Pillowcases and biastape

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I would get a craft table at the local music festival, not with any hopes of making money selling craft, but to promote my classes at Sew For My Baby. So I need a product. I made a nice list of simple kids clothing items that could be easily mass produced with recycled material and went to work. After a couple of afternoons I had two hats and several pillowcase dresses.

The problem was that halfway through my fourth pillowcase dress I remembered how much I hate production sewing. That is one reason I liked sewing for the theater so much, we almost never made the same thing twice. What was I to do??? Well. Only two days after this - I got a call from my principal telling me that my job was coming up and if I wanted it back, sooner than planned. Eight weeks of work and then off for 9 for the summer and we decided it was a good idea. So - no more production sewing. I am hoping to continue to teach classes however - but now without the pressure of having to promote them too much.

One great thing that came out of this process is that I finally got motivated to try out this tutorial and made some bias tape. I'm in love. I will never buy bias tape again. It's actually really fast to make, with most of the time invested in drawing lines and cutting which can be done in front of the TV.

 The bad thing... now I have a stash of recycle cloth that I bought to make kids clothing that currently doesn't have a purpose.. and I was so proud of myself that I knew where it was all going. That's OK - most of it fit into my cloth storage bins - and my kids will just have to benefit from hand made clothing.

Summer Dress Re-fashion

Summer is coming - which means new dresses. And..money is tight so that means - refashion! There is little I love as much as a good refashion. I bought this dress last year at the Sally Anne for 7.00 and I`ve had it stored away since then. To celebration this new blog today was the day it got out and got a ride on Judy.

 Love: the fabric is a super light-weight denim and so great for summer. There was a ton of fabric as this skirt went right to the floor. The bodice already fit so a re-make was going to be really straight-forward. I also loved the big pockets.
Don`t like: The floor length was dated and I`ve never looked great in strapless, suffering, like most women, from `under arm bubbles`. So....

I started looking at apron dresses. I saw these:

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Classic and very summery.
I cut down my dress to below the knee and used the extra cloth to make some straps. The hardest part was finding enough of the fabric on the grain to make the straps as the original skirt was a circle skirt. I also used some of the extra fabric to make a facing for the new neck line. And voila!

If anyone wanted to look closely enough you could see that there are two different kinds of topstitiching now. Anyone who might notice will also probably be a sewer. And... this was a one nap project! (That includes the blog post.) Speaking of which I hear her now....Next up: a refashion of a white shirt for underneath.