More Sewing Makes and Alterations

Another sewing post this week, as I seem to be finding my sewing groove. My first make was a small sunglasses case out of some left over fabrics from making a crossbody bag. I needed a flat cloth sunglasses/glasses case that I could put in my handbag and that wouldn't take up too much space. It needed to house either my sunglasses or my regular specs when I'm not wearing them, rather than putting them straight into my bag and risk scratching them.

 

It didn't take too long to make. I just made a lined pouch with a flap, which closes using velcro. I hand stitched a little dog patch on the front flap, to cover where the velcro had been stitched on. It does what it needs to and is quite cute, but not perfect. 

I then did an alteration to a dress that I bought from the charity shop last week for £5. Here's a picture of the dress:

It's a very nice 100% cotton gingham dress, but the neck is not a style that I would ever wear. Way too much skin on show for my liking. It was, however, a very easy and quick alteration to make it into a skirt. I basically cut it off around the bust area and encased some elastic to make it into a long tiered skirt.

This skirt is a nice mediumweight cotton, so it will be ideal to wear both in the summer and the autumn/winter. I'm looking forward to wearing it in the coming months with a nice chunky sweater or knitted vest and boots. 

The only usable parts of the dress that were left over from this alteration, were the sleeves, so I've stored these away with my scraps, as I'm sure I can find a small project to use up this lovely fabric.

I also did one small mending job on this t-shirt that I used to wear for work.

As you can see from the photo, the sleeves are made of lace and some of the lace had developed holes in it, so I hand sewed them up so that they are less noticable. I was going to donate this item along with quite a few other work clothes that I've put aside to donate, but I actually quite like it and got a few compliments from customers when I wore it for work. As a consequence, I'm going to hang onto to it and see if I can get some more wear out of it in my everyday life.

One other very small mending job I did was to add a new tab to the end of the zip on this lunchbag, as the original had come loose and fallen off. It was a tiny job, using a small piece of black linen fabric from my scraps, but it will extend the life of this lunch bag, which is a good size for travelling and carrying around a big salad box. I also like this because of the lovely Ankara or African fabric it is made of. This was another purchase from the charity shop a while ago, it was new and cost just £2. It's been extremely useful ever since.

After working on a few projects over the last couple of weeks, the sewing room was looking a bit untidy with piles of stuff everywhere. I had a good sort out and re-organised my scraps, which were getting a bit messy. I also put away things that I'm not going to be working on in the near future and put to one side all the fabrics and patterns for projects that I intend to tackle this autumn/winter. To prevent me getting side tracked, I've made a list of items I want to make for the coming season. The above two items have already been crossed off the list, so it feels like I'm making progress. I'll post again, when I've completed more items from the list.