What to Do With All Those Scraps?

When I was little my Mom always had a little plastic bag taped to the side of her sewing machine table for the inevitable snippets and scraps that come with sewing so that she could easily collect them for the garbage.

As with any next generation, I went bigger and badder :-)

That big swing-top can sits snug against my sewing machine table and ever since I've started to seriously sew, it's been patiently engulfing all the little scraps and threads that are too small for my other scrap bins (yep - there are two more totes, one for wovens and one for knits/felt - those scraps are saved for projects like beanbags and blankets).

I choose to use mostly natural fabrics, which really wouldn't be a problem in the garbage since they would decompose pretty easily, but I use thrifted polyester-cotton thread and fabric some, and the idea of my craft resulting in bits of plastic sitting around forever and making their way into the food chain makes me shudder too much to sew a straight seam, so I've been collecting it (while trying to get away from the whole polyester thing in the first place). But what to do with all those scraps?

My pregnant self tried to take a nap outside the other day, and was quickly and uncomfortably made aware of the dearth of outside cushions in this house.

So, Safiya and I sewed up a giant cushion from cotton canvas that I had, and stuffed away!

Oh, if you decide to do something like this, make sure you check your scraps thoroughly. Some things we found that would be unpleasant to sit on:

And hey - there's my bag of yellow embroidery thread that I thought I lost last year!

There will be grommets on each corner so that I can hang it up for storage, and some kind of colourful cover is in the works, but it's pretty functional as it is. A couple of years' worth of scraps handily dealt with in one afternoon. It's a bit lumpy, but certainly comfortable enough:

And yes, I'm really only delaying the inevitable, because that cushion someday will meet it's demise, but let's hope it has a long and nap-filled life...

Mending Mondays: Evolution of a Patch

Remember the yelling hole in the pair of cords that I was working on patching? Well, two weeks ago I finished it, with little ado but a lot of satisfaction. So, using the tutorial that I posted worked fantasticly (is that a word?), although when it states "most pants have extra fabric that you can steal from to make a patch to match" (maybe that's another tutorial I'm thinking of - I vetted a lot of patching tutorials, you know :-) this is not true of factory made pants made by say, G*P (that's a swear word around here). They are stingy! I had to steal that little extra front pocket that I only ever use for tampons, and since these are destined for a guy friend, I doubt he'll miss it....

Here's that hole:


1. Inside reinforcing patch (just used a scrap of mine) to prevent further tearing, pinned, seen from the wrong side (the inside of the pants):


2. Seen from the right side:


3. I basted it on the right side so that I could see where I was going, and knew to stay on the inside of the pins:


4. Basted patch, seen from the wrong side:


5. I zigzagged around the edges of the patch:


6. Seen here from the right side of the pants:


7. And then, on the right side of the pants, zigzagged the edges of the hole (I know, this is getting really ugly):


8. So, the inside reinforcing patch is done. Now, made a matching patch from that little pocket and sewed it on the outside. Now, ideally, you'd have enough fabric to turn in the edges better and be picky about whether the patch itself was already a little worn, but whatever:


Ta-da! Considering that he said not to be to picky 'cause they're just hanging around pants, but they're his favourite, I say "not bad!" and pat myself on the back.


It's a crazy number of pictures for such a little thing, but I went a step further than the other tutorial by adding an outside patch as well. I think it's a really effective, thorough way of repairing clothes, and I fully intend to keep doing it this way. Also, I have to teach Safiya how to do this, 'cause she's just taken a pair of scissors to her newest jeans that she got from Granny. When I asked her about it, she said, "That's o.k.! We can just patch them!" Ha!

Mending Mondays: Patches

Yes, I know it's Tuesday. I started patching late last night after some other work because our usual Monday morning routine was delightfully topsy turvey due to visiting Granny, so let's get on with it, shall we?

Now, these holes look suspiciously square. As in, cut-out-with-scissors square. Hmmm.....


This one, however, seems to be yelling at me:


Probably because I promised the owner of this particular pair of pants that I'd mend them... a year ago. sigh. I suppose I should work my way through this pile and not try to compost it.

Last April I patched a couple pairs of Safiya's pants, and I learned a lesson. The hard way. Patches are great, but it would be a much better idea to actually fix the hole so that little toes don't get caught in the gaping-ness of the old jeans as they're making their way down while getting dressed. I thought that patches fix holes. They do not. They cover them.

I found this really good tutorial on how to fix holes, which I'm in the middle of trying with these cords. In the tutorial the stitching is left bare, but I'll try adding another patch on top, just to pretty it up.

As for those other little holes in Safiya's clothes, I did some basting tonight while Mr. S. read evening Winnie-the-Pooh stories aloud, so I did get some zen-like mending in anyway, which was nice :-)

night-night!

Lengthening Long Johns: Yet Another Use for Sweater Sleeves

Safiya is growing tall like a lovely weed, so her ankles are poking out the bottom of her long johns like, well, legs poking out the bottom of too-short long johns. They fit her otherwise, so enter the old sweater sleeves, once again! This took about ten minutes.


1. Fold up the cuff of the long johns:


2. Pick a sweater that has been felted only a little, or not at all, so that there's some give, and make sure that the sweater sleeve cuff will be the right size to be comfy around the ankles. Cut the sleeves however long you need. Slip over the turned-up long johns, with the cut edge of the sweater matching the end of the cuff. Match the seams and pin, evenly gathering and pinning any extra fabric:


3. Sew about a 1/4" seam. I used a straight stitch, loose-ish tension, and a walking foot, which is perfect for knits. (Sorry about the blurry picture!) Notice the direction of the pins now; you kind of have to flip the leg around and make sure that you don't sew the leg shut! :-)


4. Obviously the cuff edge is finished and the sweater sleeve edge is not. I didn't zig-zag finish the seam, though, just in case I someday want to remove the cuff...you know, just in case there's anymore kids around here....someday, maybe..... It should hold up because we wash woolens gently. So there you have it:


A longer leg!


If she keeps growing this fast she'll have rainbow coloured long john legs soon!
:-)

Wardrobe Refashion, Kid's Version

Every once in a while I quickly go through my clothes and put things in the donation bag. Lately though, I've become a bit more mean. Yes, there's a perfectly good shirt of Mr. S.'s that he doesn't dig anymore in there, but you can't have it because the buttons can go in the button box and the rest can make rags. Stingy, I know, but might as well get as much use out of it as possible.

So there was the top in the picture up there, which was an early-pregnancy-friend-gave-me item that seriously? Awesome on a hot summer beach day when the pregnancy boobs are so big that they can be seen from space, but these days squishing is hardly to their benefit ;-) I quickly shortened the elasticized bodice (just cut the top couple of inches off in-between rows of stitching), took the side seam in, added ribbon for straps, and hey presto!


On a roll, I got daring with this:


Love the pattern, love the cut, but too small. I'm not sure if doing the following is officially sanctioned altering - is this allowable? Apparently, 'cause it worked!


I put the t-shirt on Safiya, got her to stand still (!), pinched it up on top of her shoulders until I got a decent fit, marked one side with a safety pin 'cause that's all I could manage given the level of wriggliness, and then turned it inside out and pondered for a minute.


This is a view from the back of one of the shoulders. The trick, which I almost got, is to line up the neck binding and the sleeve seams from front to back. There was extra fabric on the back, so I just pleated it as I sewed the seam, following the original line of the shirt (which yielded a perfectly fitting sleeve - I was pretty amazed!) It still puckered a bit across the back of the neck, so I just folded it under and stitched, as you can see.

O.k., the following is my doctored version (the red arrows are where I lined up the old seams, which are in white, and the green line is where I sewed the new seam - does that help, or am I making things more complicated?)


Anyway, not the most glamourous of jobs, but it created, it all of 5 minutes (minus the pondering), a perfectly serviceable dress:


I'd love to show you a picture of her wearing it, but most of the time today she was sticking her hands in the pockets and pulling it up over her head. I can, however, show you what happened at the end of the day:


That's our vegetable "garden". There's herbs, sunflowers, and sunchokes in there somewhere. And the often played in but rarely photographed mud hole. With the dress as accessory.

Like Scoring Three Goals in One Game...

I tried to convey how excited I was about this to Mr. S. using terms he could understand, but to no avail. "That's nice!" He tried, he really tried to be happy for me, but there was still the unspoken "whatever, crazy lady" behind his words :-)

This is my spool graveyard. I've gone through a lot of thread. Does anyone have an idea of what to do with these? I guess somehow load them up again, eh? Anyway, a couple of days ago I ran out of white. And off-white. And beige.


The halcyon days of simply buying new thread, the days before I realised what I sewed with ended up being swallowed by sea life, are long gone (and that includes the dyes - I'm starting to think, if I wouldn't want to drink it, it shouldn't get thrown out...I know, crazy talk....)

Thread on spools is hard to come by second-hand. And I haven't graduated yet to buying organic thread. But I have scored a couple of cones of thread for sergers, in the hopes of figuring out what to do with them. Ages ago I remember seeing how to rig them up on a non-serger machine on someone's craft blog. I have a million bookmarks - did I bookmark it? Of course not. So, after some searching last night, I came up with a combination of this idea posted on instructables and this. And for all you out there going, "well, a thread stand, of course..." I did not know that thread stands existed, so there.


The hanger was bent with pliers and tacked down with some electric-cord-hold-in-place-thingies from Ikea, and I just placed the cone on the spindle and put it underneath.


And it works like a charm!.....

.....GOAL!

Playing with Fire

Before:

After:

He he...that was fun. When I thrift fabric, my rule is if there's no label, I don't buy it unless I really like it and can use it for something that's not going to go next to anyone's skin. Which is fine, except when you go to fabric swaps and places like the "by-the-pound" Goodwill, where bags of donations are just dumped into bins and you have to fight the other vultures for what may or may not be cotton....

Now, everything thrifted goes into hot water wash and dry, because, well.....ick. Nothing personal, but I don't know what kind of environment any of those pieces have come from. However, I had got some fabric from a fabric swap at The Workroom (where there is a decidedly un-ick atmosphere ;-) and from the Goodwill that I wasn't sure about, fibre-content-wise. So, using info I found, I did my first real burn test this morning:


Here are my guesses, left to right, top to bottom (I wrote them down first) and the results:

blue and white gingham: mostly polyester :: mostly cotton
green: linen :: linen
lt. blue/pink flower print: mostly polyester :: mostly polyester
cream: cotton :: cotton
red/orange/pink flower print: cotton :: cotton
cream and red baroque print: no idea, probably man-made :: man-made
orange/white print: mostly cotton :: mostly polyester
stripes: mostly polyester :: mostly cotton
baby pink flowered stripes: mostly cotton :: mostly polyester
pink flannel: cotton :: mostly cotton
blue and white: cotton/linen :: some polyester
yellow/red/blue flowers: cotton :: cotton
nubby cream: i hope it's linen/silk :: linen (some polyester? - have to retest)
purple/red print: cotton :: cotton

Some other things I learned:

• blow out your match before becoming mesmerised by how the fabric is burning
• when they say well-ventilated area, they mean it - ack!
• whoah - cotton burns fast!
• make sure your last piece is extinguished before starting the next one - interesting fireballs may result if this advice is not heeded
• have a glass of water handy.....
  

Also, this confirmed my gut feeling about polyester. Why, oh why, would anyone want to wear something whose true (un)nature is revealed like this:


Do you see that melted edge? That's plastic. Gross.
There was a pleasant surprise, though. We have a huge curtain over the closet in our bedroom that I picked up at a thrift store probably a decade ago. It's a large bedspread, I think, and on each corner is woven this:

I was hoping it would be silk, and from the burn test, it looks like it is! It's beautiful regardless, but somehow it's just nice to know :-) I wish I could find out more info on it...

That, and see that sun? The last two days it's been raining, so I'm really doing a happy dance today!

Before Breakfast, Or Ode to a Walking Foot

When I woke up this morning, I couldn't remember at first why I was so happy? And then it came back to me.....ahhhh, yes......the walking foot!

Actually sewing the felt from my felted sweater adventures has always been a bit of a challenge. My sewing machine is very basic, so I've tried different combinations of needles, tensions, and stitches, and was getting pretty good at it, but if I wasn't careful, the following would happen when I tried to zig-zag or satin stitch two pieces of felt together (if you are at all craft-disaster-queasy, I beg you to look away):


Behold the ugly puckering, behold the holes in all their horrific defiance!

Frustrated, I fished around for advice from a friend (thanks Johanna!) and from the lovely lady who sold me my machine. Maybe a walking foot?

Yesterday Safiya and I sat at the machine for an hour, just sewing scraps of felt together for the fun of it. This morning she wanted to make a blanket for her doll. Before breakfast. Compared to before, it went sooo much faster. And easier. And look, look at the seams!


It is ridiculous how happy I am about this.