If you aren't a member of www.Sew-Whats-New.com I'd highly recommend you go and visit and consider joining this virtual community for sewists and crafters alike. You will get great tutorials and links on a regular basis and get to see what other crafting enthusiasts are up to. Kind of like a facebook for sewists!
It's time to start thinking about the holidays and planning your gift-giving projects that you want to hand craft! If you don't have time to make all your own, check out my For Sale page and you might find something there that will fit the bill and still give the 'made with love' message!
I have to share my latest recycling project with you. One of my girls put an orange long-sleeved t-shirt in the goodwill pile and since it had a great sequined graphic on it, I decided to cut it out and save it to reuse on something else. Then I decided to cut the sleeves off to use as arm warmers on the chilly autumn days just around the corner. Since I still had a good-sized piece of the body left, I cut out an infant skirt and a long narrow piece to gather for adding a ruffle around the hemline - oops! I wasn't paying attention and only cut one of the lower skirt piece instead of two so there wasn't enough to gather it and what might have worked on a teen as a body-hugging mini-skirt wouldn't work for a 12-mo.-old! And I sewed the gathered ruffle at the top instead of the bottom (which turned out to be a good thing in the end!). So, I cut slits up the sides and added in triangular sections of fabric to give it a flippy tapered bottom. Here's what it looked like when I was done!!
So, the moral of the story is . . . just go with the flow, play around, and see what materializes by the time you are done! You might change your mind completely mid-stream or end up with something completely different than what you started out with, but when you're being creative and recycling or repurposing guess what? There are no rules!!!! And all those boring basic construction methods you learned (or are learning) WILL pay off as you branch out into developing your own designs! Have F-U-N!
