Cherry Blossoms Skirt

Yesterday, I made the "One Hour Skirt" from Brett Bara's Sewing in a Straight Line. This is a great book for people, like me, who are new to sewing or need to brush up on their skills. There are a lot of great projects in it that look like they will teach you a lot.

While this skirt took me closer to three hours, instead of one as its name implies, that was more because I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at my fabric wondering how I was supposed to get two 22.5'' pieces of fabric from a 42'' width fabric, not accounting for the fact that I was cutting it from the length. Lalala, special moment there. I was surely not with it yesterday. 

It also took me more than the one hour because I was reading every step carefully to make sure I understood it correctly because I did not want to destroy my beautiful fabric-so at least there's that. I also had some elastic that I had to put in 3 times because it kept slipping out-little pest! But I thought of a genius solution to that: Once you enter the end with the safety pin to slide through the casing-safety pin the other end to the fabric itself. Voila! No more end slipping into the casing where you can't grab it.

With this skirt, I learned a new skill: a French Seam. This seam is used in garments to encase the raw edge of fabric so it looks nicer and, and also keeps it from unraveling. It's really easy once you learn it, and now I can say "Yay! I have a new skill!"

I am really proud of this skirt and I can't wait to make more! I think I will experiment with lengths and fabric weights and get a whole collection for my closet And I bet it will be much faster next time. :)

Under the Sea Pillows

Last week, I randomly felt the urge to make a small pillow-what I would use it for, who knows-but make one I would! I think it was more to know I could... So I made these out of  a fat quarter. The first one was smaller that I would have wanted-I think I was thinking of other measurements and did that-but it's OK. So seeing it was small, I used the rest of the fabric and made a second one, and ended up with two cute decorative pillows:

The Husband Unit is pretty happy about having Octopus mini-pillows.

Skully Glasses

I recently decided that I should make at least one project a week to keep improving my crafty skills, especially the sewing. So this week, I decided to make a glasses cover for my sunglasses, an idea from Sew What! Bags by Lexie Barnes. This is a great that gives general ideas and measurements for various types of bags-tote bags, small things, etc.

So I made this glasses case for my sunglasses:

That plaid lining is actually from my favorite pair of PJs that ripped over Christmas in a way that was too jagged to repair, so I decided to keep it to be harvested/re-purposed for small projects. It's a great way to get practice fabric, and in this case, it is so soft, it's perfect to protect glasses from getting scratched.

This was a super quick and easy project to make, but I think I mis-measured my sunglasses and therefore made the case a bit smaller than I would have liked by roughly half an inch. It was very cozy around the sunglasses.  But that's OK, that what these projects are for-to learn and improve and be able to adapt.  I think I will make another one soon and make it  bigger so it can have some wiggle room.  Other than that, I think it's cute and I like it.

Kitty Make-up Bag

After making this bag, I wanted to make one for our friend Debbie. As you may have already known from this post, she really likes kitties. It happened by pure luck/circumstance that I just so happened to have found some kitty fat quarters that were related to kitties, and really, these were just too adorable to pass up. So I made the same makeup bag again, following a pattern from a blog I had recently been following: So-Sew-Easy. (The previous bag, of course had been made from a pattern she made, too, but I forgot to link to it.)

 So-Sew-Easy has TONS of great advice and projects to complete, to make people better at sewing. So far, the make up bag is the only of her projects I have done, but I have my eye on some of the other things she's posted that I hope I can get around to soon. Anyway...

So here's the kitty bag I made about a week or two ago, What do you think?