Plans, and the Changing Thereof

Tags

Butterick 6383, cats, clothing, Friday Night With Friends, sewing

Sunday snog-fest on the sewing room windowsill.

WHAT?

I participated in Friday Night With Friends this week, and decided to get a start on my vest.

I’d been having second thoughts about my fabric choices for this.  All three fabrics here are very lightweight synthetics with a lot of drape.  But look at that photograph of the jacket in taffeta.  The suggested fabrics also include jacquard, broadcloth, linen, and tweed.  All fabrics with some body.  And the pattern is meant to be oversized–I sized down to an L and the finished hip measurement is still 13″ larger than my hips.  The vest is designed to stand out from the body, and I was afraid that my drapey fabrics would just make it look like a tent.

So I went to the stash again and came up with some gorgeous corduroy.  This is for the right front:

I wasn’t able to capture the depth of color in this–it’s amazing.  Those are gold highlights and the background is black, though it looks blue here.

And this is for the left front:

It’s black, but I’ve lightened it to show the texture.

So I cut the vest out on Friday and sewed a bit on Saturday, and this is what I have so far:

Hmmmm . . . don’t know how I feel about it yet.  Especially the puffy collar.  But, at the same time, I feel like everything about this project is new and a bit risky, and I’m just going to go with it for a while.  It’s a style I’ve never worn, with various features that are new to me, and I’m just going to wait to form an opinion until I see all the elements together.  These fabrics were just sitting around in a box, and at least now there’s a chance they’ll become something very cool.

I used to have a supervisor at a former job who was a terrible control freak about certain things, especially food.  You remember the sandwich-ordering scene from “When Harry Met Sally,” right?  Like that.  Then one day it occurred to me that controlling everything like that–wanting it the way you want it, as Sally put it–means you are never pleasantly surprised.  Like I frequently am by things like this and this.  So I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised by how this vest turns out.  🙂

This project has reminded me of how much I DESPISE gathering, however.  Gathered and tiered skirts were a thing when I was a teenager and I spent so many miserable hours wrangling long strips of cotton, and YUCK.  Was glad to get that over with.

Another change of plans that happened this weekend was this:

My honey came home from a bike ride Saturday afternoon and asked if I would make him another fleece cycling jersey, but this time with a full zip and thicker, warmer fleece.  And off we went to Joann’s to use our coupons and get supplies.

And yes, I did try to talk him into the tie dye fleece, or the fleece with the dogs on it, or the fleece with the huge black and yellow houndstooth, but we came home with the black.

Sigh.

So my plan right now is to finish the vest; I’m adding a lining, but that doesn’t really take any more time than facings.  Then I want to cut out the cycling jersey and my red jacket.

It’s going to be a very fuzzy week here.  🙂

STH

Towels and Totes and Travel

Tags

bags, cats, clothing, Ellensburg, Friday Night With Friends, Olmstead Place State Park, quilting, S5320, ScraptasticTuesday, sewing, travel, unpaper towels

Barn at Olmstead Place State Park, Ellensburg, WA.  Note barn quilt!

Some finished stuff, some travel pics–lots of pretty things to show you today!

First, I finished my unpaper towels.  They’re so pretty and colorful!   I made them with flannel on one side for absorbency, regular cotton or cotton/poly on the other.

These are a great way to use up scraps that won’t play well in quilts.  I used several pieces from the Freecycle box of fabric I got a few months ago, plus some I’ve gotten from SCRAP.  The flannel above was purchased years ago for a pair of PJs, but these aren’t really colors I like to wear any more.

Pooh discovers the towels aren’t made of delicious noms and quickly loses interest.

This snowflake flannel was a fitted sheet in its former life; the center of the sheet was worn and unusable, but the sides that went down over the mattress were still in good shape.

I used this tutorial to make the towels.  Choosing fasteners was a bit of a dilemma; I was certainly not going to buy a snap press that I would never use again, I didn’t have enough sew-in snaps, and I don’t like the way Velcro washes, so I used what I have a TON of:  1/2″ buttons.  I sewed them on first, then assembled the towels, topstitched them, and added my buttonholes.

I wound up with 19 towels, just because that was what I could get out of the fabric combinations I had.  And they’re great!  I’ve already had reason to use them a few times and they absorb well and wash up fine in the laundry.  I had seen a tutorial that suggested sewing an X across the middle of the towels to keep them from getting wonky in the wash, but I didn’t have any trouble with mine.

I’ll still keep paper towels around for particularly nasty things like draining bacon, but these should reduce the number we buy.  And it’s so nice to have all those pretty fabrics in my kitchen and being used!

Shelby knows what piles of fabric are good for.

Second finish this week was a tote bag for a friend of mine who’s being beat up by life pretty thoroughly right now.  Her birthday was in July, so I wanted to make her something new and special and beautiful, something that would be a visible daily reminder that people love her.

Because bags are what I do best, and she often needs to carry a fair bit of stuff with her, I decided on a tote bag and chose this pattern from the stash.

Not the most inspiring pattern photos ever, but I liked the bottle holder pockets and opportunities for quilting in view A.

So off I went to Joann’s for a special fabric to use.  Yes, ME–the cheapest of the cheap, Stalker of Thrift Stores, Mistress of Scraps–I bought fabric at Joann’s!  I was actually hoping they’d have Wonder Woman fabric that I could use for the lining (seemed very appropriate for my friend–understated on the outside, superhero on the inside), but they didn’t have it.  I did get some beautiful blue fabric and some lightweight denim, though, and made them into this:

I mostly followed the pattern, though I did more quilting than the instructions called for and I didn’t use patchwork.

As usual, I agonized over how to do the quilting, but in the end, I decided to keep it simple.  I just wanted a little texture, but subtle, so as to keep the focus on that gorgeous blue print.

I substituted one of my big snaps for the Velcro called for in the pattern.  No inside pockets were included (bags are SO not the forte of the Big 4 pattern companies, and sometimes I wonder what they’re thinking when they put their bag patterns together!), so I added two divided slip pockets inside.

My honey and I met up with the birthday girl last Sunday in Ellensburg and set off to explore Olmstead Place State Park.  The park includes an old pioneer homestead, but I was more interested in the walking trail.

And an update on my latest project!  I participated in another Friday Night with Friends last Friday and worked on this, a blouse I’m making from a pair of pillowcases from Goodwill.

Yep, I know it’s hard to see the details here.  This fabric is hard to photograph.

I LOVE this fabric, and I’ve been wanting to make a peasant-y type blouse for a while.  However, I am seriously short on fabric, so this is going to be one of those MacGyver make-it-work-though-it-really-shouldn’t projects.  But I am in full I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED mode and powering through (with the help of a coordinating maroon synthetic).  More details to come when I get it finished.

Have a great weekend, everybody, and I hope all your pattern pieces are fitting on your fabric.

STH

ETA:  I have linked this post up to Scraptastic Tuesday at She Can Quilt.

Friday Night Sewing

Tags

clothing, Friday Night With Friends, sewing

I participated in the Friday Night With Friends event last Friday.  After the stressful week I had, it was so nice to empty my head of all my worries and just sit and sew!

Here’s what I worked on:

This is a project that’s been cooking away in my head for a while.  I have this problem, you see; I’m in LOVE with the Kelly skirt from Megan Nielsen.  Those box pleats.  Angled front pockets.  Buttons down the front.  Sigh.  I have this inner preppy person that gets all tingly about these sorts of features in a skirt.  (Yes, I have an inner bohemian, too–it gets crowded in there sometimes.)

This is a problem because the Kelly skirt does not come in my size.  And, frankly, I’m not going to spend $13 on a pattern that I have to grade up.  So I bought the Vogue pattern on the left from an Etsy seller a while ago in what I thought was my size.  I actually have no idea what I was thinking when I bought this, however, since it isn’t my size either.  😦  So, on to problem #2:  I am a dork.

On a happier note, though, look at that fun striped fabric up there.  After one of my doctor’s appointments recently, I decided I needed a reward, so I stopped in at the Goodwill on my way home.  That striped fabric was the brightest, most cheerful thing in the linen section, so I bought it, even though $4.99 seemed a little bit steep for what I thought was a tablecloth.  When I got it home, though, I discovered it was a Tommy Hilfiger full-size comforter cover–that’s a lot of fabric for $4.99!

So I’ve been working on the happiest, most summery skirt you ever imagined.  Waistband is on, but not finished yet; tomorrow’s task is to find some buttons for it.

Hope to have the skirt done this week.  Construction details to come . . . .

STH