weekend of sewing pt III

I made a tote bag! Melissa, this uses the Ikea cushion cover you gave me as an invisible structural lining. And Saskia, do you recognize the outside sweater layer? Essentially, it's all just a nice cover for an existing ugly black canvas tote bag I already owned.

And I kind of just wanted to show off the lace curtains I got while my family was visiting. But I did alter the length of them to fit the window, so it squeaks by as acceptable posting to this blog, I hope!

thanks Melissa for telling me how to turn the pictures:)

weekend of sewing pt II

So this is my version of Melissa's fisherman pants! I have to say, it was a nice, but easy project. I decided to raise the inseam by an arbitrary 10cm, which turns out to be the limit. Any more, and the pants won't work, because the fold you need to make to wear it would hang funny.

At first, I was unsure about them because it has the funny feeling of wearing a diaper--there is a lot of material gathered up around the crotch. But they certainly are comfortable otherwise, and I've been wanting to make a loose, above-the-ankle pair of summer pants out of this dark material I had.

Project notes: I found I liked using the wrong side of the fabric because it is more rough-looking, which fits the look of the pants. And I used a contrasting green thread to sew because it made it easier to tear out stitches--and kept it, because I thought it looked nice on the hem.

weekend of sewing!

I set aside most of this weekend to do a lot of projects that have been on my mind. It helps that I got this shiny new camera to document and show you guys!

First from before, that yellow-checked dress that was too big and weird around the bust. It turns out the existing dart was too high, so adding vertical darts didn't solve the problem. But if I took out the side-dart, and made a new one, I found I could connect it to the vertical dart to make a cool-looking "L" that fits a lot better.

Hey, I just realized that this L thing is what Saskia already did on her polka dot dress! Serves me right to not look more closely at the pictures... but I guess great minds think alike.

Ok I'll start a new post for the rest..