Ottobre “Donald” Hoodies

Sabra (Sew a Straight Line) has always been super inspiring to me, in many aspects of life, but I’m talking about sewing right now, so we’ll focus on that.  She has sewn so many items of clothing for her children that are jaw-dropping amazing—the details!  Love love them.  She has been sewing a lot of patterns from a magazine designed/printed in Finland, called Ottobre design.  If you haven’t heard of it, check it out!  There are some seriously cute clothing patterns for boys and girls, ranging in sizes from infant to around age 14.  Each magazine comes with about 40 patterns.  The cost of the magazine is about $20.00, so you are getting an amazing deal on patterns!  And you can get it in English ;).  Sabra recently sewed one of these Donald Hoodies (Ottobre 6/2010) and blogged it HERE, and I loved it so much I decided it would be one of my Easter presents to my boys.  So here we go!

It has been so long since I sewed anything for my boys!  And guess what?  They still love it (phew!  because I’d still make them wear these at least 10 times for the effort I put into them!). These two boys were so cute and supportive the whole week while I worked on these.  They’d get so excited at my progress and kept trying it on throughout the week.

Since I knew I wanted these to fit for a while, I went with the largest size, which was a 170cm.  I shortened Sunshine’s by almost 3” because they were so long, but the rest is fine.  As you can see, Mr. Zippy’s is tucked up in the pictures because it looks a little funny to me so long, but he doesn’t mind it at all.  I figured they’ll get a good two years of wear out of these!  Right???  At least a year.  I’ll settle for a year.

The sweatshirt fleece I purchased from Joann, and the knits on the insides are both from Girl Charlee.  I absolutely love the black and white checkered knit!  The hoodies are both fully lined, and I wish I had placed pockets on the inside and used reversible separating zippers so the whole hoodie was reversible.  How cool would that be?  Because you know, kids like that kind of thing!  As it is, they still turn it with the knit on the outside and just zip it up from the front.

Because the sewing instructions come without any pictures, I did have to think hard while sewing the first one.  Each sentence is a sewing step, pretty much.  I think I sewed the second one in half the time as the first!  But it was great and I love that when you sew with patterns, you can learn something new each time.

The thing about topstitching in a contrasting thread color is that you can see it very well, which can get tricky over seams, or just plain tricky when you are tired and don’t feel like being careful anymore!  But they don’t look too bad.  I used neon green on one and neon yellow on the other, but they look pretty much the same to me.

I’m excited to try more Ottobre patterns!  I found a helpful guest blog post on The Train to Crazy by Melanie from A Sewing Journal about Ottobre patterns HERE.  It might be worth reading to help you make up your mind on purchasing one.

P.S.  This is not a paid post or anything, I just enjoyed the pattern and honestly think the magazine is a great price for so many patterns.  Sabra didn’t pay me either ;).  I just love the girl.