Sewing?

No bolded headers in this post, folks, because it's all about sewing.

What? You read that correctly. Sewing. I do that. Sometimes. When I have the patience for it. And the time. And the space.

And that's the thing! Because the upstairs room is partially set up as a craft room, there's plenty of space to leave half finished projects around, which was my biggest problem previously. I mean, I've had my own sewing machine for almost 8 years now and I've only done a few sewing projects. It's mostly been hemming pants. Or jackets after I've torn the elastics out.

(Seriously, that jacket. The thing was an extra-large and I couldn't zip it around my hips with that damn elastic along the bottom. And I'm a medium/large shirt size, depending on the shirt, and where jeans with a 36 waist. There's no way that should have been cutting off circulation to my legs as an extra-large.)

And I once sewed a Where The Wild Things Are Halloween costume for a friend, but that's really the most action this thing has seen. Only a handful of small sewing projects have made it to finished for me because I have limited space (read: none) and had to have everything cleared away by the end of the day/weekend.

But I did some rearranging upstairs in the craft room and my mom pulled out a table top ironing board while cleaning the downstairs closet, so I decided that I'm going to get myself back into sewing as the weather warms up. It'll come in handy later when it's too hot for my skin to agree with yarn.

So I picked up two simple sewing projects to get some practice in. The first one was a new cover for the little table top ironing board, whose cover was falling apart.









That's just some spare thick ribbon that I used for the elastic casing there. The tutorial I was using called for bias tape, but I couldn't find any in the house. I used what I had.

And now that I have this little ironing board, it makes getting stuff prepped for other sewing projects much easier. Lugging out the big ironing board is a huge pain and had led to me taking short cuts when sewing, which made those projects turn out kind of bleh. It also makes it easier to actually iron fabric, since the drape off the board is onto the table so it doesn't try to pull the whole mess over.


Then I turned some scrap fabric and felt into a pear pin cushion!




I'm really pleased with this. It looks like what I imagined, which is the goal. I may open it back up to add rice or something to the bottom. It's only stuff with the polyester fiberfill right now and it falls over if it's not leaning against anything, but I'll come back to it.


I have plans to play with a bunch of fabric hexagons that I've had in my craft stash forever. I've been afraid to use them for fear of not being patient enough and screwing up, so I'm going to make myself use them. I also picked up a couple of rolls of fabric strips from Jo-Ann's, so I think I'm going to do a basic lap quilt type thing with those. My grandma's a big quilter and my mom dabbles in quilting, so I might finally be able to use some of the advice that they've thrown at me about quilting for my entire life.