Helping out a Friend

I'm on and off the internet all day long. With my phone in my pocket I'm never more than a minute from several social media sites. As I've mentioned before I have several internet "friends" that I talk about and my girls know about. I've met a few of those friends in real life. They aren't scary stalker types, in fact they are really nice and fun to hang out with. 

A while back I gave one of my internet friends fabric, lots and lots of fabric. Some of it I'd had for years, like 9 years, and I never got around to using it and I figured it was time to pass it along. We hung out for hours and talked and sorted fabric and talked some more. It was a blast! It only took her a few days and I started seeing "my" fabric pop up in a show and tell gallery all sewn up into CUTE clothes! It made me very happy that the fabric had finally seen the light of day.

This same friend made a super cute shirt/skirt/sash (I recommended she add a sash), she thought about making it into a pattern, drew it up, turned it into a PDF, wrote a tutorial with great pictures and then went looking for pattern testers! I was lucky enough to be chosen from the giant pool of testers that she had asking to help her out. 

I'd never pattern tested before and I've only used PDF patterns on a limited basis. I'm stingy and they are more expensive than mass produced patterns, for all the same reasons my costumes cost more than the ones at Target do. Handmade, good quality, personal attention.  Using her tutorial was very easy and there were only a couple of hiccups in the process, several of which were due to my inability to read... I made two versions, here is the colorful one I made for George.

She has the pattern for sale here and you'll recognize one of her cute models :) She blogs about her sewing adventures, much better than I do, here. I hope she keeps making up great patterns because I'd love to see more of her work!