Procrastinated Green v2.0

Two-and-two-thirds years ago, I sewed this jacket for the kiddo

Despite his lukewarm reaction when presented with it, he ended up wearing it constantly.  It also acquired a lot more pins, which made a lot of holes in the front, which I patched with decorative appliqués, reinforced the front pieces with interfacing, and eventually added a layer of woven cotton for more strength.

Seams popped, got re-sewn, and popped in different places.  I stopped caring if the thread even vaguely matched.  Pills formed, betraying the high synthetic fiber content.  The child's arms grew longer than the sleeves could respectably cover.  Paint wore off of the zipper pull.

The only thing that could convince him to stop wearing it was nasty hot weather, so he hasn't been inclined to wear it for a few months, so I was looking for suitable cloth to use to make a replacement.  Happily, I blundered into a few yards of just-about-the-same-shade green cloth in a visit to a thrift store about a month ago (seen here under the old jacket)

I also blundered across this in a thrift store at some point

Yeah, there's no front zipper, but there's a front seam and it goes down to size XS, so it's close enough, and here we are

This one wasn't curtains

The fabric (another piece from the amazing amount of fabric brought by a friend dealing with a craft hoarder relative's stash)  was not quite two yards long, 52" wide, and hemmed on each end in a very home-made way--so, whatever it had originally been, it wasn't a curtain.

And now it's a dress

 that I can't decide if it would have looked better as a piece of furniture

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.