It was totally a happy accident that one of the patterns we designed for our spring ’14 season works fabulously for maternity wear. When we started Snapdragon Studios last August, Paul and I had no idea that we’d be welcoming a new baby into our family this summer and Kim and I definitely didn’t design any of our patterns with a baby belly in mind.
Fast forward nine months, and I was already in my third trimester when we went to Quilt Market. It was a challenge deciding what to wear since we knew we wanted to show our designs as we went around talking to people there. I could still *just* fit my tummy into one of the Market Day Tunics, but otherwise it was the Summer Jazz all the way for me. Just for fun, I cut off one of our SJ dresses into a tunic length to wear with jeans or leggings, and I’ve finally gotten around to taking pictures to share with you.
Paul and I went on a date night Friday night to see a summer stock production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), and I had him snap these pictures before we left, so I’m considerably further along here than when I first wore the tunic. In retrospect, I wish I would’ve shaped the hem a bit more where it goes ove rmy belly instead of cutting it off straight, but at the time I was thinking that if I cut it straight it would still be long enough to cover and I would be able to wear it without any changes after having the baby.
To make it a tunic length, I shortened the dress length of the pattern by 4″ and hemmed it as usual. Here’s how I will do it if I’m ambitious enough to make one more before the baby arrives (unlikely, but just in case…). I’m a size M in a woven and size S in a knit, so I drew my dashed line for the medium size, but these proportions should work for any size.
Sorry about the terrible lighting for that picture, but hopefully you can see what I’m getting at. I should have come up 4″ on the side and only two inches at center front. You could cut the back skirt off straight across at 4″, but if you wanted to be kinda cute you could also curve the back hem this way and then when you’re not pregnant anymore you’ll have a fun tunic with a shirt-tail hem.
The Summer Jazz as a maternity top is super comfortable and I’ve gotten lots of compliments on it, which makes it a win in my book.
Don’t forget to keep watching the blog and Facebook for our baby announcement and the opening of the quilt giveaway! T-2 weeks (or less! gulp!) and counting!
-Elizabeth
Peggy Vincent, Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife. Peggy Vincent was a professional home-birth midwife in the U.S. and delivered over 3,000 babies during her career, which spanned from her nurse-training in the 1960s through the early 2000s, so Baby Catcher has plenty of great birth stories, but it also offers interesting commentary on the obstacles faced by midwives in America and includes a lot of good information about the differences between medicalized and non-intervention birth experiences. This was one of the first midwife memoirs I read and it got me hooked.
Penny Armstrong and Sheryl Feldman, A Midwife’s Story. I just finished this one a couple days ago and I have to confess that I read it all in one fell swoop. (Any time I say that you can assume that I bought it on my Kindle and stayed up all night to read it – uninterrupted reading doesn’t happen around here during daylight hours.) Penny Armstrong is a trained nurse-midwife who set up practice serving the Amish community of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and most of her stories are about the Amish. She’s light on the details of the actual births, which is good or bad depending on your interest in birth itself and your general level of squeamishness, but she includes a lot about Amish culture and about the way that she and her husband were accepted into the Amish community despite being English because of her care for their women and babies.
Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times. News flash: in case you didn’t realize, Call the Midwife is based on the memoir of a midwife practicing in London in the 1950s. I haven’t actually watched the show yet (it’s on my list for when I’m sitting nursing the new baby 18 hours/ day later this summer), but I loved the book. Fun fact: I learned about eclampsia by reading Call the Midwife and totally diagnosed Lady Sybil and called that she was doomed after she had the baby in Downton Abbey. My mother-in-law and Paul both diagnosed me as a prego-obsessed nerd, but whatever, I was totally right.
Linda Fairley, The Midwife’s Here! The Enchanting True Story Story of Britain’s Longest Serving Midwife. I just started this one, but already I love Fairley’s humor and her way of telling the stories. Like A Midwife’s Story, so far The Midwife’s Here is lighter on actual birth stories and heavy on the culture surrounding midwifery in Britain in the 1960s and 70s when Fairley was doing her training, but so far it’s a great read.
Lucy Puryear, M.D., Understanding Your Moods When You’re Expecting. This was the closest I got to the What to Expect genre. There are tons of books on what happens to your body when you’re pregnant, but this one explains all of the craziness that is going on in your head when your brain is flushed with hormones on a regular basis and I found it to be really reassuring that I wasn’t alone in bursting into tears when I couldn’t get the peanut butter jar open or in becoming enraged over something as stupid as Paul draping his jeans over the hamper instead of putting them inside. There’s a lot of good information about more serious mental health issues as well (how to recognize post-partum depression, whether to stay on your meds while you’re pregnant and nursing), but I found the science behind the mood-swings to be pretty fascinating.
Jena Pincott, Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies? I’ve given this book to several friends when they were expecting. Pincott is a popular science writer who became interested in uncovering the “truth” (or lack thereof) in old wives tales about pregnancy when she was expecting her first baby. Fun, light and educational.
Snapdragon Studios 