the fall

In the middle of the Halloween costume craziness, my daughters decided they wanted to be brownies. After attending the first meeting and being handed the uniform order forms I has a small gasp of sticker shock. The whole kit for vest/patches etc retails around $50. Take that times 2 and well... let's just say I had a moment of quiet contemplation.

I went home, and after researching it out--the patches totaled $15 each, the vest was $16 and the rest was made up of books, I decided there must be a cheaper way. I looked on ebay, I asked around, and in the end, I scanned a bunch of pattern books. Because really--$16 for a brown vest? The downfall of me, was when I said--how hard can this be? In the end, I found that Mccall's pattern M6229 has a view that is roughly the same shape. I got the pattern for $1 on sale at Joanne's and then went looking for fabric. I found some for $6 a yard, and bought 3 yards. I also bought a bunch of bias tape, but in the end, I didn't use it. So, for $17 I was ready to make 2 vests.

Well, this is about the time I realized that the vest pattern was only partially lined, and I was thinking fully lined (although for the record, official brownie vests are not lined at all). So I thought I'd just make mine fully lined, I've done a vest like that before, and thought I remembered how it should go. So I cut out the 2 pattern pieces 4 times and set to work.

The first vest, went together really nice until I sewed the lining to the outside. Let's just say that the way *I* had it it would have no armholes. I could not for the life of me figure out how I had done this before. Looking at the vest I had made, I could not figure out how to do it. After a day of fretting and ripping, I finally thought to look to see if I had kept the pattern. I had and after looking at the instructions, it was very clear what I had done wrong.

The second vest took only an hour to put totally together.

But the vests also took some handsewing--on the sides, which was how they got turned inside out. And again, I had to remember how to sew slightly invisibly those seams together.
So, ok it isn't much of a fall, but you would think that two vests could not take 3 days to sew. And then the patches! The patches are ironed on, but they need to be sewed down still. And I didn't foresee that my homemade vests would need some sort of label so that girls could tell them apart.

The official vest:


My versions: