Category: sewing

Something to fill the hours

Last night, despite the fact that I probably need another project like I need a hole in the head, I finally decided to do something with this pile of fabric:

That’s black knit suiting with vertical stripes, and blue cotton with vertical lines of lace, plus contrasting ribbon for each. I’ve been shopping endlessly recently. Between David’s graduation, a party for my high school swim coach who’s retiring, the rehearsal, and the evening before, I need several dresses, shoes, and wraps, since Boston in May/June will either be 90 degrees or 40. Then, we leave for a week in Hawaii, and I need honeymoon-worthy beach clothes. Since Seattle is neither a dressy town, nor a sunny one, this has meant a lot of shopping. A bit exhausting. I finally gave up on finding a cover-up for walking from the hotel to our snorkeling beaches, and just decided to make one. Everything I was finding was either gaudy or non-functional, and everything was expensive, so I just went to Joann’s last week, found sale items, and “splurged”.

I came up with a detailed plan:

(note ubiquitous printouts of registry information and collection of readings for the service — still need to choose two!)
Then I used a dress and a sleeveless v-neck to approximate a good size and shape.

And then I hemmed the sides (My first time using a walking foot! Good fun.), sewed on the ribbon, decided that the back wasn’t working and so removed the cross and replaced with strait straps, and then used a zig-zag stitch to hem the bottom. It turns out that the only black thread that I have causes my sewing machine to choke, and so the thread was orange, turquoise (from two decades ago, since the label has a Canadian flag and French on it), and navy. Good enough!

It actually fits very well. Yay! The body is perfect, and the hem is straight. The ribbon is slightly puckery, and so I’m considering adding darts to it, but it really barely even needs it, and for beach-wear, it’s just fine. 🙂

My favourite parts are (1) where the two ribbons join at the shoulder, and (2) the seam for the v-neck.

And this morning, I woke up feeling accomplished (for thirty seconds until I remembered the rest of the things on the list.) 🙂 Only three more days until we leave for Boston!

A new look

Too many nights in a row of wedding things, and last night I revolted and took up a totally unrelated project. 🙂

After Kevin graduated, I was hanging out at his fraternity helping him get packed up. One of his fraternity brothers was packing his car and left an Ikea chair till last. It wouldn’t fit, and I offered to buy it. At $25, it felt like quite the steal, and was the first piece of furniture for my first apartment. (Thanks, Metzger!!) After four years of college abuse, and four years since of sitting in the sunshine at my place, it’s been looking a bit worse for wear.

In case you can’t see in that photo, the formerly black cover is now a mottled mix of pink, grey, and charcoal. The stripes at the creases are substantially darker than the surrounding fabric.

It also looked chronically out of place next to our other furniture, especially the blue futon.

So a trip to Joann fabrics, where I found a $9 corduroy remnant, *just* big enough, that matched perfectly (what ARE the odds?!**), and a few hours later, I had a brand new chair!!

It looks so sophisticated and wonderful compared to the old one! 🙂 I reused all of the padding from the original, so I didn’t have to go through the nonsense of cutting foam — a major plus. Best of all, it not only coordinates with the futon, it really matches!!

The wood somehow even looks like it was meant to go! Pretty crazy cool.

I didn’t use a pattern, just sort of lay the fabric down, matched things up, cut a bit and went to town with the sewing machine. I chose to have overlapping fabric in the back rather than dealing with zippers. I had to rip three seams (out of probably 25 or thirty), but that’s better than my usual average. 🙂 The size is great, and I figured out how to square off all of the corners by refolding the fabric and seaming, which I feel particularly clever about.

Yay!

**Unfortunately, I tried to turn one lucky find into a streak. The quest for bridal shoes was a bust, and I didn’t even like anything in Crate & Barrel. Should have stopped while I was ahead.

A crafty present pouch

While I’ve always considered myself an unusually structure-happy person, time management in the conventional sense isn’t really my thing. Master of procrastination, to put a positive spin on things. I run five minutes past fashionably late, I post in batches every two weeks, and I hate going to bed because I feel like I’ve squandered the evening. In some ways Kevin is the opposite. He likes getting up and being busy all Saturday morning so that he can relax in the afternoon, he likes leaving the house when he says he will, and he’s probably the most efficient worker I’ve ever seen. On the flip side, a list of 15 things can take him an hour and a half at the grocery store, and he’s more into the “season” of important days than the date itself. So perhaps it’s not surprising that we didn’t open each others’ Christmas gifts until Febrary third…

Part of it is that we didn’t celebrate at home, and we’d make a conscious decision early on to celebrate when we got back, rather than lugging, security-checking, and flying gifts to Florida and back. Then Kevin was busy at work, then we were wedding planning, then I sprained my wrist and couldn’t finish cutting out the pieces of his homemade gift book, and all of a sudden, January was gone. Kevin was at work all day on Saturday, and since I was in need of a project, feeling guilty about the delay, and realized that we were straddling Christmas and Valentines day, I decided to sew him a gift pouch rather than wrapping.

I bought this fabric a year ago — red with fireflies and a gorgeous white and taupe speckled pattern. I used pink thread to sew it and gold embroidery floss to tie it, as a nod to the holiday-straddling.

And here it is tied up:

It took all of 10 minutes to make, including winding the bobbin and sewing in the ends. I placed the two fabrics right-side-together, and cut so that there was 3/4″ on each side of the book, and so that the fabric was a little under 2.5 book-lengths long. I ironed both pieces. Then, holding them right sides together, I sewed a U down the long right side, across the bottom, and up the long left side. Cut thread, turned rightside out and pressed the edges with my fingers. I folded the top edge like wrapping paper (corners folded in as small triangles, rolled the edge around twice) and I seamed that. Then I folded the bottom edge up to make a big enough pocket for the book, and seamed both long edges. I like that you can see the white lining on the side seams. It looks so pretty and polished.

For finishing, you’ll have six ends to weave in — pull or sew the thread to the same side, knot, and sew the ends in between the layers. Fold the bag in half horizontally, and sew in ties (embroidery thread? Fine ribbon? A snap? A button and elastic?) at the crease.