Dropped Ceiling Remedy

When I first moved into my house, one of the items that I hoped to remedy was a dropped acoustic panel ceiling in the kitchen. You are familiar with these, I'm sure. If you work in a warehouse. Really, these things have no place in residences. They hold dust and grime, and in kitchens you get the bonus of grease. Which of course helps the dust and grime to adhere to the panels! So, one of my first projects was to get rid of this disaster.

I assumed that I would just pull down the dropped ceiling and then either a) repair whatever it was hiding, or b) clear up the mess and hire someone to come put up a dry wall dropped ceiling. Unfortunately, what I found when I lifted the panels made both of these options impossible. The dropped ceiling was concealing the fact that all the wiring and plumbing for the upstairs was in between the original and dropped ceiling.


Pretty grim, right? But I still wanted to get rid of those 2x4 acoustic panels. They just looked so...industrial. So, I searched for options for dropped ceilings. What I found was American Tin Ceiling. American Tin Ceiling is a company that manufactures both reproduction tin ceilings, the kind you nail up to a 2x4 framework, as well as two easier options: a snap-lock nail up ceiling that will attach directly to drywall, as well as a panel made to replace the acoustic tiles in drop-in ceilings. SCORE! So, I called to place my order.

One of the greatest things about this company's product is that they paint all the panels for you. And not only do they paint them, they use a technique called "powder coating." What that means is the panels are pained like your appliances (refrigerator, washer and dryer), the paint is actually baked on to the panels. Which means, you can remove them and wash them if necessary. A great option, especially for those panels that sit above the stove. In fact, the paint finish is so sturdy, the panels can also be used for back splashes (my next project!).

If you decide to undertake a project like this, make sure that you also buy 2 or more cans of spray paint from the company. They sell paint that matches the panels, because you will need to paint the suspended frame to match the panels.

The first step in this project is to remove the old acoustic panels. But don't throw them away! You are going to use them later.

You then need to turn the 2x4 foot grid into a 2x2 foot grid. You can pick up a snap-in spanner from any hardware store that sells dropped ceiling supplies. Be sure you do your homework and compare prices, though. I got my spanners for 32 cents at Lowe's, but Home Despot was asking 1.23. That is four times as much! Snap the spanners into the frame.


When you reach the edges, you will need to cut the spanners if your ceiling does not end evenly. I used tin snips, although my dad pointed out that I had three hacksaws in the basement (at least two of which I pilfered from his tool bench). He also added that sometimes he suspected that I was a little 'tarded. I thought he could have left that last part off.

Once you have your spanners up, you can begin dropping the tin panels in. You will probably notice that once you replace those squishy acoustic panels with tin, that it gets a little echo-y in the room. This is where those old panels come in. Break them in half and tuck them into the ceiling on top of the tin panels. This will help the panels not only lie flat, but also muffle some of the sound.


When you get to the edges, you will have to trim your panels as well. I used just plain tin snips, and ended up with the blister to prove it. American Tin Ceiling sells cutters, and if I ever do a project like this, I will go ahead and spend the money and get it. Mainly because not only did I get a blister, the snips also bend the panels a bit as you cut and you may have to tap them back flat with a rubber mallet. Now if you have a family like mine, your uncle that owns a metal fabricating shop will take one look at your lovely finished ceiling and say "You cut these panels by hand?? I think your dad might be right. You are a little 'tarded. You could have brought them to the shop and I would have cut them on the shear for you! It would have taken 15 seconds! Dummy."


I decided that I also wanted to add crown molding, since the elaborate ceiling seemed to "need something." For this you will need help. Mainly because you need about six hands to hold the lengths of molding while someone nails it. Fortunately, my dad and uncle took pity on their mildly 'tarded relative and offered to help.


One thing that is often difficult if you don't have a lot of expensive equipment is mitering the edges of the molding so it meets cleanly.


Even with the equipment, it's still not that easy. Fortunately, there are ways to get around this. You can add something called "corner blocks." If you have a perfectly square room, all you will need are 4 "inside corner" blocks. I, on the other hand, had both inside and outside corners. You simply nail these up over the corners, then you can cut the end of the molding perfectly flat to meet with the block, rather than trying to miter the corners. Keep in mind that your other uncle who is a contractor and restores old houses will most likely ridicule you and your father for your inability to miter edges, and imply that your 'tardedness may have been passed along the paternal line.


Final step, patch your nail holes and run a bead of paintable caulk along the bottom of the molding to fill the seam between the molding and the wall. Now you are ready to paint! Here is the finished product:

Also, if there is any advice that I can give regarding painting, it is do not be afraid of dark colors in small rooms. In the kitchen, the hot-white of the ceiling helps open up the space, even though the walls are actually much darker than they appear in the photos.


The single color of the walls, trim and baseboards also helps disguise the fact that over the years this kitchen has been plastered, paneled, and g0d-knows-what else to disguise some seriously damaged walls. By going "mono-chromatic" it helps smooth out all those varied surfaces, and class up the joint a bit.

Oh, and that big painting of the wine bottle? 5 bucks at Garden Ridge.

Fixing the Stupid

This is my house:


I bought my house in 2004 intending to renovate it. Unfortunately, a lot of the renovations have been put off in favor of major, if not cosmetic, projects. Since I have moved in, the plumbing stack has been replaced, necessitating the rebuilding of a bathroom wall; we have completely reconstructed the structural support of the front porch; my brother and I installed the privacy fence; new windows were put in the dining room; and a new roof and gutters were put on. As you can see from the photo above, the second floor of my house is essentially a series of dormers, and with all those peaks, that roof was NOT cheap to put on.

Since restoration has been tabled in favor of reconstruction, a lot of what I have done to the interior of the house has been temporary fixes rather than the final restoration that I would like to do. The house was built in 1920, and still has the original butler's pantry, woodwork (although it has been painted), and even some of the original windows. Because of this, I would like to be "true" to the era of the house in the renovation that I do, and not just replace everything with white tile and stainless steel. (The couple that live around the corner from me even restored their house's summer kitchen...a little brick building connected to the back of the house by a breezeway. I love them and hate them for their perfection all at the same time. Their house is fantastic. They even sanded and restored the original swing-out storm windows.)

But, over the last 88 years of this home's life, not every owner has had the same attitude about conservation that I do, and a lot of what I have had to do in the house is what I like to think of as "Fixing the Stupid."

One of the stupidest things in the house is the way that the upstairs bathroom was built. I know that it was added sometime after 1960, because I have met the daughter of the family that owned the house before that time, and there was no upstairs bath. Apparently, the front porch also extended all the way around the corner of the house, and met the back porch, making a huge veranda, and some numbskull decided it would be a FANTASTIC idea to just rip that the hell off. If I ever meet the person that did that, I'm going to hit them with a hammer. The claw side.

But, the level of stupidity involved in deciding to tear 3/4 of a beautiful porch off the house is similar in scale to the stupidity involved in building the upstairs bathroom, so I suspect it was the same person.

Because the upstairs is essentially an over-sized attic (even though I do actually have an attic, that I can crawl into through a tiny hole in my bedroom ceiling), many of the walls are sloped, including one of the bathroom walls. One of the four bathroom walls. But apparently, the person who put the bathroom up there thought that it would be a fantastic idea to put the bathtub under the sloped part of the wall.

This means that if you are anything over 4 feet tall, you constantly thwack your head on the wall reaching for the shampoo.

Oh, and this is what the shower curtain rod looked like when I moved in:


Now, eventually this entire bathroom is going to get torn up and the bathtub is going to be moved to the other end of the room, where the ceiling is not sloped, and you would have to be 9 feet tall to hit your head on it. Instead, the toilet will go under the highest part of the peak, and the sloped part will be enclosed to become a linen closet, so I didn't want to do anything drastic in fixing the bathroom, but that curtain HAD to be fixed, because clearly a man had come up with this set-up. I can almost hear the train of thought "It's ok that the shower curtain only extends half way down the tub, I'll just stand so my body blocks the water from the shower...the floor will only get slightly wet that way..."

Well, an only slightly wet floor was not ok with me, and I needed a shower curtain that fully blocked the spray of the water. After racking my brain trying to figure out how to create a sloped shower rod...sewing a curtain to fit....how would I keep it from sliding....I came up with a simple solution.

Forget trying to alter a shower rod and curtain, just find a way to hang a standard one. I just needed a "stop" for the other end. But how to make that something attractive and not just some chunk of 2x4 screwed into the wall?


Easy enough...I went to the hardware store and in the trim aisle found a variety of bits and pieces of trim for windows, doors, stairs, just about anything your could imagine. I just played around stacking different pieces on top of one another until I came up with something that I liked. This is two pieces of trim, both ready-made and readily available in any big lumber store. The bottom piece is floorboard (attached upside down), and the top piece is a piece of door and window trim.


I painted both white with leftovers from the wall/bathroom repair downstairs. I then used some liquid nails and two screws to attach the larger piece to the wall. I used another spot of liquid nails and four finish nails to attach the square piece to hide the screws. I used a nail-set drive the finish nails below the surface level of the wood, then four dots of spackle and some touch-up paint and....voila:


A shower curtain that extends the full extent of the bathtub. Problem solved. The stupid has been fixed. And this will more than suffice until the bathroom can be fully remodelled and the bathtub relocated.

The Ugly-Suit

So my neice...

Every now and then, when she visits, she likes to "shop the stash." Normally, that is fine with me. I give her the box where I keep the remnants from other projects and she just plays for a while.

But not this time. This time she managed to drag out from the pile of knits the UGLIEST FABRIC IN THE ENTIRE WORLD and announce "This! This, Aunt Missy! I want you to make me something out of this! As my grandmother would say, "That kid...all her taste is in her mouth."

I don't even know where the fabric came from. I think that some company I order fabric from must have put it in a shipment just to get rid of it, knowing full-well that I wouldn't spend the money to send it back ;). The photos truly do not do it justice because not only is it turquoise AND leopard print, it is also COVERED with gold glitter. I had to wash it three times before the glitter stopped coming off on everything it touched. Amazingly, I had a turquoise knit that I had picked up on the bargain table at Hancock's intending to use it for muslins, but it just so happened that it perfectly matched the turquoise in the leopard print monstrosity. It's also shiny, so she adored it on sight.

So, I decided to make for her New Look 6762. She is stuck between girls sizes and misses' sizes, so she is a little tough to fit. Her measurements are 32-28-35. Based on the pattern sizing, it indicates an XS in the shirt and an S in the pants. However, the finished garment measurments indicate that there is zero ease in the shirt, and only about one inch of ease in the pant at the hips. Since the quickest route to "Prosti-Tot" would be to sew a skin-tight, sparkly, leopard-print shirt for my 11-year-old neice, I opted for sewing both items one size larger than indicated. In fact, with the stretch in both the shirt and the pants, I can actually get into them. NOT that I would take any photos of THAT...but hopefully that means that they won't be too revealing on a little girl. I also changed the sleeve length to 3/4 sleeves, since it is the dead of winter, so no reason to make short-sleeve t-shirts.

In the process of constructing the shirts, I found two issues: one, the shoulder darts make pointy little shoulders. Not that Sadie cares. she's 11. And she wears sparkly turquoise leopard print shirts. Pointy shoulders aren't even on her radar! However, if I ever make one for myself, I'll be redrafting the sleeves to remove the dart. The second issue is that the notches on the neckband don't properly correspond to the notches on the neckline of the shirt. So just ignore them. I attached the neckband by quartering it and easing it the way I would any other t-shirt binding. The pants went together with no problems at all.


Overall, I'm very pleased with the way the shirt and pants turned out. I initially bought the pattern as a way to use up knit "leftovers" and the shirt certainly fills that bill nicely! I even made a second version of the shirt with some leftovers from the pants and a shirt I made earlier this year.

After completing the outfit, I folded it up and took the outfit over to my Aunt's house where we were all meeitng for a big family dinner. When I got there, I took Sadie into the bathroom to try the outfit on and the pants were WAAAY too long, which was frustrating, because I had called my mother on the Thursday beforeand asked her to measure Sadie's inseam for me.

On Thursday night my mother calls me and says "Her inseam is 34 inches." I told her "That can't be right, Mom. 34 inches is Jeremy's inseam. That's a MAN's inseam." So my mother gets frustrated and argues with me and says "Well, I measured it twice, and that is her inseam, and she's very tall, so there."

I assumed, OK, she misundersood..she didn't measure her inseam...she measured the outside of her leg, from the waist. So rather than argue with my mother anymore, I just measured 34 inches down the outside of the leg, and hemmed the pants.

Well, needless to say, that was totally wrong, and the pants were too long.

When Sadie was trying them on, I called my mother into the bathroom and said "Mom, Sadie's inseam is NOT 34 inches...point to me where you measured her inseam from!" She points to where Sadie's legs meet, which of course is correct.

I look at my mother and said "You measured from the wrong end of the measuring tape, didn't you?"

She just looks at me and says "You want a glass of wine?"

So, the next day I had a chance to get the pants hemmed...to the proper length this time...and took them over to my grandmother's house, where Sadie and y nephew were visiting.

I was finally able to get a couple photos of Sadie in her outfit. She loved it, and had to, of course, wear it for the rest of the day.

McCall 5468 and New Look 6648

This past weekend, I completed two projects, McCall 5468 and New Look 6648. Both were fairly heavily altered from their original states.

First, McCall 5468. This was a new pattern for me.


I was originally attracted to the sort of glam retro vibe the pattern had going on, but ended up doing the "franken-dress" thing because I wasn't entireley happy with either version of it. I liked the sleeves and skirt length of view A:


But didn't want the cross-over front, mainly because I already had so many wrap dresses, and this really didn't set it apart from those wrap dresses. Instead, I wanted a scoop neckline, but the scoop neck had these odd batty sleeves, with armscyes that went almost all the way to the waistline. I would feel like a flying squirrel in that!!

So, I redrafted the front of the dress by tracing the sides and armscyes of view A, and the neckline of view D. Also, after reading the reviews of the dress on PR, I decided to raise the neckline and add a binding, since most of the other reviewers had had issues with the depth of the scoop neck. The pattern instructions also had the neckline constructed with a simple hem, with I felt really didn't give a very finished look. Hence, the binding.


I also left off the back tie because I felt it looked a little too twee for a 36-year-old. Now, if I were 35, maybe....but really, what adult woman wants a dress with a bow above her butt? Nothing against those of you who may want that, but I am nothing if not opinionated. Plus, I made it, so I can leave off anything I want. To make up for the fact that I left off the back tie, I cut the waist band smaller than the pattern indicated.

In fact, I cut the whole pattern smaller than indicated. It was hard to decide what size to sew because there is so much ease in the pattern. According to my measurements, I am exactly inbetween a 16 an an 18, so I normally cut a 16 because the "Big 4" run just that...BIG. But, according to the pattern, the finished garment measurements were 44 inches at the bustline for a 16, and that is just too much ease in my opinion for a knit, so I cut a 14. The dress is still large, the shoulders are wider than they should be, you can see in the photo above that the shoulder seams droop off the dress form. If I make it again, I will get the other pattern envelope and use the 12, and make an attempt at an full bust adjustment and also lengthen the bodice. It's not quite short enough to be an empire waist, and not quite long enough to hit at the natural waist.

I also changed how the skirt was gathered. After my "how many months are you?" experience with my last gathered skirt (Simplicity 3678) I shifted the bulk of the gathering away from the center of the skirt.


It did not result in the front being entirely flat, but much better than previous attempts. I think that if I make the dress again, lengthen the bodice, and make the waist smaller yet, that it will look much better.


Overall, I am not as "wowed" by the dress on, as I was by the concept of the dress. I like it better on other people. But that in part may be my own fault and the fact that I cobbled together different pieces, drafted a new neckline, added a binding, moved the gathers, left off pieces, possibly used the wrong size....

But I think that the main issue is that I am a bit bottom-heavy and the gathered skirt does nothing to help mask that, where an a-line or gored skirt, as Clinton and Stacy would say, skims the body and hides any multitude of sins. I have made other dresses that really do flatter much more than this one. Although after reading the positive comments on PR, I may have to rethink...perhaps I just know how I WANT it to look, and to those people who aren't party to the "image in my head," the dress is perfectly fine!!


When I think about it and really dissect what initially attracted me to the dress, it was the sleeves with the gathered wrists. And I can draft those sleeves onto any number of other dresses that I have found that work better for my body. So, when you see a review for Vogue 8379 with long sleeves gathered at the wrist, you will know that I have been slicing and dicing patterns!!


The second project that I finished over the weekend was New Look 6648. I have made this pattern before, and I quite like it. It is a great shirt with simple lines that is perfect for "over the top" fabrics, because there is no aspect of the shirt itself that competes for attention. It is just a simple top with kimono sleeves and a shirred waist.


However, there is one issue that is bothersome. As drafted, the neckline is huge, and you are constantly tucking away bra straps. Here is the original version. You can see how broad the neckline is:


Here is my new version, in a wild leopard print that I couldn't pass up at Hancock's:


I made the neckline smaller...I would say that I redrafted it, but that would be doing the word "redrafting" a disservice. I freehanded it while I was cutting the pattern out. Fortunately I didn't gank it up too bad. I used the existing pattern for the neckline binding , but just cut it shorter. I also did not use their instructions for attaching it, but folded it in half, and sewed it on like a standard binding.


The only downside to the shirt is that even with the new neckline, you still have to wear a cami underneath, because you can see straight in the arms if you raise them. The sleeves are huge! But, the shirt is super-comfy, and like wearing your pajamas.


It also only takes about an hour to cut out and sew...really! It is so simple you won't believe it! Two seams, hem the sleeves, add the neck binding, and the waist and you are done!

My First Piece of Fabric

My friend Carolyn posted a blog that really inspired me to think about something that I have a tendency to do, and that is collect fabric, or fabric stashing.

I have enough fabric and patterns in the house that if I didn't buy anything but thread and buttons for the next year, I could probably happily sew at least three garments a month.

Yet I still buy more fabric. I just love it! The look, the feel, the vibrant colors. I can't leave it alone. I love the planning of projects...the imagining of what the fabric could be.

But really, I have a relatively small stash. There are a lot of sewers that have a significantly larger fabric collection than me. Also, I tend to purchase fabric that can be made into "everyday" clothing, and don't buy very high-end fabrics (well, there is that one piece of Liberty that I have hidden away...) because my sewing skills just aren't at the level yet that I can justify spending that much. For the most part, I spend $5.00 or less per yard, $10.00 is my self-imposed limit for something that I really want. I figure, once I get past $10.00 a yard, I am getting into the range of what I could purchase something for in the store.

Because of this, I tend to think of myself as a "stasher" and not a collecter. If I had more high-end fabric, or if it lived in the stash for longer periods of time, perhaps I would be a true collector. But I do understand collecting. I could easily become a collector. In fact, there may be a little bit of latent collector in me.

I "collected" my first piece of fabric long before I ever had my first sewing machine.

When I was in graduate school, all of my research was done in Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco...all places that produce wonderful textiles. Each season, I would find myself in the fabric shops and carpet shops wondering just what in the world I would do with such wonderful things.

One year, I finally gave in. I was in Damascus for some R&R after a hot, dusty, and beige season at an archaeological site in northeastern Syria. After three months of beige grass, beige dust, beige dirt, and wearing beige clothes it was overwhelming to see the colors and vibrancy of the wares in the shops of the Souk Hammdiyeh.

I was relating how overwhelming it was to my friend Sultan, who owned one of these vibrant, overcrowded shops, as I sat drinking tea on the tiny balcony overlooking the shopping street below. Sultan, ever the salesman, offered his help by pulling from a cabinet bolt after bolt of hand-loomed silk brocade...two-color, three-color, five-color, seven-color....with abstract designs, florals, turquiose with peacocks, oh, and here is Saladin on his way to Jerusalem....

I couldn't help myself. I finally asked...how much? $50.00...per meter. How much would I neeed? What did I want to make? Could I ever bring myself to cut into it? I finally gave in and purchased two meters.

That fabric stayed with me for many years. I carried it from one grim graduate student apartment to another. Ocassionally I would open the package and roll out the two meters and admire it..marvel at how if I looked at it this way it was gold, but if I looked at it this way it was red. Then I would roll it back up and put it away, knowing that I did not have the skill to do anything with it.

But I finally got tired of just looking at the fabric, year after year, and decided to do something about it. I was living in Champaign, Illinois at the time and found a woman there who made custom wedding dresses. I assumed that someone with the skill to make wedding dresses would know what to do with the silk.

I took the silk to her, and we talked about what could be done with it. We settled on a knee-length sheath, which she lined with a decadent gold silk that was pretty enough to be on the outside of a dress.

Here is the dress at New Years Eve two years ago:


So, I can understand the collector. I understand because I collected my first piece of fabric before I had even an inkling about what to do with it. It was another eight years after that dress was made before I even embarked on sewing a garment for myself. Sure, I sewed curtains and slipcovers...but never working with anything so decadent as $50.00 a meter silk. And it never crossed my mind that I might be able to take those skills at sewing curtains and pillows and slipcovers and actually apply that to making clothing for myself.

But now I am building skills every day, and as I learn more about how to fit my body properly, and finish garments more professionally, perhaps one day soon I can justify working with more high-end farics, and then...I will be a collector.

A New Way of Doing Things-For Me...

So the last week I haven't sewn a single thing. I have decided that to increase efficiency, I would cut a HUGE number of projects so I could just get down to some serious sewing.

So, in the past few days I have cut out the following projects:

The muslin for Vogue 8280. Now, admittedly I normally don't use muslins. I am incredibly lucky in that most patterns fit me with minimal alterations (if I would just remember to do flat measurements and cut the right size). I read on PR about people doing FBAs and sway back adjustments, and forward shoulder adjustments, and lowering bust points, and slash and pivot and I just shudder with fear. I could never figure all that out!!! I am incredibly fortunate that that my proportions, even when heavier, tend to fall within a single size. Which is not to say I don't make the occasional misstep...I make plenty of wadders!


But, back to Vogue 8280. After reading all the reviews on PR, I couldn't get a good handle on whether the pattern ran large, small, true to size, just that it could be a real booger. So, I decided since it was a straight skirt, and that needed to FIT, I would do a muslin. Fortunately, Yo Momma cleaned out her closets and bequeathed to me an entire trashbag full of old sheets that I can chop up and use for muslins.

I have a second muslin cut out (from I believe my old sheets from grade school!) is for a dress for my niece. I let her pick out fabric for a dress that she could wear to our wedding in February. She picked Butterick 4385, after a prolonged battle that involved me taking away the Vogue catalog, as well as McCalls because that Hillary Duff stuff is SKANKY.

She is a bit larger in the hips than the largest size on the pattern, so I put a little extra room in the side seams. I may also need to add more of a curve to the princess seams at the bust, because she is starting to get her boobies, oy vey. She picked out some cute fabrics, though. Pink and blue, and age appropriate. The pink and blue brocade is for the jacket and the band around the top of the dress, the blue is for the lining of the jacket, and the main part of the dress is a satin with a relatively low sheen.


I also got the fabric cut out for Vogue 8409. This is a pattern that is for both a knit and a woven, so I did flat pattern measurements before hacking into the fabric. No muslin, it's a simple dress, I can alter on the fly if I have to.


I am using a gray doubleknit from Fashion Fabrics Club, it was super-cheap, so I'm not too worried if I mess it up.


I also cut out a version of the Hot Patterns Wong-Sing-Jones Kimono Wrap Dress. I am making a version for a friend, but before I cut into her fabric, I want to learn how to put it together. That way if I mess it up, I mess up my own fabric.


For my "muslin", I am using a light grey knit for the main part of the dress and the trim will be in a black and grey print picked up from Fabric.com. For her version, the main part of the dress will be red, with the trim in heather grey.


And last but not least, I cut out McCall's 5468. I did make some changes to the pattern, though. I preferred the sleeve from View B, but the scoop neck from View D. But, if you look, the sleeve is set in very differently in B and D. So, if I wanted the scoop neck, I had to draft that onto the front pattern piece for View B. I also got rid of the ties, because that looked just a little too twee for me. Since I wouldn't have the tie to cinch the waist, I did flat pattern measurements and decided to cut a size 14.

After slicing and dicing the pattern, who knows if it will actually work out, so I decided that the fabric that I would cut it from would be my least favorite of my new acquisitions. If it works out, I'll cut another from fabric that I like better.


I also have Jeremy's coat to work on, but that involves about 400 hours of hand stitching to get the padstitching completed. I only work on that one a little at a time, because I don't want to get fatigued and screw it up, since it's about $150.00 of materials.

I still have some to cut out, but my back is screaming from cutting on the dining room table, so it's off to the sewing room for a while!

Keep Me Off the Interwebz!

I made a some great internet scores the past few days, but now I probably need to stay off the interwebz for a while!

The first thing that I got was a buttonholer for my Singer 401. It is super-cool, and even makes keyhole buttonholes. Not to mention, it came in a cool retro case.


My other scores were some awesome knits from Fashion Fabrics Club. They were having a $4.00 a yard sale and I snagged a few for fall dresses.




At least one will become McCall 5468 and I will probably make at least one of the "old standby" Vogue 8379.

I also got 6 yards of black jersey, because, well, you never know. I don't actually have a project in mind, but you never know. You always need black jersey. And I got two yards of swirly purple charmeuse.


The charmeuse will probably become Butterick 5284, if I manage to catch it on sale! Otherwise, I might grab the Hot Patterns Metropolitan Criterion Blouse.

I also need to figure out something to do with this hot mess I found in my stash:


There is only a yard and a half, so I I'm pretty limited. I'm seriously thinking about making a little batwing shirt for my niece, who loves all things sparkly and tacky. That kid...all her taste is in her mouth!

I also bought my first REAL vintage pattern. I saw this one online at Out of the Ashes and just could NOT pass it up! I have no idea when I'm going to make it, or where I would wear it, but dammit, I'm going to sew it up!