chop tops

The more refashioning I'm doing, the pickier I'm getting about my clothes.  Honestly, I was sort of hoping it would go the other way.  But now that I know how tailor-made clothes fit, it's really hard to wear something that just sort-of works.  I keep staring in my closet and bemoaning, "I have nothing to wear!"  And then I reply back to myself, "How do you have nothing to wear when you sew something new for yourself at least once a week?  What are you doing with all your new clothes??"  It's like a mother and daughter are arguing inside my head, yikes.

I took a close look at my closet and cleared out a lot of clothes I haven't worn in a long time.  No more--"I love that dress....I'll wear it next summer!"  If I hadn't worn it in a year, it was headed to the chopping block.  Literally.  I chopped.

The first dress I chopped was from my wedding shower.  I couldn't bear to part with it, but it was see-through and made of cream lace.  You really can't wear that to anything other than your own bridal shower without looking like a bride at someone else's party.  And I HATE wearing those skintight squeezy things that someone decided should replace normal slips.  Who ever thought up that torture??

The other dress was way too short.  I somehow had the idea to wear it to a wedding for a coworker last summer.  A ridiculously short dress to a daytime wedding with all of my colleagues.  I can really be brilliant sometimes...  To give you an indication of how short it was, I only cut off about eight inches to make it into a shirt.  Also, for the record, my mother did teach me not to wear white to someone else's wedding, but you can see the blue, right?!

Here we go!  Put on your dress and mark a good length for a shirt.  Then add three inches because you are invariably judging it too short and you'll never wear a too-short shirt (also you need extra material for your hem).  Take it off, lie it straight, and CHOP.  It feels so good, doesn't it??



All that's left is to hem!  For my hems, I usually fold the fabric twice, about 1/4 inch each time, iron it flat, and put in a straight stitch.  If you cut it too short, like most of the things I do, cut it with your pinking shears and then use a zig-zag stitch to prevent fraying.

I've worn both of these shirts twice already since I made them!  It makes me feel so much better that they aren't sitting in the back of my closet with my beanie baby collection anymore. (Lies, my beanie baby collection is in the attic.)

columbia mini maker faire

We have a big event coming up next weekend!  I recently met the amazingly cool and amazingly talented Jillian from the famous ReFashionista.  (Don't tell her, but I'm obsessed with her work!)   I was so excited to realize we both live in Columbia, SC--and over the moon excited when she asked me to help her with the Columbia Mini Maker Faire.

The Maker Faire is a show and tell festival where creaters of all kinds come together to show their wares and teach others the how-to.  Jillian and I will be hosting an open-sew for you to get your hands on a sewing machine and materials for refashioning.  We will be there offer both sewing support and creative ideas for you to make your own refashions.

I'm really looking forward to seeing you all there.  Sewing can be daunting and scary until you sit down with a sewing machine.  Once you get the hang of the over-under upside-downside of threading the machine, it really is sew easy.  I can't wait to show you next Saturday!

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:

on slapdashery

slapdashery:  (n.)

1.  the act of doing things in a careless or hurried way
2.  utilizing a complete lack of patience when trying to make or build something
3.  my middle name

Construction doesn't lend well to slapdashery.  Sewing doesn't usually either.  It's like baking, requiring close precision.  My husband is the baker, I'm the cook.  He saved this desk.

I struggle with patience.  It would be quite adequate to say that I am not a process oriented person--I want a desk and I want it now and will do everything I can to get it done in a day.  But alas, polyurethane takes 24 hours to dry, supplies need to be purchased and then returned and purchased again, and boards need to be cut and then cut again.

Here's what I've learned about building desks:

1.  Measure.  Then measure again.
2.  Don't guess what height you want your desk.  An arbitrary number of 33 inches, because I like tall desks, doesn't work with any chair that would still allow me to touch the floor.  Too bad I found this out after I build the supports.
3.  Wood soaks up a lot of paint and stain.  So buy extra--a lot of extra.
4.  I haven't the faintest idea how to clean a paintbrush so it won't harden with polyurethane.
5.  My cat can squeeze out of window open only 5 inches.
6.  My square isn't square, so all my cuts were at an angle.  Now my whole desk is angled.
7.  Angry painting in the dark does not a pretty desk make.
8.  1"x10" lumber is actually 3/4"x9 1/4."  This makes a big difference when the side support of the table sticks out those extra 3/4".  I'm convinced the fourth dimension is where all of the wood that's missing from these measurements is hiding.  It's just a bunch of skinny slivers of lumber hanging in space.

We're getting close--I can see the light.  Tonight we will be screwing the top boards together to make the table top.  And it will look like an actual table.  Then 5 coats of paint + 2 coats of an accent design + 5 coats of polyurethane + 2 days of drying time = a functional, amazing, mind-blowing desk.

the traveling sewing machine

For many years, my sewing machine lived in it's original box in my tiny closet underneath all of my clothes.  Every time I wanted to sew, I needed to go dig it out of the bottom of the closet, which usually took a lot of effort and heavy breathing.  When I finished graduate school, I repurposed my desk into a sewing table.  It was tiny, but a lot better than excavating my sewing machine out of my closet every few weeks.

During school, my desk lived in the living room.  Meanwhile, I had a room full of dying plants all to themselves.  It was called the Dying Plant Room.  I desperately want to be a gardener, but I'm just not good at it.  The dying plants lived on, but always looking desperate for even a single drop of water.  When I finished school I didn't water the plants more, I just used my newly-acquired wisdom to know that I should give them away.  So I gifted every half-dead plant to a friend.  How nice of me.  With those plants gone, I moved my sewing machine desk into the Dying Plant Room and rebranded it as the Craft Room.

But I had one problem with the new Craft Room.  It was full of windows, which makes it incredibly hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.  Uh, and I usually sew in my skivvies.  I can't be bothered to take on and off my clothes every time I need to try on an article of clothing.  That is really too much to ask.  So the window-ful Craft Room wasn't going to cut it.

So me and my sewing machine are on the move again.  We've decided to invade the Man Cave. This time, we're leaving behind the desk, and making plans to build an L-shaped desk that spans two full walls of the (former Man Cave) now Studio.  This weekend, we plan to commence the epic endeavor of hand-crafting this monster desk, so my sewing will be on hold for a few days.

This hot Man Cave mess will soon be transformed into a sexy Studio!

Wish me luck!

(As a side note, every other room in my house is called the normal name:  the Bedroom, the Bathroom, the Kitchen.)

blue dotted shirt

A few weeks ago I found this:

I loved the bold blue polka-dottedness and the vast amount of fabric.  I imagined a little large old lady wearing this dress to church on Sundays and to dinner with her family.  Her favorite Sunday dinner was chicken dumplings and she always went to see her cousin Maybel, who was also very fashionable.  It was her best dress and she treasured it.  And she never once stained it with communion wine or chicken dumplings.  As I was ripping the seams, I even discovered that she probably sewed it herself.  She loved this dress.  Now I love this dress, but I decided it needs to be a shirt.  And probably a skirt too, but all in good time.

To start with, I ripped the seams to separate the sleeves from the bodice and the bodice from the skirt, so I get the individual puzzle pieces.  I ripped the seams because, surprisingly, as tall and large as the previous woman was (I'm imagining her living in the Amazon), the top piece is actually pretty small.  I needed to save every millimeter of fabric.

Then I put it on inside out and pinned the sides to take it in.  I sewed a straight stitch along the pins and a zigzag stitch for extra security, and chopped off the extra fabric with my pinking shears.  Lastly, I carefully folded and sewed the smallest hem I could manage on the bottom of the shirt and for the sleeves.

And that's it.  I wore it the next day with my awesome, recently-thrifted green blazer.  My husband said, "You look like someone who means business, but wants to have fun doing it."  Score one for the polka dots.

And then I changed into my jammies, but couldn't take the top off.  When I get proud of making something, I need to wear it a lot!  It matched the blue dotted pajama pants that I also just found at the thrift store.  I just had to show you.