craft projects

I tried really hard to stick to my promise of no shopping until 2011, but I accidentally broke that promise to myself yesterday. There were Betsey Johnson knee socks on sale… With skulls and bows. How could I say no? I’ll justify the spending by saying that I want to be able to still maintain the staples of my closet (e.g. socks) but I will continue to work hard to keep reconstructing old pieces that I no longer wear into more practical ones that I can get use out of again.

Case in point: I wanted a pair of winter shorts. You know, the kind that you can wear with leggings underneath? I didn’t want to spend $20 for a new pair so I decided to dig through my stash of clothes that I don’t wear but are in immaculate condition and try to rework a pair of pants.

The original piece: army green dress pants that were a tad too short in length.

I started off by eyeballing the desired length for the shorts. I knew I wanted to have a bottom band, so I saved the bottom hem from the original pants to save me a bit of time in making my own band from scratch.

From here, I serged the bands to the bottom of the shorts by ensuring that the wrong side of the bands were on top of the right side of the leg openings. I know it looks a bit messy, but we’ll clean that up in the next step!

Tucking the serged edge under the (now) banded leg openings, whip-stitch the hem to the inside of the shorts for a clean finish.

Aaaaaaand they’re done! This was a pretty easy reconstruction. I think the whole thing took just under 1.5 hours from start to finish. Yay!

These shorts are part of my 30 for 30 remix challenge. The full list of 30 items are on their way. I’m still trying to finalize my selection of tops. Eek!

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The rest of my Halloween went well! A bunch of us headed over to a friend’s place for a small get together after a very rough week. Being dressed up in ridiculous outfits made the get together all that much funnier!

Aside from the usual treats, one of our friends brought special Halloween cupcakes. How good do these look? I’m so sad that I didn’t get a chance to try one. They were homemade and looked so good. I can thank my roommate for eating my cupcake since I forgot to take it home with me and she ended up getting dibs on leftover cupcakes.

The best costume of the night: Scout dressed as a cat. Hands down, the most realistic costume I’ve ever seen to date! Okay, I’m totally kidding. I just wanted to include Scout in this post because it’s been almost eight months since I’ve last seen this adorable kitty. I remember when he was just a wee little kitten and now he’s all grown up and still just as adorable as he used to be.

As the night went on, we started swapping props. And by swapping I mean I’m pretty sure someone else put a fairy hat on me insisting that it was better suited with my costume than their own (although I personally think I looked like a wizard more so than a fairy in the hat). I somehow also ended up with a beard and mustache ensemble. I’ve always wondered what I would look like in a grey beard. Now I know!

Random: I never knew how hot and uncomfortable facial hair could be! I’m so glad that I don’t have a mustache. Or a beard.

Just so you don’t think I’m totally crazy, I looked sane for the majority of the night (left). The beard and fairy hat only appeared for the last hour or so. Oh, I’m also sporting a plastic bag-baby. Don’t get any ideas… it was all part of the costume, I promise! : P

I hope you all had an amazing Halloween!

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After years of being fed up with store bought costumes (Honestly, I have no idea why I paid so much money for such small amounts of fabric. I usually ended up wearing leggings underneath those horrid costumes since the “skirts” barely covered my butt!), I told myself that 2010 was going to be the year that I made my costume from scratch. In total, this project cost me $8 and about 7 hours of time. Mind you, I’ve never sewn a dress before (I’ve only ever made shirts) and it was an interesting experience working with elastics for the first time ever.

My friends and I decided to go with a Pokemon theme this Halloween. We’ve never done a group costume before and wanted to pick a theme that we could all relate to. Sadly, some of us were voluntold to be characters based on our personalities. My choices were Snorlax (he eats and sleeps a lot) or Jigglypuff (she’s a little temperamental and draws on other characters that fall asleep when she sings. I’ve only drawn on someone ONCE, and even then he gave me permission to!).

The initial drafting of the pattern stemmed from a dress that already exists in my closet. Sadly, I forgot to take into consideration the fabric I was using and drafted the initial pattern to be a million sizes too big.

Lesson #1: Stretchy fabric is forgiving. Don’t add 0.5″ for seams because that’s TOO MUCH!

The second biggest challenge was trying to figure out how much/little elastic to use. I was making a bubble dress and wanted the under-bust to have a bit of gathering. Having never used elastics before was an interesting experience. I definitely poked myself on more than one occasion with the pins while trying to assemble the dress. The fact that the elastics kept bunching while I was trying to sew didn’t make it any easier.

Lesson #2: Black elastics are $2 cheaper than white at Michael’s. Why? I don’t know.

Because of the fact that I overestimated my measurements and made the bust of the dress too big, the style ended up changing quite drastically. It was originally supposed to be a strapless bubble dress, but I ended up transforming it into a halter dress with asymmetrical straps. I braided some of the leftover pink jersey knit to form the strap, which was one long continuous piece that was sewn only to the front neckline. I purposely made one side longer than the other so that the strap would tie off to the side instead of the traditional halter style that tied behind the neck.

Lesson #3: Braiding fabric is not like braiding hair! The ends of the fabric kept curling in all sorts of directions that made for an almost nightmare-ish experience. The whole strap took almost 25 minutes to braid!!

The most fun part of the entire process was picking the face for the dress. Jigglypuff has two very distinct looks. One is her doe-eyed-cutesy-face (as I like to call it), and the other is her pissed-off “why-did-you-fall-asleep-while-I-was-singing?” face. I went with the former in fear of being the angry Pokemon of the pack.

I was running out of time to assemble my costume, so I cheated and used fabric glue instead of stitching the felt pieces of her eyes together. I first started with a fabric glue stick which ended up failing quite terribly. As soon as I tried the dress on, one of her eyes fell off! I had to borrow my roommate’s liquid fabric glue in order to get the eye back on.

Lesson #4: Fabric glue sticks are terrible. Opt for the liquid glue if you have enough time to let your fabric set.

Fun fact: If you’re ever wondering what I look like when extremely sleep deprived, look left! My hair doesn’t get straightened and I look like a zombie with the huge bags under my eyes. The photo on the right is what I looked like when I left the apartment. Yes, I remembered to not go out wearing the costume over my pajamas! : P

Hopefully more photos of the costume in action will come after tonight. Until then: Happy Halloween! ♥

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Perk of being back in Toronto: spending quality time with my sewing machine and serger! It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to complete a sewing project. Mind you, I’ve been collecting fabric for quite some time (I think I have close to 20lbs of it sitting in my room waiting to be used) and finally dug into about 4oz of it. Any progress is good progress, right?

The i ♥ NY t-shirt was the only souvenir I brought home during my visit. A whole $2 worth of goodies. Thank you China Town for having amazingly cheap t-shirts. Sadly, the original shirt fit like a box on me. I know, for $2, I shouldn’t complain.

I had some grey jersey knit in my stash ‘o fabrics and decided complete a quick reconstruction. The whole project from start to finish took just under an hour. I retrimmed the whole thing in grey and really like it. For some reason, the color palette reminds me a lot of Pee-wee Herman. I think it’s the grey, white, and red combo. I wanted to make a red bow and pin it to the neckline before posting these photos, but I didn’t have any red fabric in my pile. Maybe next time…

I’m pretty happy with the final fitting of the shirt! The biggest bonus is the fact that this whole project was under $5.

Also, I’m sorry for the semi-awkward photos. I’m trying to get used to the idea of using my remote again. Plus, can you tell I’ve been a little sleep deprived? Yay for eye-bags. :P

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