The Ex-Sweater Bag

I hope you don't hate in progress project posts, but I thought this was kind of fun. My Aunt brought my Mom a sweater home from Greece when she was studying abroad in the 80s, so of course Mom can't wear it anymore, but also won't throw it away (of course).

So in order that she keep the gift still, I'm going to unravel the sweater and make her a bag with it :) Here's the sweater mid-unravel:

I really love the idea of unraveling sweaters to reuse the yarn, especially when the piece can't be worn, is stained, or torn and can't be fixed. The offending yarn can be cut away and the rest reused for other projects. I even found a knitted beanie on the ground the other day-- free yarn! It's a really nice way to reuse pieces that you either can't or won't give away :)

Disaster Cake

Now, everyone has been trying very hard to convince me that Disaster Cake isn't so disastrous after all, but that's the name I gave it while I was working on it, so that's the name that stuck.

Here's how it went: It was my birthday, and I wanted to bake a cake (I really like baking). I didn't want to bake a cake so badly that I wanted to do it from scratch, though, so I decided to use a boxed cake mix and canned frosting. So I baked the cakes and set them to cool while I walked over to Whole Foods to buy a can of frosting (Whole Foods is only two blocks from home, so it's pretty logical. When I got the frosting home and the cakes were cooled, I cut each tier in half to fill with preserves, and then stacked them to frost with what Whole Foods apparently thinks is frosting.

 

But I was not fooled by Whole Foods trying to tell me that this was frosting. It is clearly (clearly) glaze. And why they would market glaze as frosting is beyond me.

So I was pretty dissipointed, but I figured I could save the looks of the cake by buying regular white frosting and spreading it over the weirdness to disguise it, so I walked to Walgreens (about six blocks from home). Then I discovered the Walgreens only sells chocolate frosting (really?).

So here is the finished, "saved" birthday cake:

Crocheted Shopping Bag

So ages and ages ago I bought crocheting thread because I thought it was lace weight yarn. After I realized what a dumb idea that was, I just stuck the thread away thinking that someday I might come up with something to do with it. And here it is:

  A crochet grocery bag! So this is what it looks like with groceries in it.

This is what it looks like empty, and here it is:

 

 ...folded up for carrying! Cool, huh?

Fixed Tee Shirt

So my boyfriend had this tee he loved, but he only got to wear it once before it shrunk so bad he couldn't wear it. So he gave me the shrunk tee, plus a tee that he didn't wear because he didn't like the design, and I did a master re-mix, which resulted in:

At first, I just cut out the design and held it against the black shirt, but I realized I could still see the old logo behind the new design, so I cut out a separate piece of white to cover the old logo. Now, the first piece of white shows behind the main design, and even comes out from behind the patch in places, which I really like.

I used my sewing machine's stretch jearsy stitch to do this, which was kind of funny, because the progress feels so slow. You have two stitches forward, one to each side, one back; two stitches forward, one to each side, one back. It's very amusing.

Anyway, I left the edges of the patch unfinished, because I think once the shirt is washed, the edges will curl up a little, which I think will be awesome.

And: I know! Another sewing project! I'm on a roll :)

Replaced Pocket

So I know I keep saying I'm not much of a seamstress, but I've been doing lots of sewing lately! Here's what I did lately:

This thing was a bear to sew. I mean, making the pocket was easy, I just used an old cloth napkin and cut out the old one as a pattern. It was sewing it in that was the problem. It was just difficult to get the sewing machine into the pocket to sew it, and I almost sewed the pocket closed about twice.

Anyway, I'm pretty proud with how it turned out, and I think it was way smarter to replace the pocket instead of trying to patch it.

TOSS Swap

I don't want to give any full photos and give away the surprise for the friend I'm spoiling, but here's a close up teaser:

Now we all know that I'm not much of a seamstress, but I am so excited about this project. I had so much fun making it and picking out the cloth and seeing the finished project come together. The pattern came from a book my mom got me for graduation called 24 Hour Sewing Projects. However, this bag took me about 10 hours to finish (from cutting out the shapes to cutting the loose threads), and I'm considering renaming my copy of the book One-Bobbin Projects, because when I was finished I had about two feet of thread left on my bobbin-- pretty cool.

I'll update after I give my friend her gift!

Crocheted Apron

So this is another work in progress, because I ran out of crochet thread!

I wanted an apron that I could use, so I picked this pattern, but I've decided that it's a very good thing that my Aunt bought me a perfect one for graduation, because this one is going to be more of a "show" apron-- you know, where the company arrives and you put on a pretty apron to pretend like you've been working all day and didn't get even one speck of tomato sauce on you?

Anyway, here's the progress so far:

So for graduation, my boss at HUTE got me a gift certificate to a yarn shop, so I'm pretty sure I'll spend it on more crochet thread. I'm thinking chocolate brown is a must, and maybe creme? We'll see what they have, I suppose :)