a week of craftiness

Since I've been lax in updating, here's a pic-spammy post to make up for it.

Wednesday: As mentioned before, Goodwill shopping for supplies. Here's why...

A friend of mine asked me to help her shop for supplies for some Halloween costume for her and her husband. While there, I noticed these fairy wings for half-off ($6, which is probably about as good as it would get with me finding pantyhose and such to make my own!) I may have mentioned this on here before, but I'm supposed to dress in costume for a Halloween concert I'm going to be playing in, and none of my current costumes would work well for playing flute (sleeves either too fitted for that kind of arm movement, such as the pirate coat, or too heavy, like my more Lord of the Rings-Renaissance based costumes. Plus I wanted something kids would understand better.) So since I have to wear kind of darkish, more normal clothing for one of the pieces, I thought the colors on this were just about perfect. They do need some tweaking, like painting the design on the opposite side so you can see it when you're facing me (since I will be on stage for this), and hopefully figuring out a way to get it to stay on my back better. Might need some wider straps.

As it turns out, I have a party to go to the same night-- costumes being a requirement, of course. I have a shirt to wear for the concert, but I needed a fairy skirt, and preferred to have a different shirt for the party (since this shirt's one I wear for concerts a lot and I don't want to risk messing it up.) So this is what I ended up with for supplies. Clockwise from top: a poly/cotton chiffon I found in the remnant bin at Joanns, (approximately $6, for about 3 yards in the bundle, so I have leftovers to play with) polyester satin thrifted pj pants (about $2), a huge stretch nylon skirt (I think about $4), and some shimmery black organza that was from a failure project-- I was going to use it to overlay a dress for performances, but the fabric was too stiff and didn't drape right at all. (Unfortunately, it was the only sheer black at the store at the time. Pretty sure this project was from close to the end of college or the beginning of grad school, and has been sitting in the bin ever since.) The nylon skirt will be turned into the party shirt, as soon as I figure out how. The rest of it was for the fairy skirt.

Thursday/Friday: Ripped seams out of the pj pants.

Saturday: Started work on the skirt. Which consisted of sewing up the ripped-out legs into more of a skirt tube, hemming that, and cutting out an overlay from the sheer blue. Then I started sealing the edges with glitter fabric paint, because hemming that would take forever and not look right anyway.

Sunday: Finished sealing the edges on the blue, as well as cut out the black sheer overlay and edge-sealing on that. The nice thing about the black layer was I was able to cut it directly off the bottom of the dress overlay, so all the seams were pre-done.

Monday: both layers onto the black satin skirt. The top's messy... when I took out the first seam for the elastic waistband on the pj pants, I discovered that the fabric was sewn directly to the elastic, and the elastic fit me perfectly. So I just stretched that out while sewing the sheer layers on and let that do the gathering for me. I originally had that turned to the inside, but the sheer edges were so itchy and it just lookedSewed the side seams on the blue, then sewed bulky and weird, so now the top is literally the elastic. But it'll be covered, so it's ok. So here's the finished result.


Yesterday:

Finally finished refashioning this shirt. A bit unusual for me because it was an entirely hand-sewn refashion. All I did was shorten the sleeves (which I finished last night), and then sew the trim to the neckline. But only in the front, to make sure it could still get over my head-- the neckline was finished differently in the back anyway. Simple, but I like it.

Tonight: Sewed the actual seams into the peacoat lining. Now I just have to rip out the original basting, which is about a quarter inch closer to the edges of the pieces, so I can press the seams flat and continue.

On a random note, feeling annoyed with Blogger tonight. On Internet Explorer, it took forever to load the pics and wouldn't let me click "done" to continue more than half the times I tried to upload even one photo at a time. So finishing this on Firefox, and discovered I can't just drag and scroll the pics. Meh.