Some Sewing!

I have new furniture!!!  And I finally got a job!!!   More on that soon...er...as soon as I get this disaster-zone of a house cleaned up and can get some nice pics.  Meanwhile:

Yesterday I made a dress for a 1950s-themed July 4th garden party for next weekend.  I made the pattern myself, based off of similar dresses from the 50s I've seen online.  I wish I'd been able to make the skirt fuller, but I botched the top  (the entire top is all one piece) and had to re-cut it. I still have accessories to put together and a hat to trim up;  pics of it after the party.

Here's the muslin that I draped up on my mannequin while developing the pattern, pinned together and covered with Sharpie notes. I did this back in March; when I made the dress yesterday, I actually had to bring both dress and mannequin down by two whole sizes, yay!

Earlier this month: 

I needed new clothing for my new workplace:  my last job was jeans-and-t-shirts casual, and after five years, I had NO nice, office-y clothes to wear.  I'd also been thinking for more than a year about making some of my old batik sarongs into cute tops, so I put the two ideas together and made some blouses for work at the beginning of June:

A simple peasant blouse with elastic neck
and cuffs, made with my medieval chemise pattern 

A brown leafy tunic with flutter sleeves, adapted from
Simplicity 2690

A little skirt, using the fringe edge of the
sarong for the hem and patch pockets. 

A drawstring "pillowcase" top (not
for work), made in the same way I made
 the top of this set of PJs back in March, from
a pair of old wrap pants. 

In other news: 

I am also a redhead now.  My hair [was] nearly black, naturally, but I started going gray in my TEENS.  It's been many varieties of dark auburn over the years, as well as cherry red, navy blue,  and several purples;  I decided to start growing out my gray - because I've always wanted, since I was a kid, to have loooong, white hair when I'm an old lady (because of the fairy godmother character in the book The Princess and the Goblin).  Since it's easier to maintain root color updates on lighter hair, and also to blend gray/white in with lighter colors, I decided why not go balls-out ginger for a while before finally fading/growing it out?  :) 

More Clothing!

What finally got me off my ass and sewing the purple bathrobe I posted the other day?  I'll be driving to Dallas this weekend with friends for a spa day at King Spa & Waterpark. I. CANNOT. WAIT.  I mean, can you imagine a cooler place to hang out?  It's a spa WITH SLIDES.  Seriously, you guys.

So, in addition to the pretty robe, I whipped together a couple of other things for this coming weekend:

Pants To PJs

In my SCA travels, I frequently end up in hotel rooms during and after events - long trips often require a break and a hot shower before the road trip back, and sometimes events are rained (or frozen, or baked) out and a group of us will end up bailing on the camping idea and just hotel it for the event.  And I'm always the dump truck in the ratty old Iron Maiden tshirt and men's boxers, hehe.  So I decided to do something about that for this coming weekend.

This set was made from an old pair of wrap pants I purchased a million years ago and then never wore because they were too short.  I cut the legs off and hemmed the resulting shorts, then made the top out of the pant legs that I had removed, like this: 

(I sewed the rectangular pants legs together at the sides, hemmed the top, and
ran a single drawstring through both front and back at the top, to form straps). 

And Of Course, 

A girl needs a swimsuit at a spa/waterpark (spaterpark?)  While I'm an admitted swimsuit junkie, I currently don't have any that fit me properly AND that I wanted to actually wear.  This weekend is an event:  it requires a new suit, dangit!  Tee-hee.  

After testing out patterns on a couple of old tshirts (and assing them up completely. Three times), I decided to go with an "Infinity Dress" style top to wear with some plain black suit bottoms I already have:  

I used a pattern based on the one in this blog post.  The only changes I made were to shorten the skirt drastically and gather the top edge a bit so it would flare over hips and stomach, omit the waistband entirely, and to shorten the "tube top" section into one that would function AS a waistband and also cover just my bust instead of my entire torso.  The fabric is a slinky, shiny, jersey knit that I've had laying around for years.  The teal-and-purple knotwork design at the bottom is printed directly on the selvage edge of the fabric. 

It's hard to see the upper edge of the back in these pics, since my mannequin, Violet, is wearing a black tshirt at the moment (I really need to make her a proper cover), so I put a red arrow in the second picture so you can see how high the back is.  

I'm doing a great job not sewing for a while, huh?  

FUCK. 

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Fück This Shirt

My first foray into customizing clothing with ink and stamps!  

T-shirt:  $3 from my favorite thrift store (Thrift Town, Austin TX) 

Stamps and ink provided by my bff/roommate (StazOn solvent ink, which isn't made for fabric, but it's supposed to be permanent on virtually any surface, so, we'll see). 

Cheater Post

Holy COW do I have some updates.  But at the moment, this week, I'm up to my ears in social engagements and catching-up with other things, so for now, here's some more jewelry I made last week when I was on my jewelry-making kick:

Iolite and glass

anklet for my sex!boots (wore to a wedding recently)

tiny blue glass drop at the clasp

Lots of blue drops happened.  The
moonstone bracelet is old, but I made
it, too, back in the day. 

By the way?  Fuck the camera on my phone. 

An old beaded memory wire bracelet that I
made fit again.  

pink and black glass with silver, earrings 

ipnk and black necklace to go with the earrings;
I made the little charm loop in the center, too. 

One last phone-cam pic of a "ruby" and "topaz" + "gold"
costume piece I made for the SCA

Some of the blue and silver beaded jewelry here is part of a set I made to wear with a specific outfit, that I'm sewing myself, and which I haven't talked about, lol. Sorry.  Been posting about that over at my SCA sewing blog, since it's clothing stuff; you can read those posts here.  Should be a finished product photo in a couple of days.  :)


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An Aside

I have an update for you on the whole light fixtures thing, which will be coming later this week; but in the meantime, I finally attacked my mending pile in the sewing room over the weekend, and wanted to show you a bit of that.   I altered the neckline and sleeves on several shirts, and took in two pair of jeans that were gapping in some very odd places.  I still have lots of mending and alterations to do; but I'm pleased that I got that far!

This was one of the shirts I had on the pile:

(well, almost this shirt - mine has a round lower hem)

I *love* Holy Clothing's stuff.  It's all viscose and rayon, beautifully hand-embroidered, and soooo comfy to wear.  I bought this blouse at the renaissance festival a few years ago, and I've always loved it, but I haven't gotten to wear it much, because of the neckline.

These pics are from HC's website.  The second pic shows my problem:  on me (being a bit, ahem, thicker than the model shown), the neckline was quite a bit higher, and I'm REALLY weird about things on my neck.  I can NOT stand shirts touching my neck at all - I cut the neck off of every t-shirt I buy, before I ever wear them, and I never wear shirts with collars.  I have a standing order that every turtleneck that enters my kingdom  be executed on sight.  (That said, I love cowl-neck things and scarves, because they're soft and drapey, and not restricting at all).

So over the weekend I enlarged the neckline - I zig-zag stitched along the pink dotted line in the third picture above, cut along that line, folded it over, and stitched it down.  Easy peasy. Five minutes.

MUCH better.  *sigh of relief*  I can breathe now.  And that took like NO effort.  Yay!

And now back to your irregularly-scheduled Housey Stuff...


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ERMAHGERD TER SHERT HERCK

You know that thing I never do on this blog?  I'mma do it again.   I can't help it:  I LOVE T-SHIRT HACKS.   I saw this one on Pinterest:

blog entry + how-to from the Pin  HERE 

And had to have it.   But that's not all I had to have.  I had to have a cute, sassy little black dress; but what I actually had was this:

pose and dress re-do also inspired in part by
The Refashionista! 

Now, before I go any further, let me note that my boyfriend took these pictures, and he's a giant.  I'm five-nine, people, and in these pictures I look like a stumpy little log with hardly any legs.  He's six-two, and taking these shots basically from his face-level.  I look silly. Heehee.

Anyway - how boring is this dress?  It makes my tits look saggy, and while it's comfy, it's just not remotely interesting.  There's no cleavage!  There's no shape! At least I took the short sleeves off of it years ago so it doesn't look out-and-out grandma-y.  But still.  It needed something.  It needed a lot of something.


First it needed to be either longer or shorter, and since I can't add length out of thin air:

I cut off about 7-9" and curved up the side to form a sort-of mans'-shirt slit on both sides at the knee.  Ish. 

And from the piece I cut off, I removed the original hemline, to use as a thin tie belt on the finished dress.

It's kinda awesome!  And my head is all weird!  Tall boyfriend!

The overall shape is much better now, the neckline is waaaay lower, which I love, the length is comfy, I love the tie belt, and...

 There's that cute little slit/curve in the side.  Yay!

"But Laura,"  you ask, "What about that braided neckline?"   

I did the braided neckline.  I cannot get a single picture of it to turn out.  Black fabric - whaddaya want, yanno?   But it looks COOL AS HELL.  You'll, um, just have to trust me.

I will note, mostly for myself, for next time, that the way that I cut the slits  in the fabric around the neckline for the "braid" (see the original tutorial here) made it very difficult to accomplish said braid.  I meant to try it on like a sock or something first to get a feel for it, but I got all gung-ho and just went for it.   I did two things, not "wrong", but that I'll change next time:

1.   The slits I cut were smallish (they look to be about 2.5" in the tutorial, and mine were at most an inch and a half), and too far apart in proportion to their length, which meant that the loops resulting from the slits had to stretch really far, which made them thin and tight and hard to work with, and also really small.

2.   I also graduated the size of the cuts  - smaller in the back and shoulders, gradually widening towards the front of the neckline, for a braid that gets bigger around the front and then tapers off again.  But since the slits were so small and the loops so tight, what I got was a braid about 3/4" in the front and barely as wide as a pencil in the back!

Also, with such a tight, small braid, even though it looks really awesome, it drew the fabric of the dress up a LOT.  You can see it above in the pic from the Pin/tutorial - how the braiding pulls and gathers the fabric?  It's a really lovely effect.  Except that it pulled the straps on my dress up so much that they're quite a bit narrower than they started out, and that's the only thing I'm not happy about.  But I can live with it.

(And yes, I tried un-braiding, thinking I'd just adjust the slits.  No dice: the fabric stretched so far and pulled so tight the first time that undoing it and doing it over would have just broken it in places.  I'll just make the slits bigger next time).

And oh yes, there will be a next time.  And if I can manage a decent pic of that braid, I'll post it.

Ta!


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For My Closet...FML

Ugh.  My closet.

Remember this, from September?   Yeah, me either.

Actually, I did get rid of the step-shelf.  And I moved the heavy wood shelf in, on the main wall (under the mirror, which only exists in the sketch).  I stuffed it with baskets; but the baskets I had were WAY wrong for the shelf - wrong size, wrong style, wrong color, just...WRONG.  And a pain in the butt to use, too. 

However, since my last aquarium went belly-up and I no longer needed the little mini-dresser I had refinished to go under it, the mini-dresser got moved into the closet instead:

It works great - in the space, and as...wait for it...a dresser.  Imagine that.   It's a bit short, but I've got an idea for a little hutch-type thing to place on top of it (if I can find it in the garage).

My clothes are actually pretty well contained within the arrangement of shelves and rods I have now (especially since earlier this month I got rid of like half of them, finally).  The sketch above called for a small bar to the left of the dresser/mirror area for long coats and dresses, and a secondary dresser-type storage unit on the left below the shelves made of these modular cubes I have sitting around. But since linen-closet items are actually the biggest problem at the moment, I'm thinking of stacking the cubes vertically in the same space for more of a linen-cabinet type of thing for towels, sheets, rugs, etc. 

a similar tower o' cubes in my living room

If that ends up working, then the only thing missing will be the shelf running around the top of the room, and the mirror over the dresser.  Here's hoping!





(And I may or may not get around to this.  I've spent all week getting ready for a party tomorrow night, so that'll take up my entire day tomorrow; but usually Sunday after a party I like to unwind by doing something like this that just for me.  So we'll see). 

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Derailment + Hat

Instead of working on the craft room, or the gardens, or anything, really, this weekend I was...asleep.  Due to the weather change (I think?) I had a migraine headache that lasted for two days, and only broke last night once the cold front finished coming in and the air pressure settled out a bit.

BLEH.

The good news - aside from the fact that I'm functional now, which is pretty freakin' awesome - it's 65º outside! Holy cow! Fall is here, yay!  *dances*

Also, I may be going camping this weekend.  I don't know for sure yet; but I'll likely be spending most of the week (after work) putting my camping gear in order and figuring out what to bring.  That and working in the yard, since the weather tells me that if I don't put down some grass seed RIGHT NOW I won't be able to fill in the spots in the front that I removed last week.

So.

In lieu of a project update, today I bring you:

HAT.

Which I guess sort of counts, since I made it, when I learned to crochet two years ago.  

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