Dino Alterations

A good friend of mine got me a couple of Threadless tees for Christmas, and as rad as they were, they were both Larges, and sadly I'm a Small, so they've been sitting in my drawer for five months.

So I spent the morning altering this one!

Turned out pretty good.  The shirt had no side seams (how in the world do they make a tube of cloth with no seams??) so I had to cut the sides and take it in about two inches total.

 

Hemmed the bottom another two and half inches, then shortened the sleeves and decreased the arm hole diameter.  I love using thread that stands out from whatever fabric I'm working with, but there's something to be said for matching thread...darker colors show everything, right or wrong.

I'm also sure there's some other type of stitching that's better than a straight stitch for stretchy t-shirt material, but I have no idea what it is.  I say, straight stitch all the time. 

It gets the job done for now!

Shorts

Gah!  Tried my hand at a pair of shorts recently, and uh.....wellll, shoot.  They were supposed to be custom fit, but that ended up meaning very fitted.  And, it made the front and back rise the exact same measurement, so the shorts barely cover my bum in the back, while covering my bellybutton many times over in the front. 

 

Still though, with a shirt covering the waist, they're pretty cute.  I'm gonna try again.

Tubes

So I finally cleaned up and pulled apart the old mountain bike tube I had draped over a chair on my front porch for weeeeeeks.  It was covered in pollen on the outside, and coated in baby powder on the INside.  A quick call to the man informed me that the powder prevents the tube from sticking to the tire when it heats up!  I had no idea.

This was my first attempt at sewing a zipper onto anything.  I had to wing it because the "easy" instructions found on the zipper package were ridiculous.  I took a bunch of pictures of this process, but had to can them all because I initially sewed the zipper on the wrong, stinking side. 

 

Oh, AND it took a full hour and a half of tinkering to find the correct tension to stitch length ratio for sewing through two layers of rubber...fruuuustratinnnnng!  But around 11pm two nights ago, a proper pouch finally emerged.

 

And as a side note, the outside of the tube (UNpowdered) is pretty sticky and will not run through the machine on its own because it sticks to the bottom of the presser foot.  I had to lay pieces of newspaper over it which not only obscured seam vision, but also gets sewed INTO the seam and has to be pulled out later.  With tweezers.  There has to be a better way?

The pouch was supposed to be a manly sewing kit for Jerm, but this one is way too long (stupid 9" zipper).  Alternatively, my boss said it would make a perfect pencil bag, and I think he's right.

Still though, I wanted to make right by the sewing kit idea, so I made another one last night, using a 7" zipper instead.  This time I knew to close the ends on the zipper which made it a lot more tidy.  

 

Voila!  The shorter one is way more what I had in mind, and at first I was disappointed that the lines of stitching along the zippers are pretty uneven...but then I decided I liked the idea because they run along the natural curve of the tube and that seems more hand crafty to me. 

 

That's it!

Hi, Mom!

Now that my mom finally received her Mother's Day package (a day late!!  Thanks to a certain post office, grr...) I can show you what I made her.  Well, I didn't make this awesome towel, but I found it to go inside what I made her.

The nice fruits and veg kitchen towel thing was the perfect complement to the muslin drawstring bag I made from this pattern which I saw referenced on My Paper Crane.

I happened across some really nice shamrock fabric in the sale bin at Hobby Lobby one day, and remorsed the fact I hadn't found it back before St. Patrick's Day.  BUT, since my mom is 100% Irish, I thought she'd dig the shamrocks for every day use anyway :)

This was also my first time ever trying applique with double sided fusible iron-y stuff, and it worked out great!  I was worried the edges would fray since I just cut the shamrocks straight out of the cotton, but the glue kept the edges nice and tight. 

Annnd, I changed the pattern up a bit by adding the lining, purely because I wanted to use the Irish fabric...it's like a nice clover surprise.  Here it is twice, because I was so torn between my close up shot of the bag with the peas and peaches, I couldn't decide which one to post, so I posted both.  Hehehe...

And the coup de grace, a dimetrodon card made from cut paper.  I got to use my new (and first ever) pair of scallop scissors, and they totally rocked...I love them.   

Graduating Bananas

I stayed up sewing last night till my eyeballs were bleeding; I was so close to finishing my friend's graduation gift, I just couldn't stop (despite countless setbacks!!). 

I had the idea early on that I wanted bananas and peapods for my project, but had a hard time finding either.

My sister ended up designing the peapods which I had printed at Spoonflower, and after much Googling I found the bananas at Harts Fabric. 

 

I looooove the way the peapods turned out, but I ordered the lightweight cotton which was way too thin for this project, so I ran into some "issues"...

 

Buuut, the final project turned out ok in the end, and the bananas even attracted a little lady bug during our photo shoot!

I got this pattern for a "market bag" from Portabello Pixie, and tho I love the finished bags, I was confusedly left to my own devices on more than one occasion trying to follow the pattern... 

By the way, it's reversible!!

Also, I have no idea what was up with me, the sun, the camera, etc., but seems like every picture I took was either over exposed or too dark, OR completely blurry...gah!  But you get the idea.

So that's it!  Oh, and this project made me think that my sister needs to make ME a pincushion because I've run out of tomato space...