easter roundup

Hi everyone, hope you all had a lovely easter and didn't consume too many easter eggs.  We had a great time camping, in fact Anna is still talking about "camping in the bush" so I guess that is a good sign.  It didn't rain at all where we were, but it was a bit chilly so there was a bit of warming our hands by the fire

eating some easter eggs (well an Easter Bilby in this case)

a bit of fishing with dad (without catching anything though)

photographing our friend's dogs and generally running riot with the furry ones (there were three dogs there much to Anna's delight!)

and playing house in the tent!

But the best way to top off a weekend away is a day at home all by myself! Thanks to the wonders of being a government employee, I took today off work using my accrued excess time while my husband went to work and Anna went to daycare. And it was bliss - the only problem I had was choosing what to do on this very rare day to myself.

I spent the morning doing many loads of washing, as well as tracing out some Burda patterns since there were no little hands tugging on the tracing pattern and asking repeatedly "what are you doing mummy?" - it made the task a little bit easier! These are what I traced:

Jacket 116 from Burda 4/2009 to make in a stretch dark denim.

Skirt 113 from Burda 1/2011, probably in a grey glen plaid check wool, just like the magazine photo.

Jacket 126 from Burda 9/2010, possibly in black wool crepe to match the tulip skirt from a few posts ago.

Top 121 from Burda 9/2010, which is a big call for me because I don't really have too many knit fabrics in my stash to sew it from and nor are knit fabrics and I the best of friends, so we shall see.

After a cup of tea and time to uncross my eyes after tracing all those out, I got to work on the denim jacket for a few hours before the whirlwind came home from daycare.  And here is the progress so far:

The bodice is all sewn together and topstitched, all that is needed are the sleeves, hem and buttons.  It's actually a pretty straightforward pattern despite having 15 pattern pieces, and about six million kilometres of topstitching.  However, I seem to have run into a little problem -  have a closer look at that collar:

The collar sits much closer to the centre front on one than the other, despite the fact I matched up all the notches so I have no idea what I've done there.  Now I'm in for a bout of unstitching and head scratching to figure out how to fix this - luckily there are still some easter eggs hanging around to help me on that journey.......