The Quickest Valentine's Day Outfit Yet

The annual Valentine's outfit discussion happened again a few weeks ago. My sister wanted a special outfit for Valentine's Day, and I would be making it for her. This has become a bit of a tradition, but this year it went a little different than usual - my sister supplied half the outfit herself.

Any time I wind up dying fabric, my sister finds something of hers to throw in the dye bath too. When I was attempting to dye silk burgundy for trim on my 1898 scalloped jacket, my sister produced a ivory t-shirt that needed a color change.

My sister received the shirt in a bag of hand-me-downs from my cousin. It was brand new with the tags still on. Never worn because the pale color made it nearly see through. Into the dye bath it went - the shirt already wasn't getting worn, so there was nothing to lose by changing the color.

The body of the shirt is a polyester/rayon blend. Polyester doesn't take dye very well, but rayon dyes decently well, so the shirt came out a rather pale maroon color. The lace on the shoulders is nylon, which takes dye very well, so the lace came out a lovely dark maroon - the exact color I was attempting to dye the silk in the same dye bath. (no the silk did not turn out that dark unfortunately.)

Once she saw how pretty the dyed shirt turned out, my sister declared it would be her Valentine's Day shirt, she just needed a skirt to go with it - So I got right on that.

I decided to make her the Gretel Skirt by Mother Grimm - it has wonderful large pockets perfect for holding valentines to pass out at class parties.

My sister wanted the skirt to either have hearts or roses on it for a particularly "valentines-y" feel. Thus, I needed to find a fabric, that would match the shirt, featuring one of those motifs. A quick look through my fabric stash revealed the perfect material.

A sky blue polyester double knit, probably from the 1970's, and covered in roses which happened to be the same color as the lace on the newly dyed shirt. It had the perfect amount of stretch and body for the Gretel Skirt - and my sister liked it!

To tie the whole look together I used a solid maroon polyester/spandex blend knit for the waist and pocket bands.

The skirt only took about an hour to make one evening, so this is probably the quickest and easiest Valentine's Day garment I've ever made my sister - yet it still looks fabulous!

Now, in other news, as you may have gathered from the baby goat in the pictures, kidding season is well underway here!

Zillah started us off by giving birth to a large single doe last Friday afternoon.

Then Sunday night Sugar Plum graced us with triplets, two does and a buck!

The littlest triplet, a doeing we've named Buttercup, had to be bottle fed as she was too little to compete with her siblings for food. So, she currently spends her nights in the house and is absolutely adorable - I've never had, and only once seen, a goat this gold color before! It will be interesting to see if her coloring changes at all as she grows!

And the youngest of our babies so far is this big single buckling of Skylena's, born Monday afternoon.

Happy Valentine's Day!