as much as i love my young man, i'm always thrilled when we're invited to a little girl's birthday party, or one of our friends spawns a little girl, so that i can shop for or, more often, make some girly goods....

i bought this (adult-sized) dress at the salvation army a few months ago:



i had momentary delusions of wearing it, but really knew that i had just grabbed it for the wonderful fabric...



...and put it aside until i figured out what to do with it.

then wile got invited to james's 4th birthday party, and we needed a present. (yes, james is a girl). the dress's time had come. i decided to make a little babydoll dress/shirt, so first i made a simple bodice with straps. i just took in the existing bodice and straightened out the seams in the front that had been curved to allow for, you know, boobs:



i had sized it based on a size 4t shirt that i had bought for wile, but it looked a bit small, so i put a hook and eye in the back to space it out a bit. i figured it would be fine, and even look cute, for the back to be open a little bit.



then i took one of the skirt layers, cut it a bit thinner, and pinned and then basted in some pleats:



all that was left to do was attach top to bottom, and....



done and done. (please ignore the stray thread at the bottom....) best part? by using a part of the existing skirt, i didn't have to hem—woohoo!

i've applied for several fairs and markets coming up this spring and summer, which means i've been contemplating my display strategy. i have in the past used wire baskets that i borrowed from sarah, but then she called and said she needed somewhere to put her fruit and vegetables or some such nonsense.... clearly i needed something that wouldn't be repossessed. i had this idea that old interior shutters would be cool, but where was i going to find old interior shutters?

at my in-laws' house, apparently.

my m.i.l. was finally changing stephen's old bedroom into a guest room. which means, on the minus side, that our house is now full of all the "treasures" that had been in his closet.... but on the plus side, we'll have a brand new queen-size pull-out sofa to sleep on when we stay there, AND i scored the old shutters!



the only thing standing in my way (aside from a little paint touch-up and a good cleaning) was the bar that ran down the center of the louvers:



the whole operation needed to be excised---the bar and the metal bits that were holding it in. i contemplated my removal options:



i tried the needle-nose pliers first...



...and thankfully, with some effort, they did the trick. i really didn't want to have to break out the hacksaw.

and so, voila!





p.s. i had planned on posting all of my fabulous florida thrift scores, but on wednesday night my laptop crashed, all data lost....it's at the shop now, i'm trying to stay optimistic that the tekserve peeps can do their magic.....

frankensweater

i have three shelves of sweaters in my closet, which hold somewhere around 36 sweaters (holy crap, that's the first time i've done that math.....). anyway, i usually rotate between about 5 of them, because most of them are too short for my long torso---i can't deal with any mid-section flesh being uncovered, it just makes me cold all over. plus it just looks terrible.

so rather than just sending 30 sweaters packing to the salvation army, i thought i'd see if i could make some of them wearable.

so i started with these two lovelies, both recently given to me by wile's auntie meg and auntie syd:



i hacked them both in pieces horizontally, right below the bust-line...





...removing the sleeves of sweater #2 as well.

i then chopped the bottom edge off of sweater #2, and inserted the resulting tube o'sweater into the middle of sweater #1:



as you can see, i ended up with some wonky side seams, so i just sewed new ones a half inch inside the existing ones, which straightened things out and also made it fit better, yay.

i was pretty happy at this point, but bored with the neckline:



so i went at that with the scissors too....



i trimmed it with the ribbing that i cut off the bottom of sweater #2 (i don't have a close-up shot of that, but you'll see it in the finished shots at the end). this made things better. but i still wasn't thrilled...it still needed something, but i wasn't sure what...till i remembered a patch that i had from my friend's band, which had been lingering in my wallet since i had bought it at his last show. i grabbed it, and placed it on about six different places on the sweater, but none looked right.....hmmm....then it hit me: pocket! i created a little pocket out of the end of one of the hacked-off sleeves of sweater #2, and attached the patch to it with some fusible interfacing...



found a good place for it on the sweater...



...stitched it on, and voila!



two sweaters i probably never would have worn become one sweater i love very much.



p.s. this is what happens when you forget to turn you flash off when taking mirror pictures:



ooo, sparkly!

as if i needed another purse, i know....

stephen brings home all manner of loot from work. he's got shirts from jameson, we both got shirts and coozies from pbr, and wile was, i believe, the only baby to carry his pacifier on a jagermeister lanyard. all well and good, but nothing i would have ever paid actual money for.

but then yesterday, he brought me this:



it arrived on his desk in a package full of swag from some promoter in barcelona whose name he didn't really recognize. whatever, who cares! look at that bag!



it's made from a recycled show banner, like that would hang outside a club. i found the company that made it, they sound pretty great. and you seem to be able to buy things on their site, but i can't quite figure out how....i see the shopping cart button, but i'm not sure how you get anything into it.....

p.s. i'm off gallivanting until the 11th, see you then!

refashioning is contagious

i haven't refashioned anything for myself in a ridiculously long time—haven't bought anything new though!—but my nearest and dearest have been taking up the slack.

my mom made one shirt from a pattern and refashioned another (waiting for pics!).

sarah needed some new dresses for her trip to italy and instead of buying some, asked me to make them. we made her a dress form:



and i found her two great vintage patterns on ebay:



we didn't get any pictures before she left—the sewing went right down to the wire, sar stitched the straps on to the last dress on the plane!—but she promised me some good shots, on location on the amalfi coast.

and finally, stephen refashioned! he transformed one of his old yankees shirts from gary sheffield (no longer on the team, a big jerk) to shelley duncan (rookie just called up from the minors, young and really enthusiastic and hitting big home runs):



i am, of course, a mets fan. but i'm still impressed with his work. :)

nightgown to dress

i couldn't resist this silly nightie i found in the salvation army:



the pattern was just too great:



so i reconfigured it into this:



i think it still needs a little tweaking.... i want to put some pleats at the neckline, and i think i need to take it in at the sides a little more---i want it to be loose and comfy, but think it's still a little too much fabric. but even in the meantime, it's been a great summer dress/swimsuit coverup.

p.s. sorry about the blue underwear! i forgot to change to taupe for the photo shoot.....

p.p.s. i had a windfall: some store/company/who knows what down the street from stephen's office was throwing out a whole load of upholstery fabric, and he snagged almost all of it for me:



i think there's some ultrasuede in there!

another old shirt rescued!

this was part of my college uniform:

not only is it ridiculously big (as all of my clothes were back then), it has developed some issues in the back....

.....and so has since been relegated to the pajama drawer (or, more accurately, one of the pajama drawers. i have a few pajama/loungewear drawers. some of my friends find this odd). but i never wore it, because i was afraid it was just going to keep ripping and fall apart. so, clearly, it was time to take it apart myself.

i started by removing the sleeves, then cutting across the back at the spot of the enourmous gaping hole, leaving me with this:

then i cut down the sides, making two pieces, and slit the part of the back that was attached to the front down the middle, comme ca:

i decided that those two pieces coming off the top of the front piece would become straps, so i trimmed them a bit to make them slimmer and hemmed the edges. i also turned the neckband under in the front and stitched it down to make a uniform hem all around.

then i put it all together: pinned the side seams and sewed them up, hemmed the top of the back piece, attached the straps to the back, and hemmed the front piece— which had ended up longer than the back—at the bottom. and this is what i got:

putting it on, i realized that the part where i had hemmed under the existing neckband stuck out....

...and i was going to fix it by turning it under one more time and re-hemming, but then i realized that i liked it the way it was.

the finished product definitely retained some of the pinholes and frayed edges of the original shirt, and i'm glad it did.

i believe i originally bought this at joyce leslie....

this was my favorite shirt in 5th grade.



hey, blame the 80s. anyway, i went at it with the scissors, pieced the pieces back together, and ended up with this:



you can't see it in this shot, but on the back panel (which is all one piece, not three pieces patched together like the front) the stripes go vertical instead of horizontal, which looks really neat at the side seams when the two come together.

sizing down

i have about a dozen sweatshirts that i love dearly but never wore out of the house because they were all about five sizes too big, having come to me as hand-me-downs from my brother or having been thrifted because i couldn't resist the pattern/graphics even though i could have fit two of me in them. example:



so i figured it was time to them down a few notches...

this is the basic process i followed:

1) put the sweatshirt on inside out and marked the spot on either side of my bust where i thought the new armholes should start. i pinned the front and back together at those spots, so that the pins marked not only where the arm should start but also the new width that i wanted. i did the same with the band at the bottom—pinning the front and back together at the width that felt right.

2) took the sweatshirt off and laid it on a table and drew a line from the bust pins down to the bottom-band pins, and pinned it.

3) cut the arms off at the seams, then drew a line from the bust pins up to the shoulder seams at an angle, essentially creating a raglan sleeve opening. cut next to that line, leaving a decent (3/8") seam allowance.

4) laid the top openings of the cut-off sleeves on the new sleeve openings i had marked on the body, so that they were aligned at the shoulder seams. then marked and pinned the openings of the sleeves at the spot that met up with the bottom of the sleeve openings. then drew a line from that spot down to the cuff of each sleeve, and pinned it.

5) sewed all of my new seams: both sides of the torso, both new sleeve seams. (i then used my serger to finish all of the seams; if you don't have a serger, just trim the excess. obviously.)

6) pinned the sleeves into the new sleeve holes, positioning so that the seams fall on the insides of the arms, and sewed them in. this scared the bejeesus out of me, as i'd never done a sleeve before, but it was totally painless!

et, voila!



sorry it's not the greatest photo (i know it looks like the pocket kinda bends around to my right , but really it doesn't, i'm just standing crooked). but i'm so amped about the way it turned out. the sleeves became 3/4-ish length, which i love. and the kangaroo pocket in front stretches from seam to seam, which i think looks great. and most importantly, for my long torso-ed self, i have a sweatshirt that is slim enough and long enough. woohoo! after the sweatshirts, i'm moving on to all of the huge t-shirts i've saved from my college years when i wore everything five sizes too big on purpose....

i also made a shirt for the young man, from this very large men's polo that i picked up at my favorite thrift shop, the goodwill in port st. lucie florida (home to the spring training facility of the n.y. mets and, just as importantly, my mom):



i traced one of wile's existing tops on top of it and ended up with this:



the neck and bottom seams are a little wonky because wile (age 2 & 3/4) wanted to "help", and i wanted to make sure that he didn't get his fingers anywhere near the needle of the sewing machine. but, still a successful project, i think. i wish i could have gotten a pic of him in it, but he refused to model. i'm still not sure what i'm going to do with the (abundant) excess material. maybe a tube top for me, with the stripe at the top....