Week of Sewing Shorts

It's fun to pull out a piece of well-aged fabric and finally do something with it.  I think that I've had this for at least three years, and it's another one of those, "Now Why Did I Buy So Much of This?" kind of fabrics, but at least I've now used some of it.

In case it's difficult to see just what I'm talking about, this is a beige linen fabric and embroidered all over it are small pairs of flip flops.  I used this to make Miss V some walking shorts, which are long enough for her to wear to school when it starts back up in about six weeks.  I chose it because this is the first year she's been able to wear the "real deal" flip flops--no more straps across the back to hold them on.  When I told her that's why she got these this year, she got the biggest grin on her face, and I got to enjoy that six-year-old tooth missing on the bottom smile.  She's growing up on us.

I've also made one more pair this week to go under a tiered peasant dress.  I'm working on the dress now and will post pictures of her in it when it's all finished.

Pillow Cases from Leftovers

My sister just finished piecing a quilt for her son.  This is her first big project and it looks great.  (I'll try to get a picture up after it's finished.) After cutting out the two borders, there was a lot of fabric left over.  She asked about matching pillowcases, so while she put on the borders, I whipped up two pillowcases.  I sewed some of them on the machine and finished the seams on the serger.  The inside border was a 3" light fabric that reminded me of a wheat field.  The outside border was about the color the sky gets just before it turns completely dark.  I used the former for the body of the pillowcase and the latter for the cuff.  I decided to put a simple decorative stitch from my machine on the hem, and it looked as great as I thought it would.  The added benefit was that the motion of the stitches really secured the back side of the hem.

Getting Organized

It boggles my mind just how much sewing related stuff I've accumulated over the years--and we're talking over 40 here.  I'm trying to do some sorting and organizing and it is a major task, for sure.  Over the weekend when I was using my serger a lot, I had to climb under a table to get to the threads, and I decided that was just crazy, so I did something about it yesterday--I moved the chest the threads were in so it could be easily accessed--brilliant, right?  It was definitely one of those, "Now why didn't I do this earlier?" moments!

Not only did I move the chest, I decided to organize them and inventory them so I would quit duplicating (or triplicating) what I have.  There are four drawers in the chest, and I now have an inventoried set of wooly nylon, Maxilock and Maxilock Swirls all on a handy dandy spreadsheet.  It's amazing what a little time and energy can do to speed up finding what you need!  I have a great serger thread template in Excel if anyone is interested.