A Special Bag

I ran into my massage therapist and her mom at the local garden club's plant sale today. Seeing familiar friendly faces just about everywhere I go is one of the many things I love about living in a small town. It was the first time I had met Judy's mom, but I felt I already had a connection with her since I had made this bag for her a couple of months ago. She lit up when she heard I was the lady who had made it and said how happy her group was with it.

When Judy found out that I sew, she told me about her mom's Franciscan friends who had been carrying their traveling San Damiano cross in a regular tote bag that was too small. For my non-Catholic readers I should explain a little here. It's a devotional tradition among Catholics to take turns having a blessed cross, statue, or icon in their home as a focal point for prayer. While each family has it in their home, they pray for the other members of the group as well as the intentions of the group. It's a lovely way to enhance the bond among friends united in Jesus.

This particular cross is an icon painted in the Byzantine tradition and is a replica of the cross that hung in the church of San Damiano in Assisi where St. Francis heard the voice of Jesus telling him to rebuild the church. St. Francis at first thought Jesus meant for him to rebuild that church building which was falling into ruin at the time, but he came to realize later that our Lord meant for him to rebuild faith and devotion in the entire Church. And he did. Hence we still have devoted Franciscans consecrated as priests, brothers and sisters, and lay people like the Franciscans to which Judy's mom belong. So that's the connection between our local Franciscans and this cross you see here. We were blessed to be able to have the cross in our home during Holy Week and Easter while I was working on the new bag. I placed it on our prayer table and we said our morning and evening devotions there each day.

I started with some "heavenly" quilting cotton covered with blue sky and clouds which I had in my stash. There wasn't quite enough, so I pieced in strips of sunny yellow and flowers in a field of green. I wanted the bag to be strong and firm, so I fused on stiff interfacing and lined all the pieces with quilting cotton before putting them together. I haven't made many bags so far, so I wasn't quite sure if it would turn out stiff enough. Judy had also given me a fluffy massage table pad to repurpose as a soft lining for the bag. I thought that would be firm enough to add support for the bag, but when I got it all together, it was still pretty wobbly.

So I used my favorite problem solving method: say a prayer, get a good night's sleep and see what pops into my head in the morning. Sure enough, it popped. Cardboard. I went to Wal-Mart the next day and bought one of those three-paneled display boards like the kids use for projects. It cut surprisingly smoothly and was just the right size. I glued the pieces of the padding to the cardboard and made a box out of this by taping the corners with packaging tape. It worked beautifully! Oh I was pleased.

Then I tried to put the box in the bag. It was too big! I had to take it all apart, size it down and put it together again. Then it fit! Whew!

I made this little shoulder section in the strap that opens up like an envelope pillow cover. That way a piece of padding can be slipped in and taken out whenever the bag needs washing. The padded box, slips out for washing too. Judy's mom said the older ladies in the group really liked the padded shoulder strap and find it easier to carry the cross now with the new bag. I'm really glad that worked.

This was my first payed sewing project since Judy wanted to pay me. I just charged for the materials though. I figured I'm no expert bag maker and I basically made it up as I went along. And I received plenty of benefits from working on this bag. I learned a lot, we had the beautiful cross for a long while, and I got to make something really worthwhile.

Two Blouses and a Dress from the Sense and Sensibility Romantic Blouse Pattern

When I first started sewing in 2006, I poured over the Sense and Sensibility pattern website admiring the beautiful dresses and show-and-tell pages wondering if I would ever be able to actually make such lovely things. Now a few years later, I have several S&S regency dresses and a few blouses in the closet, and a some already outgrown by my daughters and given away. I really like Jenny Chancey's style of pattern writing. It's conversational and easy to follow. Garments that seem as if they would be very complicated, are actually pretty logical according to her directions. She also includes historical information, which I really like, being a life-long history buff.

Today, I'll show you what I've made from the S&S Romantic Blouse pattern. The blouse above and below here is made of a lightweight woven fabric my neighbor gave me. Isn't it sweet that when people find out you sew, they start to give you fabric for free?

I made a muslin of this pattern to start with and fiddled with the front and back tucks quite a bit until I was happy with the fit. It's probably my best fitting blouse at this point.

I had some fun improvising the sleeves with tucks and a band. I should have used a placket and buttons here, but I was getting tired of the project at the time. Next time, I'll do it up right. For now, I can push my hands through all right so it works for me. I mention this fact for anyone reading this who's new to sewing. I've found that loosening up on the desire for perfection and professionalism turns sewing from a stressful activity into a stress reliever. I wear "imperfect" creations of mine all the time and nobody's ever said a critical thing. In fact, my friends are usually pretty impressed. I just fight the urge to start listing off all the things I know are wrong with it.

This is an earlier version of the same pattern. Made of pink bandana cotton, this one has a Western style which fit right in when we lived in Arizona.

Below, is a dress I made by using the Romantic Blouse for the bodice but cutting it at the waistline. Then I just attached a simple rectangle of fabric for the skirt by making knife pleats in the back and front. It was a little looser in the waist than I liked when I had it all done, so I made a tie belt out of the same fabric. That took care of it well enough. I wear this dress a lot, especially with my kelly green cardigan.

Challenge in a Bag

In January I joined a sewing club at Cottons Etc. a local quilt shop. It's called Runway Addicts and each month our leaders Paula and Terry cook up a puzzling challenge to spark our imaginations. There are about 20 members, and I have been so amazed and astounded every month to see what these brilliantly creative women come up with. Every month I read the challenge sheet and say to myself, "What on earth?????" But the wheels begin to turn and I have surprised myself with what I could dream up.

The April challenge was dubbed "Spring is in the Bag". We were each given a cute gift bag containing a yard and a half of purple polyester, a length of piping, a tangled handful of assorted machine embroidery thread scraps, a black double-ended lanyard, and several squares of bandage gauze. We were challenged to use all of these elements plus snaps, a zipper and pen parts. Yes that's the parts of a broken writing pen! What on earth! We were allowed to delete one item and replace the piping with bias binding if we wished. We could also add other fabrics at will.

The weeks went by and the wheels turned. In the meantime I received a paying sewing commission which I'll blog about later, so I didn't get to the challenge until a week before our next meeting. But a tight deadline just makes things more exciting. It reminds me of my daily newspaper days a lifetime ago.

I had bought the online class Design and Sew an A-Line Skirt taught by Deborah Moebes from Craftsy and wanted to apply what I learned from that. Also, my youngest daughter's favorite color is purple. So I settled on making an a-line skirt for Gracie incorporating the crazy elements from the bag. I tossed around several ideas, but ended up making the yoke from the a-line class and creating a pleated skirt that attached to it. I replaced the piping in the bag with bias tape I made from scraps of a fabric Gracie had picked out a year ago. That took care of the purple polyester, piping, zipper, and snaps.

My daughter and I were really pleased with the excellent fit of this A-line yoke. Thanks Craftsy!

If you want to put in an invisible zipper very easily and make the yoke seam line up perfectly,
use Kay Whitt's directions found on her blog right here. 

Now, what to do with that gauze? I went to sleep one night puzzling on that question and woke up saying, "Headband!" Gracie likes to wear headbands with her short haircut. I glued strips of gauze onto an old headband of hers, wrapped a piece of leftover binding around it and hand stitched it while chatting with a dear friend as the kids played soccer one day. (You have to squeeze sewing into every crevice of a busy life.) The purple polyester pulled double duty as the flower accent and I drew out some long strands of thread from the gob and hand sewed French knots with it in the flower's center. The lanyard I just put lamely around the top as a belt, and chose the pen parts as my delete option.

The gauze served as a padding under the fabric binding.

We title our challenge projects. I called this skirt and headband set "Gracie's Got Spring Fever". 

It was great fun to solve the quandaries of the bag, but even more delightful to see at the meeting what my fellow Runway Addicts had created. Several of those creative geniuses made much more elaborate belts from the lanyard using pretty clasps replacing the plastic clips and covering the nylon with lovely fabrics. Now I know what possibilities lie hidden in a plain old black lanyard! Most impressive were the creations using pen parts. They fabricated buttons, pins, and beads from the assorted parts of plain ink pens. My eyes were wide in awe through most of the meeting. I love that club! I wish I could show you pictures, but our Shutterfly group is private and their creations are their own to share as they choose. But if you ever get the chance to join a creative club like this, I highly encourage it. I've really gained so much from seeing how other crafty ladies think.

A Little Needle Felting Fun

I spent the day with two dear friends trying out needle felting for the first time. I can see this being very useful for adding pizzazz to upcycled felted sweaters like the gray wool one I made awhile back. I always like expanding my crafting horizons.

This is just a 3" by 3" sample I played around with today, randomly felting the wool onto felt. I especially like how it can be sculpted into raised areas making it kind of 3D in places. Hmmm....many possibilities.....

The Saga of the Dress

After a very long hiatus, in which my family and I moved from Arizona to New York, I am now back to blogging. Although I wasn't posting during the past year, I was doing plenty of sewing. Now I'm looking forward to catching up on writing the stories of all those exciting adventures in fabric.

Let's see...how about starting at the most recent and then catching up on highlights of the past few months' projects?

One of the reasons we moved to New York was to transition the girls from homeschooling to a small Catholic high school near my extended family. It has been a move well worth it! The school supports our homeschooling goals while offering much more friendship and camaraderie than we had at home. One of the wonderful events at school is the Spring Formal Dinner Dance, held just this past Saturday evening. The dance isn't called a prom because it's quite a bit different. There's no pressure of finding a date. Everybody goes as friends. They eat a nice dinner, dance the swing dances they learned in gym class, and the parents pick them up by 10 pm. Pretty tame, but that's the way we like it.

The hot topic among the girls for months before the dance is: the dress. This being our first such affair, the dress became quite a saga. Of course I gleefully volunteered to make a dress for Izzy, but that idea was summarily squashed right out of the gate. So we went out into the wide world to search for the perfect dress. We tried expensive bridal boutiques and the department stores at the mall. We combed the consignment shops. We even ordered a gown online. Nothing pleased us both.

It's funny how sometimes in life you take a long way around to arrive at the place you started. April 16 was the deadline for dress approval. (It's a conservative school and dresses have to be pre-approved for modesty.) On April 11 we zipped over to JoAnne Fabrics, and Iz picked out a crepe back satin in a beautiful midnight blue and a bit of silver sequined trim. She likes a simple elegant style. I already had the New Look 6143 pattern. We had some other things to do, so I didn't start cutting until about 4 pm on April 13. I went into the "sewing zone" (that's a mental state of project preoccupation) and emerged about midnight on April 14 with the dress complete. If I tallied all the hours spent shopping in stores and online, I think it took less time to sew the dress. It definitely was a lot less money.

The pattern is nice and easy, and I appreciated having my Fit for Real People by Palmer and Pletsch close at hand. I made a muslin of the bodice which led me to several fitting adjustments to the darts. Then I took it in even further as I was sewing the bodice in the fabric, just as P & P recommend. In the end, the neckline could have been more fitted, but I think the drape there works OK. The Craftsy blog was another great resource for tips on working with satin. How I love Craftsy! But that's a topic for another post.

Parents could stay for a little while after bringing the dancers to the soiree. I enjoyed admiring all the other dresses and picked up several good ideas for next year when I have three dresses to make, since the younger sisters will be old enough to attend.

Izzy was happy with her look and received lots of compliments. She had an overall delightful time with her friends. I'd say that's a happy ending to the saga of the dress.