Swim Coverups

I dunno, maybe a year ago, I decided to make my nephew a swim cover up using the Aegean Swim Cover pattern from Hey June.  I bought the pattern and downloaded it to my desktop.  Then I went to Target and got two beach towels, because I wanted to make one for his sister, too.  And then it sat there...and sat there...and sat there.  His birthday passed.  Christmas passed.  

A whole year passed, actually.  

So I found myself over Labor Day weekend thinking about this pattern again, because his birthday was coming up...

Then his birthday passed. 

And then, on the very next day, I printed the pdf and got to work.  It took me just over a week (with only about an hour of actual sewing) to get the two swim covers done.  So it's a week late.  I can deal with that.  

I had no idea what sizes to make.  The pattern ranges from 18 months to size 12 or something, so I chose a 4 for the girl and a 6 for the boy.  Who knows?  

I made one for my niece first.  You know, for my nephew's birthday.  I'm such a dunce.

That's my little miss modeling it for us.  She's two and a half and her cousin will be four this winter, so I hope it fits.  

I did a pretty good job of lining up the stripes on the hood, but the sides got wonky:

 The nifty thing about this pattern, though, is that it uses the existing hems of the beach towels for the hems of the coverups.  I didn't need to hem the bottom or the hood on the dress (or the sleeves on the tunic).  I did have one problem with the hem of the dress, because the pattern curved upward, so I cut up into the beach towel's hem.  When I sewed the sides together, there was a raw edge where that little curve was.   I fixed it by taking the serger to it:

It'll do.  And then I got excited about using my serger, so I serged anything I could!

I also forgot to clip the corners on the placket and ended up with some puckering:

As for the little boy's coverup, I did a pretty good job with those hood stripes, as well:

Nice!  But then the sides were on crack and one side ended up being too short:

That's like a whole inch.  I just serged it.  Whatever.

Here's my model again...

She ran to her little house each time I put her in these things.  She's such a nut.  She didn't want me to take her picture.  And then she wanted to go find her camera.  I had one of our old digital cameras, but I accidentally left the batteries in it.  They oozed and corroded the battery connectors.  Boo.  Now I don't have a little camera to give her.  Maybe I'll have to go see if anyone dumped any at the goodwill.  But here's a final shot of her in her little house (another project that I need to work on!):