Filed under: Sewing
Now we come to today in the sewing saga that has put life on hold.
I have long meant to stop wearing boring bobby pins because they’re well, boring.
So today I made these flowers. Well, actually the little green and red one was yesterday and I cheated and used the hot glue gun because I wanted to make it fast enough to wear it to my friend’s piano concert at three. It took about 5 minutes with the hot glue.
The big pink flower at the top I did not make, but I’m thinking about taking it apart and doing something like what I did with the little one at the bottom with it.
This is the hot glued flower being worn to the concert.
This is the first flower that I sewed. It’s pinned in this picture and I’m choosing thread color.
This is the peach flower being sewn. You can see the thread color I chose in the lower right.
Messy, messy back.
And there they were: the first two flowers.
The peachish flower being worn.
And being worn another (better) way.
The green flower pinned and awaiting thread selection.
Green flower being sewn with the thread I chose in the lower right.
And the fake pearl in the center. . .
And then there were 3.
This one was a bit cheatey as I took apart a fake flower to get the plastic out of it and simply sewed it back together with a fake pearl in the center.
And that’s it for flowers. Well for today at least.
Filed under: Sewing
Lolita and Mismatch left a lot of scraps. So instead of finishing Lolita, I made something out of the scraps.
I pinned them together:
Sewed along the seems:
Turned it right side out:
Examined the shape:
Found some buttons and a charm and some yarn and waited to see what would happen.
Ragamuffin happened.
This is Ragamuffin.
Filed under: Sewing
Mismatch was a hit the next day. Friend carried him around and braided his tail instead of watching the video on Soviet Russia in Civ. Other friend slept. I watched it. Did you know that the Soviets used the movie “Oliver!” as propaganda that the West was a worse place than Soviet Russia?
Friend admitted that I actually had had a plan and knew what I was doing. HA.
Friend wants one.
Friend says I should go into the business.
I took it seriously.
Meet Lolita.
Lolita is a sheep. She has a velvet cheek and a bow-covered chin and flowers on her forehead.
This is Lolita’s head before it was put together.
Lolita’s ears are the same size.
Lolita’s eyes are pretty, old buttons.
This is Lolita about to be stuffed.
This is Lolita stuffed.
This is Lolita’s unfinished body.
Lolita might be going to a friend. But maybe not because I really like her.
All year, my Western Civ teacher has been reminding us about Mystery Day. It’s been on the calendar all year and in the weeks leading up to it she would say at the end of class “Don’t forget Mystery Day’s coming up! I wonder what it could be!” She’d even end emails to us in this fashion: “MYSTERY DAY!!!????!!!!???? NEXT WEEK!!!????!!!”
I got curious about it the day before. And I spent the night before wondering if it would be something really cool and historyish and then trying to figure out what that would be ideally or if it would be totally lame.
The day of, I think I was the only one in the grade who didn’t know. I think my brain refused to make the connection between people walking around with pillows and Mystery Day. Well, it had just never entered my mind that Mystery Day would be anything close to what it was. I kind of thought it would be like the day we got to handle the facsimile of the Canterbury Tales. What I didn’t expect, even up to the second I stepped into the room, was two sewing machines, about 40 yards of the weirdest fabrics on this planet and the next, and a bunch of boys from the period before mine desperately trying to pin St. Patrick’s Day themed fabrics into semblances of boxers.
Um.
What???
Wait, you weren’t kidding? You actually didn’t know?? My friend looks at me incredulously, wondering how on earth I manage to function if I miss things like this.
Well why on earth would I lie about not knowing what Mystery Day was? I really had no clue. I’d thought the pillows people were carrying around were either in celebration of something like “Bring Your Pillow to School Day” that only America would have and I would never know about or something Mr. Weisel’s class had done. I’m not quite sure why I connected pillows with math, but it made sense in my head.
So I come into this chaos of fabric and needles and thread completely unprepared and am stunned (for once) into silence and can do really nothing for the first 20 minutes of the period but try to take in the bandeau the girl behind me is attempting to make out of pink fabric that says “You Go Girl!” and “Rockstar!” and stuff all over it, the tie my friend is trying to make out of billiard-ball printed fabric, the loincloth the boy who fancies himself the coolest guy in the class is manufacturing out of monkey-adorned fake flannel, and my usually above-it-all friend cutting out a pattern for a cat pillow.
I found out later that even my above-it-all and shy boyfriend had made a pillow out of kiddy pirate-ship covered fabric.
Things got slightly more easy to process when my friend abandoned the cat out of apathy and because the sides “didn’t match up.”
But still.
I should have gotten out my phone and snapped some pictures of the chaos so people would actually believe me when I tried to recount it later.
Well, I didn’t quite know what to do. So I started making a stuffed animal, not really caring how it turned out. I don’t have a picture of what I did in civ class, but it was hastily done out of a need to do something.
I didn’t finish in class. I got the body and 2 sides of the head done.
My friend thought it looked like a four-legged octopus and enjoyed sticking her fingers in the legs and grabbing people’s faces. None of my friends could see how it was supposed to be a stuffed animal.
So in order to prove to them I knew what I was doing, I studied less for the chemistry test than I should have and finished it.
Meet Mismatch.
This is his head. His ears are different sizes. He has fake pearl buttons for eyes and a pirate ship on the side of his face.
That’s his head before he got stuffed.
This is Mismatch’s body. He has a velvet spine with more fake pearl buttons. Can you visualize the 4-legged octopus now?
These are Mismatch’s innards.
I ran out of real stuffing so I used scraps. My friend likes it better. She walked around all the next day just holding him.
This is Mismatch complete. He has a long tail for pulling.
Mismatch is looking at you quizzically.
This is Mismatch’s cousin, Mauvais. Mauvais is 2 years older than Mismatch. Mauvais is a turtle-cat and he has a long tail for pulling too.
And so it was that the sewing frenzy began.
