hi-lo dress

A few days ago I was shopping at Goodwill to outfit my husband for his summer internship.  I wandered away while he was trying on clothes and found this gem:

The colors screamed, "SUMMER" so loud I had to have it.  It was a pricey purchase for me, at $6.25, but that goes to show the extent of my love at first sight.  First, I hacked off the sleeves.  I left about an inch of the sleeve intact to give myself some fabric for the hem so I wouldn't have to make the strap any more slender than it was.  Think:  a hem at this point would have meant spaghetti straps.

Honestly, I should have really ripped out the seam and done it more cleanly since there were so many ruffles in the sleeve, but I was really excited to finally be sewing on my new table and get a new dress for Casual Friday.  Next order of business was to pin and take in the sides a little (not shown) and bring up the waist of the skirt.  Again, when bringing up the waist, I should have picked the seam and resewn, but I didn't want to! I folded over the amount I wanted to move it up and then sewed very close to the current waistline.

Lastly, I folded the dress in half, down the very front (think: line between your bosom), laid a favorite hi-lo skirt on the waist, and made a half-circle cut.  This made my dress hi-lo.  Some important notes: 1.  Make sure your waist is where you want it to be before you make the cut out. 2. You don't have to cut out the entire side - mine only ended being about have of the bottom hem.  Re-hem the section you cut out and rock it like you own it!  

Sorry for all the cheesy rock analogies - my husband's internship is in geology!!!  My next post is coming soon on how I took all of his over-sized dress shirts in to make them fitted.

diy craft table (aka. the wooly mammoth)

Our table is done!  Our table is done!!  It took six long weeks of arduous labor and then a week of waiting to let the polyurethane cure, but it's done!!!  The folks over at Shabby Dwelling had a great tutorial that was recently taken down.  I was hoping to add a few directions to their otherwise amazing tutorial on how we scaled up the size, but it is no longer there!  And I unfortunately didn't take enough pictures to walk you through the process without their instructions.  Sorry folks!

As we were building, we made lots of mistakes.  Most of the table has been built, taken apart, and rebuilt at least once.  Does that mean we actually built two tables?  Fortunately, none of the mistakes are very noticeable.  And, a few weeks later, I'm not even thinking about them.  Kind of like how I stress over all the minor issues in my new sewing projects until I've worn it a few times and realize I'm the only one that knows.  Or cares.

Visible mistakes aside, the table needed a name.  The Table just isn't good enough.  After the 900,000th piece of cat hair made its way permanently into the endless layers of polyurethane, we decided she's going to be called The Wooly Mammoth.  Feast your eyes on our beast: