At Bat

The dress I sewed a few months ago with elements from a different floral print appliquéd on has been worn a decent amount of times, and laundered enough to reveal some flaws in the print that I thought I could ignore..until I couldn't

So of course that called for more appliqué!  I really wanted a bee, or a moth, and would have settled for a butterfly, but I didn't have prints with any of those (at least not in a suitable size), so I went with this little bat

so now this dress is that much Halloweenier.

(on some distant future day, I will feel confident in my embroidery abilities...)

Flower Power

There were lots of nice-to-amazing prints in the cloth brought by the person who brought me their relative's cloth stash, so I know I'm going to be sewing a lot with that (in addition to all the doll clothes I've already made from it.)

I made the first larger project from that cloth last weekend, using two prints that seemed to coordinate and the mash up of patterns and improvisation that I've used to make a few other dresses this year, ending up with this

Sewed a Few Pieces of Doll Clothes

and they have been mailed off to the person with whom I'm trading. That's 30 items, added to the 20 I sewed and gave the person when she visited in July.  I had to give myself a number to aim for, or else I'd keep sewing doll clothes forever...

I also finished sewing a pile of clothes for a different doll friend's belated birthday package (it's only about two months late this year.  I seem to remember last year saying I'd start sewing the stuff sooner.  Yeah.  I should start sewing next year's stuff sometime before his next birthday actually happens...)  I didn't get a picture of those, though.

And now I can sew something besides doll clothes for a while!

More Light Improvement

I got a(n) LED bulb for my sewing machine!

I would have preferred a cooler color temperature, but I'm still really happy that I could walk into the big box hardware store and find a bulb that fits my machine, because of course this machine needs a base size that's smaller (candelabra) than what the sewing machine supply sites seem to stock (intermediate.) (It's a threaded base instead of a bayonet like the bulb I still had in my stash for past machines I've had, too.)

Between this and the chandelier, I know a lot more about lights than I feel like I should.

All the cloth bits are for doll clothes, to finish up the last big trade I have going--when that's done, I can get back to random sewing!

This is Not a Home Dec Blog

But this is about the sewing room, so a note will be made here.

This room was lit by an ignominious boob light

 

Which  of course illuminated the room in a perfectly serviceable manner--and, anyway, most craft activities were performed under task lights, so general illumination wasn't so important.

Still.

Boob light.

Most DIY-for-cheap blogs enthusiastically endorse the act of acquiring a nice drum-shaped lamp shade and attaching that to conceal the boob shape.  I visited local thrift stores every week in search of a suitable shade, with a vague hope that I could find an entire light fixture that could be swapped in instead.

And, before I found a suitable shade, I did indeed find a light fixture:

(yes, a whole 99¢, and that included not only the light fixture itself, but also two LED bulbs and a whole lot of dead moths.)

There was, however, no simple "swap" involved--this thing had to be rewired (hissssss) and I ditched the shade, because I didn't want to feel like a UFO was hovering overhead .  I looked at glass shades in one of the big box hardware stores and decided to keep looking, because, if I was going to spend Real Money, I should get shades that I Really Liked.  Then I visited another thrift store (a whole two days after buying the light) and, heh, whaddaya know, there was a set of three glass shades for $2.  When I'm not spending Real Money, I'm not nearly as picky.

I was willing to try to rewire this by myself, but Husband pitched in and, despite all the cursing, it got rewired and hung a lot faster than if I had been working alone.

 And he also convinced me to splurge a  few dollars and get the not-absolutely-cheapest dimmable 800 lumen LED lights, making the total cost spent on this right around $25

And it is wonderful.  The three 60W-equivalent daylight bulbs are a lot brighter and more appealing to me than the two 60W equivalent (but lower lumen) warm bulbs that had been in the boob light.

I plan to get a dimmer switch, too--part of the reason I didn't use the original light a lot was because, in the evening when I'm not working on projects, I don't want super bright light...but there's really no place to put a lamp near my computer, so I generally typed by squinting in the dark, because the other lamps in the room work very well for illuminating tasks, but not so well for ambient lighting.  I had been thinking of getting an RGB keyboard, but, the cost of this light project + a dimmer switch will be less...  And I get a nice non-boob light.