Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Finally, some sewing

I was able to get some sewing done after getting the garden harvest stored:

1.  Mending:  Several items of family clothing received minor or moderate repairs.

2.  Clothing:  I finally got around to sewing one of the skirts I had planned to make for my "Wardrobe in a Week" sewing sprint in the spring. After it was sewn, I overdyed it, and the color turned out well.
Notable for this project was that the fabric shower curtain I was using for fabric wasn't quite large enough to cut all of the skirt pieces out whole, so I had to do some careful piecing and pattern matching to get all the fabric I needed. It adds a subtle but interesting custom detail to the finished skirt. (I did a flat seam by overlapping the pieces by an inch, and then sewing two lines of zigzag stitches down the overlapped part. The exposed raw edge has frayed down to the stitching, making a short fringe.)

3.  Curtains:  I was given several yards of cotton upholstery-weight velvet, and curtains seemed like the best place to use it; I have been thinking about how to bootstrap my way into a somewhat more mature style of decorating. I sewed up a set of curtains from the fabric, put them up, and then realized that the stiffness of the material made them almost impossible to open. And when they were closed, they were overwhelming the room. I took them down, and cut half of them in half lengthwise, stabilizing the cut edges with a quick zigzag stitch. Then I put them back up, and made some quick curtain ties from selvedge edges that were left over.  Now they make a style statement, but not too much of one.

4.  High chair cover:  Months ago, I threw out the cover to the high chair; I had gotten tired of it, and it had seen more than a decade of use anyway. I finally began putting together some bits and pieces of someone's abandoned wall hanging project from the 90's, and have a basic cover sewn together now. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go in finishing it nicely.

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