Since part of my Crafty Resolution for 2010 involves a bit of destashing, I started digging in "the Pile of Crafty Goodness" on Thursday. Thursday was a lovely day - black ice covered roads and a windchill in the negative double-digits. Lovely enough to stay home and off the roads. Instead, I worked from home for a while, then started digging. I came up with this hot pink quilted skirt, purchased for a few dollars from a street vendor one summer day who knows how long ago...
It doesn't fit, and never did; it was purchased specifically to become something else! But what, I wasn't sure. I was thinking bag, or skirt. So...why not both? Ripping the seams open, removing the zipper and tearing out the darts along the top yielded a pretty decent size piece of fabric.
A new skirt is still in the works; I need to cut a facing for the waistband...maybe on Tuesday! But as for a new bag...I thought this was the perfect fabric for a "belly dancer gym bag". I measured out both the skirt (bottom half of the fabric, to leave the lace trim intact) and then cut the remainder into an even-sided rectangle. Lucky me, there was a nice and long turquoise zipper in the stash as well. :) for the straps and ends of the bag, I used a pair of jeans the DH kept trying to throw away. (I say "try" because he would toss them on top of his trash can, only to have me "rescue" them for projects like this, wash them, fold them, forget that they were no longer wanted, and put them back in his drawer. And repeat.) Since my stash did not contain any kind of webbing for straps, I used one pant leg to cut strips of denim. These were sown into a long circular strip, folded over and sewn again, leaving the sewn edge raw. I'm sure the raw edge will start to annoy me eventually, but really it was a matter of patience (or lack thereof). Two nice large circles were cut from the other pant leg, and voila! The belly dancer gym bag, perfect for rehearsals and workshops!
This next lovely item is the final project of 2009. I started it sometime in the early part of 2009, put it in a bag for safe keeping, and then lost it. It turned up around Thanksgiving, and I found it to be the perfect addition to nights in front of the TV with the DH. The pattern is the Reverse-Applique Swing Skirt from the
Alabama Stitch Book, a gift from Christmas '08. I didn't put as many appliques on as the original pattern called for, as I wanted a simpler design...and I'm lazy. However, I did sew the entire thing by hand. I used some FOE for the waistband...my attempts to create a folded over waistband with interior elastic were thwarted by the fact that I either didn't measure correctly when I cut the pieces out...or I've just gained that much weight. I couldn't pull the skirt in with a folded over waistband. So FOE it was. And it works. I wore this skirt for Christmas at Grandma's with some gray tights and a purple and silver T-shirt combo, plus the
Peacock scarf for good measure.
