Sewing

Want to save big money with your sewing skills? Learn to mend.

August 24, 2010

A lot of people who are frugal newbies assume that buying fabric and sewing clothes basically from scratch is an uber-frugal practice, and that they haven’t really arrived until their family is wearing homemade clothing from head to toe. If you are one of these people, take heart! Sewing your own clothes is usually time-consuming [...]

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What to do with the cut-off part of cut-offs: Make a bag!

August 10, 2010

After I made Lisey’s pink Gap pants into cut-off shorts for her, I decided I wanted to make something out of the pant legs, since they were in fairly good shape below the ripped knee portions. I’ve made stuffed animal sleeping bags out of pant legs before, but this time I decided to make a [...]

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Oh, cut-offs! How I love you!

August 6, 2010

Sometimes when pants start to wear out, especially in the knee area, I like to make skirts (I make plain ones and I recently made a ruffle version). Cute though they are, skirts are definitely not the fastest way to reuse hole-y pants. No, if speed is the name of the game, cut-offs totally rock. [...]

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More Refashioning: Old Khakis = Ruffle Skirt

June 22, 2010

Can you tell it’s summertime? I’ve been using my sewing machine a lot more than usual because now that we’re on break from homeschooling, I actually have something approaching free time. Ahhh. I love summer (not so much the weather…just the break from school!). Anyways, I’ve been slowly working through my pile of clothes to [...]

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Refashioning: Looking past what’s on the hanger

June 17, 2010

Second-hand clothes shopping often requires a bit more creativity than new-clothes shopping does. Really, this is true with most any second-hand shopping…a lot of used things just need a little bit of fixing, updating, or customizing. If you can get used to looking past what you initially see and instead look at what the item [...]

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Come see what I made for Zoe!

June 8, 2010

This project has been a long time coming. Last fall sometime I spied a dress at Goodwill and it caught my eye because of the fish print (in case you’re new around here and aren’t aware of this, Zoe is completely and utterly obsessed with fish and really, with any animal that lives in the [...]