Sunday School Craft - Joseph's Coat of Many Colors

This one is super easy.

You just need cardstock, scissors, tissue paper, and some glue sticks.

Cut up the tissue paper into little pieces.

Then, glue the pieces onto the coat.... 

That's it!

Template (taken from a Google search).

The End!

Refashioning: Updating and Deleting a Weird Hem-Line Stripe Trend

Remember this stripe trend from the 90s? It was that sort of nautical thing that Tommy Hilfiger made so popular. (This dress is Liz Claiborne if that tells you anything.) Anyways, I found this dress at Goodwill, and I really liked the thicker stripes, but those narrow ones at the bottom hem just looked really dated to me. Also, the length of the dress was about four inches below the knee--not a good length for me.

So, this is what I did to fix it.

I folded the unwanted striped area in half and pinned it.

This is a close up of the pinning. See how I pinned right along the black part?

This is the pin from the other side. I tried to make sure that all my pins followed along the black line on either side of the fold.

Here is a series of the said pins all along the black stripe that I wanted to keep.

As I sewed, I kept just to the left of the pins to make sure that none of the white peeked through on either side.

After sewing, I ironed the fold up.

And then I top-stitched the fold to keep everything from shifting underneath.

Here you can see my sewing and top-stitching from the back.

Then I cut off the excess of the fold.

( I realize that I could have just cut off the entire bottom hem of the dress and created a new hem, but this way I could keep the actual manufacturer's hem. Plus, I didn't want the dress to be too short. Plus, I liked the big, thick black stripe.)

And here is my completed dress! And you'd be none the wiser if I hadn't told you!

To me, it looks a lot more timeless now.

The End!

Alterations: Make Shoulders Smaller in a Shirt

This post isn't for everyone. If you have been blessed with shoulders and an hourglass frame, you need not read on.

This post is for me and the other Tinkerbells out there:

Small shoulders, big hips.

So, when you get a shirt that fits like the one below (shoulders that hang off your frame), you can do the following steps to fix it. 

This shirt is Tommy Hilfiger, so. . .I guess it was made for a rugby player?

First of all, cut off the sleeves by cutting into the bodice, not the sleeve. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, since you will be taking fabric away from the bodice shoulder anyway, you might as well cut into that part. Secondly, if you keep the original seam on the sleeve, it will add stability to the seam as you ease it back on. Also, since you are taking fabric away, the sleeves are going to be shorter, so leaving the seam on the sleeve will help to save as much length to the sleeve as possible.

After the sleeves were cut off, this is what I was left with. You will see that even with cutting the sleeve off, there is still excess fabric hanging over the shoulder and arm hole area.

Using my dress form as a guide, I cut a section off. Not too much, because I still needed some left as a seam. If you don't have a form, use another shirt that fits you as a guide.

The other sleeve.

And the other sleeve cut.

Then, I took the shirt off the form and folded it in half to make sure the arm holes matched. They were pretty much exactly the same.

All righty. So, another issue I ran into was getting the stripes to match back up. As you can see in the picture, I pinned both the top and bottom of each stripe to keep my machine from feeding the fabric in wrongly. I will say, when I was done, most of them matched up great, but one stripe in the back I had to redo a few times. For some reason the feed dogs really wanted to pull the bottom layer through faster on that one. . .But I finally got it!

The finished shirt. You can see it fits the form much better.

You're welcome, Tinkerbells of the World!

(. . .Apologies to the rugby players. . .)

The End

Chanel Inspired: Striped Sweater

Okay, so this is another one that's really loosely based on Chanel. Anyways, I've been seeing sweaters for fall and winter that have shorter sleeves than you'd expect. I'd been working on this sweater for about two weeks, off and on, whenever my husband and I watched T.V.  I made this sweater from the leftover yarn I still had after the "Baby Boom of '13" as I'm calling it. (Of the 250 people at my church, 10 women will have had babies this year. I made them all mother/baby hat sets, and I had a ton of leftover yarn. Hence, the sweater.)

Basically, I knitted five panels. Two sleeves, two large panels for the body, and one for the neck. Then, stitched them all together. 

(I did other things too, like tapering in the body panels at the top to avoid the shoulders hanging off, folding the "fabric" over to create tubular edges, and tapering the top hems of the sleeves so they hang at an angle.)

This sweater is super bulky, so I will definitely not travel with it! It takes up almost half my carry on!

I lifted the sleeve to show how I matched up the colors on the seams on the sides.

The End!

The Sherry Dress

My sister-in-law (and great friend!), Sherry, is having a miracle baby (whole other story). She asked if I would make her a dress. I am willingly ignorant about many things when it comes to having children, but I know a few things about maternity clothes: Pregnant women love the comfort but hate the style. Sherry is an awesome person, so it took me awhile to come up with her dress.

First, I asked her to give me a dress of hers that she liked. It was a purple tank top dress. She wanted a dress that she could wear to work, so the dress I would make would need sleeves. I laid the purple dress on the floor and traced the basic outline of it and then added sleeves to my pattern, but also made a sort of criss-cross front, because that is flattering to the female figure. Sherry has awesome shoulders, so I braided some strips of material and sewed them onto the shoulders. She also requested that I make it a maxi dress. Maxi dresses are automatically more comfortable than shorter dresses. If you are a woman, you understand why without my explaining...

I went to Walmart and found this really soft grey jersey fabric. The problem with it, though, was that it was kind of see-through, so I had to layer it. If you have ever worked with jersey, you can understand what a headache it is to try to sew several layers of it together. The advantage, though, is that now it's not see-through, so she can wear it confidently throughout the summer. Anyways, this is what I came up with:

Doesn't she look so cute? And she can wear it after she delivers, because I pleated the front of the skirt part instead of gathering it, so it will lay flat later on.

I love you, Sherry!

Ultimate Travel Multi-Wear Shirt

I had this idea in my head, and I had a few hours last Friday, so I made it. It is reversible and can be worn in any setting from super casual to very dressy. Why don't you scroll down and see?

I used these three shirts as my inspiration. I used the top of the back grey shirt, the bottom of the front grey shirt, and the split front of the pink one. I just laid the shirts down and cut around them instead of making a pattern, because I was too lazy to use paper:

I cut the same pattern in the striped grey and the nude underneath, except the nude I cut a bit longer, obviously. The front neckline is slightly lower than the back, but it is wearable backwards (you'll see what that means later).

It looked kinda frumpy on me the way I had it up there, so I cut a slit up the middle of the front, detailed the lower seams, and narrowed the grey part so the nude part would sort of ruffle underneath.

The back.

You can see how I detailed the lower side seams here. I added elastic to the grey part and tucked the nude part.

This is how the two seams hang together.

If you turn it inside out, you can wear it like this.

This is how the tucked sides hang from the other side.

This is how it looks if you wear it with the grey side out and the slit in the back.

You can wear it to work!

I guess the style now is to mix like patterns.

You can also wear the slit in the front with a jacket.

You can gather up the grey and tuck it in and pin it in the back and make a sort of mock-midriff shirt.

If you pull the two corners of the slit to the back and pin them like this, you can get the following look.

You can also simply tuck in the nude part and let the grey part hang out. (The skirt is one that I made that I will post soon, but I'm still tweaking a few things.)

You can tie the two corners together up high and do a 50s/80s look.

Or tie it low and get this one.

If you use a wide belt, you can pull the two corners to either side and get sort of an Asian look going.

Flip it inside out and add a white sweater for a conservative granny style.

Looks good with black lace too.

Add a belt and pull the bottom out in a bit of a non-obnoxious peplum.

Gatsby it up! (Pretend that I wasn't lazy and added my string of pearls.)

It's off the shoulder...but not really.

Add a fake collar.

I wore it this past weekend with the grey side out, slit in the back, and the top from my flash dance dress.

Another nice thing about it is, it's made of polyester and nylon materials, so you can wash it out in a sink and it will dry over night! Ta-da! Perfect for travel!

Thanks for reading!