Limbs and head flopped out to sleep. Looking d-e-d.Filed under: Gifted it, Sewed it | Tags: Christmas, corduroy, cotton, dress, fabric, Gaffney's, niece, pink
Sigh. The reason I started selling clothes online at all was precisely to sell off all the pink vintage clothing I found. Stuff that was so beautiful, but pink. No sir, I don’t like it.
So of course, my niece, whose Christmas dress I make every year, chose p-i-n-k this time. In my favorite fabric store ever, during our special trip, just girls, she swept past teal velour, purple velvet, silvery knit and plunked her finger squarely on a hot pink baby corduroy.
With glitter, see?.
Efforts to push the dusty rose (and gray) taffeta were promptly denied.
So this dress will be hot pink. And super twirly.
Since Gaffney’s is amazing, I grabbed up out of the quarter bin (not the yardage, the price) a chunk of this cotton that might make the bindings.
Close enough? I know it hardly screams “holiday”. But neither does pink.
Filed under: Finished it, Fixed it, How to do it, Sewed it, Thrifted it | Tags: cotton, purple, sleeves, sweater, wardrobe refashion
Lousy purple is IN this season.
Boils my blood to no end since I’ve loved purple for many long years so I’m already sick of everyone looking like me. Went to a wedding last weekend in a fave purple dress — there were at least four other women all purpled up. Grrr.
A smart lady in my life said to shut up and stock up so when the trixies moved on to teal or yellow or whatever, I’d be all set. It’s pretty good advice. Since I haven’t bought retail since August 2007, I continue to stockpile purple at the Salvy.
This winning XL cardigan is a stunning shade, a solid lightweight cotton and sweetly long. It was too wide and shapeless though,
and the buttons were terrible.
1. Try sweater on inside out. Pin up sides. Fit, repinning as necessary.
2. Using a zig zag stitch, sew up the sides.
3. With sharp scissors, cut off the sleeves at the shoulder seams.
4. Find the middle of the top of each sleeve. About 1 inch, 1 1/2 inches on either side of the middle, baste about 1/4 inch from the edge. Pin the bottom of the sleeve to the bottom of the armhole, and the top to the top. Keep pinning from the bottom.
5. Pull the basted threads slowly from each side until the sleeve fits the armhole with a little gathering. Pin, fit and sew.
I stitched in a little folded netting to support the little puff.
I also replaced the original boring brown buttons with vintage yellow domed buttons, after much debate between yellow and pink.
The purple acorns and green discs wouldn’t fit. Boo.
So much better now.
And check out a similar slimming sans sleeve enhancements. Such a fantastic cotton knit with a boatneck and cheeky sneaky silver buttons up the front of one side, before:
And after:
The change is subtle; the fit is just better now that the sides have been slimmed.
Filed under: Cooked it, Do it, FOIAd it, Fixed it, Get it, Grew it, Love it, Made it, Read it, Refashioned it, Scavenged it, Sewed it, Shook it, Thrifted it | Tags: cotton, writing
Writing about facts all the time for money made me hesitate to write for free in my spare time about my inner workings. Then 2002 called and told me to go home already; I was beginning to stink.
Writing all the time for money using my real name and accurate facts and news judgment and deadly serious (Important) topics seemed so different from spouting off about the other things I love: public records, lady turtles, growing stuff, making stuff, cooking pots of stuff, eschewing squareness and blatant consumerism, yard sales, Chicago, the Iladelph, foiled corruption, shaking it and leopard printed anything. And by different, I mean not at all the same, maybe in an OK way.
Now I get an outlet for The Fluff I’d die before writing about professionally but which occupies a lot of my brain. There’s time and space for Fluff, of course. There’s just also Important News that can be boring to sit through, but which makes for job that America needs and I kind of like. It’s that Making News Relevant, that Sitting in Court All Morning to Tell You How Many Years the Crook Got, that Digging Through Mountains of Forms and Numbers that I like a lot. It’s translating those languages for you, the taxpayer, that gets me out of bed every morning.
Enough of that already and onto the Cotton I Grew Last Summer, the little cotton plant my Mister gave me as kudos for landing a new job.
