Monday, June 21, 2010

A Dress for Elizabeth! ♥

Elizabeth has a dance this week and it's a special one the Eighth Grade Prom, so she came over to work on a dress for it! What she found while going through my fabric stash were some formals that I had bought at the thrift store but hadn't cut yet! LOL After trying on lots of them this purple one seemed to be the closest fit and the easiest to alter! I don't sew clothing...so I had no clue how to go about fixing it so it would fit her...THEN...I had the idea to cut off the top part, cut off the straps, and fold down the remaining "top" so that it was rounded and reattach the straps! Even this seemed impossible to me but somehow we managed! HAHA What I did was have it on her fold it under to look the shape we wanted and then made a running stitch (by hand) along the top to hold it in place...then as I was doing that Elizabeth loved how it looked gathered so we ended up gathering the top front edge and that fixed the need to take in the sides too!!! I also did the running stitch around the back too but left if flat, then I hand sewed the straps into place and then later reinforced them with the sewing machine. THEN Elizabeth had the idea to tie something around the waist and so we found a white ribbon and tacked it onto the dress on a seam and then it gets tied around the waist after she gets it on (there are no zippers etc. it's a slip on dress)! OH and Hubby helped by hemming the bottom! ♥
After we finished working out all the kinks of the dress we cut a piece of white lace from my stash for her to use as a wrap or like she did in the photo below tie it in the back to look like a bolero or shrug.
Voila! Two non-seamstresses but very creative gals created a pretty good looking formal if I do say so myself! LOL

Monday, June 14, 2010

Craft Room Update

I've been slowly improving my craft room it's cool looking back through my posts on it's progress! It's still not completely finished but I got a huge part of it up and running and it's a dream come true!
Above is a photo as you walk in the door! The board on top of the little chest of drawers is padded fabric and can be ironed on! How perfect is that!
As you can see it's a U (well more like J haha) with my work station in front of the window that's where I'll do my embroidery and embellishment etc. Then a little swivel to the right and I have my sewing machine, and a little swivel to the right again the padded board for ironing as I piece! And I can always set up the ironing board there too! The little desk that the sewing machine is on we got at Staples it's just a little cheepie computer desk that we didn't install the keyboard slide out so it's the perfect depth!
I have my cork board which I pinned a bunch of swap items and pretty things but I also put a couple of push pins up to hold my current project to get it out of the way, the square Q-snap sits right on them!
Right next to the door I have a Design Wall hanging you can see the Tree Project on it right now. It's supposed to hold blocks on it without using pins but my cream blocks are too heavy to stay up for too long, if I want it to stay up longer term I still need to pin.
Then my hubby put up shelves for me to have my supplies in reaching distance! Wow did they make a huge difference! I gained and freed up a ton of space just from having them put up! Now the bookshelf I had a lot of my supplies on is free for all my various embroidery, crazy quilting, beading, tatting, etc. books as well as other things!
On the door I got a hanger for the iron and ironing board when not needed!
Also I got hooks to store my hoops using vertical space! Now they aren't stacked somewhere with the possibility of getting lost under things or cluttering up space!