my template:

I made two and dissected one. Each piece was then pinned onto a piece of fabric from my scrap basket. The fabric was then cut around using a rotary cutter. Scissors are fine, just a bit more fiddly:

I thought about doing this bit on freezer paper and ironing straight onto the fabric for easier cutting. But then I would not have been able to reuse the pieces. In retrospect, it would have been easier. But you know, reduce reuse recycle. 

I then arranged the pieces onto some fusible interlining and pressed:

I pinned the balloon onto an old t-shirt and set my sewing machine to a medium sized zig zag. 

I sewed slowly along all edges taking care to get them right in the middle of the zig zag:

I really needed a jersey needle for my machine as it tore the t-shirt in a few places. so much so that I had to cut the balloon out and sew it to a new t-shirt. 


So much for reduce. 

For the sleepsuit I cut along the line of the poppers and zigzagged along this edge too:

And up, up and away:

One for the brother and one for the sister.


This was the earworm for this project.

Man, I want to go to the fifth dimension and wear a suit like that.


PS Some more things that we have been making for these folks recently can be seen here.