Tablecloth into dress vol. 3?

Hey everyone!
So I found a nice mint green scallop-edge tablecloth at Salvation Army secondhand store:

It cost me 4 euros.

I liked the scallop edge and the fact that the tablecloth was already curved along the edges. This could make a nice circle skirt dress, I thought as I bought the tablecloth.

And so a few days ago I set out to make just that.

The tablecloth was sort of oval shaped, so I chopped off the two ends to make two half-circles, and used the middle part to make the top.

This times 2 makes a circle skirt. ♥

I wanted some of that fancy scallop edge on the top as well, so I cut the top front in three pieces to make this:

The back and waistband I made just as usual. (And I totally forgot to take pictures of this...)

And here it is:

Since I had extra fabric, I also added pockets into the side seams of the skirt:

Pockets are awesome!

So this is what the dress looks like in full view:

I think it's pretty neat. What do you think? ^_^

love,
scoundrel

Skirt out of vintage fabric

Hey everyone,
So last week we visited my husband's grandma. She has this stash of fabric lying around, and she doesn't do sewing anymore, so I always get to rummage through her stash while I'm there. Last time I did that around New Year's, I ended up making this House Stark sigil dress out of one of the fabrics I got from her. This time, I went through a cardboard box full of stretchy knits. She said they're all dyed in a local factory a long time ago, so actually I was rummaging through a gold mine of Finnish vintage fabrics. (Cue a choir of angels singing somewhere.)

Holy awesome.

So now I got around to making a skirt out of one of the fabrics.

This black-green-gold beauty, to be precise.

I wanted to make a full/circle skirt, but that is difficult with a fabric that has lines or a pattern that needs to be positioned in a certain way.

So then I calculated the size of eight slices that I could cut out and then sew together to make a circle where the lines run horizontally all around the skirt.

Slice, slice, slice...

Sewing the pieces together was extremely quick and painless, thanks to my new overlocker. ♥

I then made and pinned a waistband:

I serged the waistband in. Seriously, like 90% of this skirt was made by only using the overlocker. So much love. ♥

Then, since the slices didn't have curve along the hem, I measured 60cm down from the waistband and serged the hem along the curve. Serrrrrge.

Then I sewed the back pieces together and added a zipper.

Almost done - after this I just needed to turn the hem over once and top-stitch that in place, and the skirt was finished!

Here's the skirt on me:

I think the skirt turned out awesome. It's an amazing feeling to be wearing something that's made of vintage fabric. I love the pattern and how it runs around the skirt... And the best part is, there's still enough fabric left to make a matching shirt at some point! :)

***

Edit. June 22nd:

I made the matching shirt, using this tutorial:

I'm loving this outfit ot pieces tbh. ♥



So, what do you think of the skirt and the shirt? :)

love,
scoundrel

Jumping on the bandwagon: DIY galaxy skirt

Hey everyone!
Whoa, I'm on a roll here. It's amazing what vacation can do to a person. All this free time and lower stress levels are really agreeing with me, so I've been sewing stuff left and right.

This particular project was more of a work of art than sewing, since the sewing part was the good ol' circle skirt (tutorial here). Although a slightly modified version, with an elastic waistband, but anyways. The sewing part was smooth sailing - I just made the circumference of the waist circle so big it fit over my hips, made the waistband fit that circumference, cut an elastic band that fit my waist, made an encasing of the waistband, pulled elastic through and that's pretty much that. If you want a more detailed tutorial on that, here's a good one. But anyways, the sewing was just a tiny bit of the whole project...

...The bigger job here was painting a skirt-ful of space. I got inspired by this skirt I found via Google (it's a sold-out piece on Etsy.)

So I went on Youtube and searched for "DIY galaxy print" or something along those lines, watched a few tutorials, and then got cracking.

I gathered:
-fabric paint (black, white, blue, red, gold, copper)
-white fabric paint pen
-foam brush, Q-tips, an old toothbrush
-a bit of water in a cup to thin the paint if needed
-magazines to spread my skirt on

So I'd cut out a circle skirt piece (full circle, so it looked like a massive blue donut when I spread it on the magazines. I had a lot of blue fabric left over from when I made the TARDIS dress, so I used that same fabric for this galaxy project).

I poured some white, blue and red paint on a magazine and dipped the toothbrush in white, then begun by spritzing the whole skirt in white dots. Then I started dabbing white, blue and red on random spots and spreading them to make cloudy galaxy formations. Basically I just splashed color here and there, smudged it, added more color, threw in some gold/copper dots and black spaces, then spritzed more white dots... I was like a five-year-old fingerpainting, honestly :D

It took me several hours to finish my masterpiece, but it was worth the trouble because the end result looks pretty neat.

After the paint had dried, I ironed the skirt to set the paint, serged the raw edges, added the aforementioned waistband and elastic, hemmed the skirt and voilà:

This turned out really neat, or at least I think so. Plus with the elastic waistband, it's also super comfy. (I must be getting old, because nowadays it's more important to me that clothes are comfortable than it used to be... :P)

Anyways, how do you like it? :)

love,
scoundrel

Full skirt from black vintage lace

Hey all,
I know I promised geek projects, but this skirt just sort of... happened this morning. I made the skirt out of (what I think is) vintage lace.

I found this lace fabric for 2 euros at a secondhand store a few months back:

Now I can't be sure it's real vintage, but I think it is. The thing that led me to this conclusion was a magazine that was used to roll the fabric. After I unrolled the fabric and the magazine in the middle, I found myself looking at this:

Date: September 17th, 1961.

Of course someone could have kept a pile of 1960's magazines and then used one to roll up a bunch of lace that was bought last year. But why would anyone do that? It makes no sense. Surely they would have used a current magazine or newspaper, because those are usually readily at hand. So that led me to believe that this lace has been wrapped around the magazine and then the whole thing's just been sitting around in someone's attic until they finally decided to do a clean-up and donated the lace to a secondhand store in the process. (I even came up with a whole background story for the fabric and how it ended up in the secondhand store :D)

Well, vintage or not, the lace is pretty nice. So I decided to make a tulle-like skirt with an elastic waistband.

I used this tutorial as my guide, skipping the top part:



I happened to have an underskirt I'd ripped off of another skirt earlier on, so I just used that. And instead of one layer of lace, I used four to get volume. I made the layers different lengths, too. But otherwise I just followed the tutorial.

And here's the result:

So, I really like how this turned out. I can see myself wearing this skirt a lot. It's comfortable yet looks fancy; awesome combination.

So, what do you think? ^_^

love,
scoundrel

I got an overlocker! And I made a summer dress.

Hey,
I've been absent because there was this exam on clinical neuropsychology I had to study for. Or well, mostly I just procrastinated like hell... I started watching Heroes. I baked an apple pie. I went to see my grandparents. All good things, but none of them really helped with the exam tbh. But anyway. Now the exam is done and that means I'm free for the summer! (Trying to be positive about the fact that I don't have a job for the summer... think of all the free time I have to do whatever I want. Like sewing!)

I hadn't been doing much sewing lately, but then my husband bought me an overlocker for my birthday. And holy crap I love that thing.

It wasn't a super expensive one, but I thought I should go for the cheaper option just to see how much I will use/need it. I tried it for the first time today and I can already tell this is love at first sight. See, I had been putting off this one sewing project because the fabric was annoying (you know, the type that frays when you look at it). But with the overlocker all my fraying problems are now history! \o/

So with the help of my lovely new overlocker, I completed this summer dress I'd wanted to make for a while:

Both fabrics 2€ and zipper 0,50€ from Salvation Army secondhand store. So thread and all included, this dress cost me something like 3 euros. Super expensive, eh? ;)

So now I'm thinking about doing a geeky sewing project next, but I need to come up with an idea... if you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments ^_^

love,
scoundrel