upcycling: dress to spring skirt

Hi there! Last week I didn’t post because I started to work in one of the most charged weeks of the academic year; evaluation week. So, here’s my spring upcycling for you.

Clothes long for soooo many years. When I was a teenager, I had a blue dress I loved. It was dark blue with thin bib suspenders and a pocket with white designs at the chest, the only thing that broke the monotonous blue. It was one of these comfy clothes that I wore no more due to aging, so I decided to turn it into a skirt.

First step: cutting the dress. This step made me feel sad, but I don’t regret doing it. Sometimes I’m afraid of upcycling, but eventually you love the final result, with more or less work. So, I put my dress on but at as a skirt, so I knew where to cut and sew the elastic band. It turned to be very easy to sew, though I’m not an experienced sewer.

Second step: to put some garment on. Once the skirt was sewn, I could have wore it, but I wanted to break this blue and add a touch of colour. I was attending an embroidery course, so I thought, after looking at all those old-fashioned flowers designs, thath I would do some butterflies. I finally found some that I loved and copied the design in silk paper. As I was doing it, all I was thinking was all the job left (I’m a little lazy), and the light bulb in my head turned on. I decided to copy the butterflies in felt, rather than embroider them directly. Sew them into the skirt, kind of ‘leaving / flying’ butterflies, and embroidered the border. Also embroidered the body and head.

One thing I haven’t planned but that I love, is the trimming I added at the bottom. Just opened my trim’s drawer, saw the colors and love it.

Leave you the photos and hope you’ve liked it.

March Photo-a-day challenge – 1st week

As promised, a follow-up to my first week in the daily photo challenge. I have to say it’s becoming hard to find the inspiration, hope next week will be easier. Sometimes you just have no idea what to shot. It’s a hard list.

improvised bag

Some time ago it was the birthday of a loved friend, and we bought her some books. And despite she already knew what it was (we prefer to buy something really needed rather than to buy some junk), we wanted to maintein the gift format or the surprise moment. We think that this world can’t go on like this, so we have been adopting some degrowth habits (rather than sustainables), and gifts aren’t gonna be excluded. We used to do like everyone does, we wrapped the gift and put on a loop (we haven’t still managed to get rid of it), but it really hurts to see the amount of wasted paper; gift paper is rarely kept.It will luckily end up in the recycling bin, but it means a huge waste of energy, so I improvised a useful wrap (I hope it will be useful in summer).

Thought and done! it took hardly an hour. I took some blue fabric for the inside and Ikea fabric for the outside(really improvised, no pattern used), and I remembered the great American invention: do your own fabric tape. So I cut a long and narrow piece of fabric, folded it in 4 parts and ironed it. Once ironed it’s really easy to sew the borders. The handle was placed between the inside and the outside, and the inside part was a little lower than the outside ‘coz I didn’t want it to be seen.

It’s no big deal, it’s a small handbag, but it’s cute and funny.

waka-waka

Not long ago we got a call from our friends telling us they were getting married two weeks later… what????? It wasn’t actually a big surprise, we already knew they were gonna marry, but the thing that it was going to be just 2 weeks from that day… As we don’t have a job (damned recession!) and thus, no much money, it was obvious that the gift was gonna be handcrafted and with all our love. Somewhere I had a pattern for a wedding, really nice and cute, but it didn’t fit with their personnalities.

One day I found in Pinterest a x-stitch pattern that jakki.adams did for the wedding of her friends; Mr. and Mrs. Pacman surrounded by the ghosts. It was perfect!! but there was no pattern, so I had to search for one. The letters were improvised drawing in a patterned notebook. The idea of writting their nicknames instead of their real names was J’s, and I really loved it (so did they).

dinosaur

This extinct animal has been the first amigurumi I’ve made. At first I thought this would be crazy to try because I only knew the basic stitches (chain, single and double crochet), but I found a tutorial in Youtube (1, 2, 3) in Spanish, my mothertongue, a perfect step-by-step explanation. The girl in the video has way more expertise than I have, and had to pause it several times, but I had no problems at all. In the tutorial eyes are crocheted. In the first collage you can see how they looked, but they seemed pretty coarse and changed them for the plastic eyes in the second one. Photos link to my flickr gallery, where you may find them bigger.

crocheted eyes

plastic eyes

It has still no name, but he’s left us and gone living with a loving family, and he’s gonna take care of AJ while he’s sleeping =)

March photo challenge

The best things are always the ones you haven’t planned, and I hope this to be true because this morning, when I openned my blog just to go on translating my second post, I found somebody liked my first one. So go on checking who this person had been (just for fun, my first visitor and my first like), I went to her blog and read her latest posts, and from the beginning the last one caught my eye. It’s about a photo challenge she has taken in february, so I went down looking for her other photo challenges’ posts. I have always liked this photo challenge posts, but I never thought of taking one of them, first of all, because I didn’t had a blog to post them, but also because I was afraid of showing myself too much. Maybe it’s time to take a step forward and try the march one she proposes from fatmumslim. I’ve read the rules, but I don’t even know if I had to inscribe myself in her blog or not. Let’s do it just for fun =)

I think I will post them weekly here but daily on my flickr and facebook account. I don’t want the blog to be full, I think it’s a way to make it grow, but that’s crazy to fill it just with photos when it’s meant to be to show things made with needles.

A new beginning

Some time ago I decided to start a blog to share all the stuff I’m making, but I opened it, wrote a post, it was all so well linked… but I left it because I enjoyed much more doing things than doing blogging job – taking and uploading photos and writing posts -. It seems that, once the days become longer, when the light takes more hours of the day, the laziness goes away.

On my first post I’d like to show my first steps. As you may see in my future posts, I’m one of those people who likes to learn a lot of new things but I’m not pretty constant. I didn’t knew even how to crochet a stitch! but now I love it and here I am, learning this and that. I’ve got nobody close to teach me -I’m away from my family-, so I learn from tutorials and videos on the web.

As I was figuring out how I wanted my blog to be, I came across pinterest, and thus, upcycling. I was fascinated by the idea of bringing old things to a new life, and that’s what I made with this tee-shirt (a gift from my French friends) that did no longer fit me (I’m not any more in the age of showing my belly). I didn’t want to get rid of it, but neither did I want to keep it in my closet as a souvenir, so I decided to make it a pillow case.

I also made this seat cover from the curtains’ leftovers (enoug to cover my 4 chairs).

This necklace was an attempt to make the necklaces I had seen on the web pulling balls inside a stocking. I’ll have to improve it.

And the last thing for this post is my first granny square.