Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Sewing 101

Over the past few months, I have been slowly dipping my toes into the world of sewing. While creating placemat pillows and repairing dog toys have become common practice in our home, I decided it was time to step it up a notch and dreamt of creating pillows (from scratch) and one day, baby items. Plus, if I hope to make any children’s clothes in this lifetime, I better start practicing!


So I began to look around for an affordable sewing machine. I looked at Joann’s and Target at new ones, but the price tag always scared me off. Paying $200+ for a machine that I may quickly fall out of love with did not make sense. Next stop was to look at second hand stores, Craigslist, and Freecycle. This took quite a bit of patience. You never know when someone will drop off or list an unwanted (and working) machine. So waiting can take weeks or even months!

Finally, one Saturday morning when I checked in with my good friend Craig, I spotted a like new machine in a recent posting! Unfortunately, the price the seller was asking for was still out of my range. But, I decided to take a chance and email her an offer that I was happy with. Sadly, she declined. So I moved on with my search.


After a few days, I had another email from the sewing machine seller in my inbox. As it turns out she was willing to accept my offer and asked when we could meet. I was in pure joy! I scheduled a time when Mr. Moore and I could meet the seller to make the exchange. After all, you should never meet a stranger alone!

Over the next few days, I began to collect ideas, free online patterns, and even went to a local second hand store and found some fabric to get me started.

Once I had the machine in my little hands, I began to set up a nice little home for it:

my new Brother!

After dusting off my memories of home economics I began to thread my machine with what little thread I had from a tiny sewing kit purchased in college. While at the local second hand store, I had purchased 4 tan colored, cloth napkins in hope of making, you guessed it, pillows. They were my first experiment project. After running my finger tips over numerous times and wishing I had straight pins, here is what I ended up with:




Perfect? No. But a start? Yes. These little pillows gave me the confidence to make an “envelope” pillow case for an existing throw pillow on the couch that had seen better days, buttons and all:

Next on my sewing list? Larger rectangles! More pillows are on the horizon and so are a few cute bags. Maybe one day I will venture into making a few clothing pieces for myself. And someday down the road, I can begin to make all of the baby items I have seeing around.

Now I just have to get over the fear of drowning in the large pool of fabrics at Joann’s!

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