Recycled Sweaters

Welcome to the first post of the new year! Happy 2011 to you all! 

 

Over the holidays I made an ugly sweater dress from ugly sweaters, for an ugly sweater party. That got me hooked sewing thrift store sweaters. Eventually I started buying the "nice" thrift store sweaters, ala Betz White. I have 100% natural fibers in solid colors with a few fun knitted designs on there. That rockin' hat (below) was the crowning jewel on the ugliest dress, ugliest sweater, ugliest Christmas attire known to woman-kind.

I made scarflettes using the U-Create tutorial as a guide. (This scarflette is made a synthetic fiber sweater.) Instead of using the entire torso of a sweater, I made two narrower scraflettes from the sleeves. My sister-in-law has the matching cream colored scarflette. I'm sure she has some kind of fabulous felt flower or rolled rosette on there by now. My blue vintage brooch is also from a thrift store.

Well, I liked sewing with the sweaters. Its like thrift store linen, but in the winter. =)

The next thing I made were a couple plain pillows from the main torso of the sweater.

(The quilt on my couch is a pattern by Toby Lischko called Mosaic Magic.)

The creamy white one pillow is the torso from the scarflettes sweater. The red sweater pillow is felted cashmere. The cool thing about buying the 100% wool fiber sweaters at the thrift store is that the ones I seem to be finding are there because the original owners accidentally shrank/felted them. Thank you, Ms Original Owner; you have totally saved me a step!

Ooooh- what did I make next??!!?!? Inquiring minds want to know. Well, that red sweater had some leftovers. I couldn't possibly just have felty cashmere-y leftovers! I decided to make the "WHAT? REALLY!" Punctuation Pillow. I kinda have a quirky sense of humor. I'm sure we all do in some capacity.

This Punctuation Pillow, with a ? and !, is only one total pillow. The red cashmere used to be sleeves. The grey lamb's wool is from the torso of one sweater. It measures approximately 13" x 18" & is stitched shut. The two punctuations are raw-edge appliqued to the sweater using a straight stitch. I ended up stitching them on by hand because I wasn't sure if the sewing machine would stretch the sweater/shapes since I have no stablizer/interfacing in the project. Oh, one other thing- I custom made the pillow forms. Its more fun to have "any shape I feel like" on the couch, rather than the standard square or bolster shapes.


Think you might need a Punctuation Pillow?!?! I added the hand-drawn (then scanned and traced in Illustrator) original characters to a little printable pdf for you. Click the image above or click HERE to get the template. The seam allowances are included, so you can use any applique method and any fabric type you prefer.

So now I have a mood couch. A snuggly-winter-sweater-mood-couch. Feeling inquisitive? Feeling assertive! Indecisive? Thrilled!

*If you make a Punctuation Pillow, I'd love to see it over in the ReannaLily Designs Flickr Pool.


If you've been following along this far and doing the mental math in your head, you'll know I have 1/2 a grey sweater left. Ooooh.... what will be next? Who knows. Time will tell.

Recycled Sweaters

Hey, I'm still here!

The random post of all things random.


Hey, the internet has not yet been switched off. In fact, right now its just about the only thing to do while the packers sweep through our home with the fabulous brown boxes. Packers are great, right?

Those two above pictures are my beloved sewing room, sans fabric which has already been delivered to the new headquarters in Kansas. We took a uHaul up last weekend, just to be sure.

So what the heck have I been doing on the computer? I cleaned up my website a tiny bit. Did you see the recently added TimeLine O'Jen on the About Me page? I also added these flashy new page headers to each page. The blog makes the inserted images awfully small. Here, I'll link it for you so you can see it in action, full size.

AND I thought I'd do a little more practicing in Illustrator. I took an "old" scanned digital scrapbook doodle from my own files and turned it into a vector drawing.

The madness didn't stop there. I decided I needed flower frame for my collection.


Then I went through a few more scanned-in doodles to create another frame using the different brushes in Illustrator.

I've just got to keep on practicing. And when I'm not on the computer, I'm going over my presentation for Friday's school house. Very exciting times, my friends! Ok, looks like today they really will be packing up the desktop computer... Adios, peeps. 'til we meet again!

Hey, I'm still here!

Toot Toot.

I'd like to take a moment from our regularly scheduled sewing and quilting blog to toot my own tiny horn. I entered a Logo Design contest for a local club and I won! Its a military spouses group, hence the yellow ribbon. I personally like that where the letters "ASC" are, you can remove those and use the logo for all sorts of name tags or invitations. So there ya have it. My design is now the official logo for the club. toot toot.

Toot Toot.

The Yellow Napkin

I went thriftin' today! Man, I love thriftin. ...especially when I find linens and table linens. Today I scored a lonely little yellow framed linen napkin that needed a little love.

First, I drew up a little flower to embroider on the corner. This napkin told me it needed a flower, and who was I to argue?

I took the time to draft up that flower in illustrator for you, in case you were diggin it and wanted to put it on something of your own. Find the pdf here. You can also find it on The Patterns link of my ReannaLily Designs website. The flower fits in a 6" x 6" square. I do think you can use the "scaling" feature on your printer to make the flower any size you want, though.

Now, I've got this great linen napkin with a smokin black line flower on it... I was absolutely inspired to make a bag similar to the one on Sew Mama Sew- its a tutorial by Jennifer Ladd. Mine is constructed differently and has different handles, but the shape is the same so I thought I'd mention it.

Hum... that's mostly me and my fence. Here's a better one. What can I say, its a small clutch.

I didn't put any pockets in this recycled wonder. I figure, its a clutch. Grab it, throw the keys, wallet and cell in there and you probably don't need any extra pockets. I did use a magnet clasp closure though. I think I might be turning into a magnet clasp junkie! I suppose there are worse kinds of junkies, right? The bag is lined with mottled yellow fabric and uses sew-in, crazy-stiff interfacing. (found the interfacing in the Wal*Mart remnant bin!) It holds the shape quite nicely.

So that's all the news worth shouting today. Enjoy. ~jen~

If you make it, feel free to share it in the ReannaLily Designs Flickr pool.

The Yellow Napkin

Goals and Milestones

Ok, I've got some insane, lofty, long-term goals. One of them is to learn Illustrator. AND with a big fat huge-a-monga ThankYou to Kim over at True-Up, I now have a great resource to aid in achieving this goal. She posted tutorials by Eliane Polvinen. Holy smokes, Ms. Polvinen explains things so well and the tutorials are so easy to follow along. I'm only at the beginning of my journey, but I cannot wait to keep going. {It totally makes me want to go back to college for a MFA.} So here's the first *neato* thing I made:

It looks easy, right? Look- a shirt. You could draw this up right now with a pen in about two seconds, but to have it look "right" in Illustrator it takes a handful of tutorials. Small potatoes, I know. -But I'm learning-

I don't know if I'll have the shirt made up/printed. It would be fun to wear around Spring Market in Pittsburgh, though. And I did do the mock-up in brown because I love to wear brown. We shall see.

I'm stoked that I'm working towards my lofty, insane goals. Thanks for following along. Who knows what I'll draw up next?? ~jen~

Goals and Milestones