Tag Archives: thrifty-ness

the Valentine’s day skirt

Finally, something sewn! There has been a lot of knitting around here lately, which isn’t too strange considering that I’ve been without my sewing machine for months over the summer, only to play a repair waiting game with an airline, an insurance company, and a repair shop.

So, fed up with waiting, I did what any normal person would do. I finished this skirt by hand.

Eking every last centimeter out of this remnant. And yes, that makes me ridiculously proud!

The pink lining, the graphic ribbon, the silk organza, and the wool suiting.

Yeah, this skirt has been waiting for completion since sometime this spring. I started patternmaking around Halloween (I clearly remember my co-worker talking about the scant and tacky clothing she was planning to dress up in, and me drafting this pretty demure pencil-skirt. I pick pencil-skirts over scant and scandalous any day!). I posted about my muslin and the fitting changes back in December last year, and was really determined to finish the skirt for my Valentine’s Day date (John and I went to the Museum of Science and Industry in the morning. Then I went  straight to class. It was lovely). That obviously didn’t happen!

The Valentine’s Day thing seemed appropriate because of the rich pink silk that I lined the skirt with, and I got pretty close to finishing before it all came to a screeching halt. I really wanted this skirt to be full of lovely touches, so I’ve been taking my sweet time and doing things thoroughly and nice. I interfaced the waistband with organza; I bound raw lining edges with more organza to prevent the crazy fraying I knew would happen otherwise (I used the same silk as a lining for another skirt, and when I took a look at the inside for some reason, it was such a mess! Just silk-fuzz everywhere!); and I french-seamed all the lining seams I could.

Binding the edges of the silk used for the pocket and the lining with strips of bias organza. That should keep the silk from fraying, and I think really increase the durability and lifespan of the skirt.

I had sewn in the zipper already and was all set to attach the lining to the waistband when I realized I had closed up the wrong side of the lining. I had just messed up which side was supposed to be open when looking at the right side – and since the right side of the lining was facing my body, it wasn’t the same as the shell where the right side faces outwards. Ops! Undoing painstakingly made french seams on silk charmeuse? Yeah, it went in the waiting pile.

Where it stayed. I graduated. I went on a cross-country road-trip for several months. I moved back to Bergen and Norway. And I was without a sewing machine. And really missing my sewing.

The insides of the pockets are the same pink silk as the lining. So lovely to put my hands into!

So I redid my french seam, and attached the lining to the waistband. I used this black and white graphic ribbon in the transition, and I love the way it came out! I also used it at the bottom – it made sense to me in how I needed to sew this thing by hand. Look how narrow that hem is! On the one hand I’m a little perturbed – hems aren’t supposed to be that narrow – but on the other side, I think the flash of black and white and pink is pretty cool!

The waistband facing, contrast ribbon, and the lining. And the same at the hem.

And I love the pink charmeuse best of all. I adore putting ont the skirt and seeing all the pink just hiding cheekily! Oh, and happy Valentine’s day everyone!

using the fabric scraps

I can’t stand waste. More specifically, I can’t stand being wasteful.  I don’t know if the mild hoarding is the source, or the consequence of this aversion to throwing away anything that could possibly be useful, but here I am – constantly with drawers and boxes and surfaces covered in things that surely will be useful – somehow, sometime.

fabric scraps

Setting up in a new apartment always feels like a new start, so spurred on by that, I’ve come up with a way of making at least some of my hoarded materials turn useful. I’m sure I’m not the only one with scraps of fabric left over after sewing projects – too big to throw away (too beautiful!), but too small to be put to use in a garment. Some people make small things; pincushions, coin-purses, soft toys – but I mostly make garments, and these pieces aren’t even large enough for pockets. I finally realized the perfect use for these scraps was to make bias tape!

making bias tape

I make my bias tape by measuring the same amount (say, 3 inches) along two sides of a triangle – along the weft and the warp grain. Connecting those two points gives me the bias, and then I can just use my ruler to draw new diagonal marks. This works well on oddly shaped scrappy pieces, but I’ve found that my lines can get a little skewed after four or five repeats – best to double-check my lines every so often!

making bias tape

making bias tape

One trick to getting perfectly aligned seams when joining pieces is to make sure the short ends are at a 45 degree angle to the long ends, which they will be if they follow the grainlines to begin with. Sometimes it’s easier to trim the scrap piece of fabric first. The other trick is to mark the seam allowance, and offset the two pieces so that it’s the stitching line goes edge to edge on both layers.

self-made bias tapeIt’s kind of amazing how many yards of bias tape you can get out of a fat quarter sized scrap (or smaller!) of fabric.

I think I’ve been fooling myself with my mindset of “this can be useful somehow!”. Sure, most of the things we having lying in drawers and boxes can be useful, but are they useful to us – in the way that we use things? Like I mentioned, I don’t really sew or make small things, so smallish scraps of fabric don’t hold any value to me, at least not in how I craft. So while someone else might have found a million things to make with my scraps, I didn’t. By making these remnants into bias-tape, I’ve turned them into something I will actually use  – something that makes sense with the kinds of things I craft. And that is the whole point, isn’t it?

And what will I use my bias tape for? I took a workshop a while back where I learned lots of finishing techniques, like hong-kong hemming, bound seams, and decorative uses. Quilts can be finished with some home-made bias tape; use it for a decorative piping touch,  and my favorite, a really nice edge finishing from Tasia of sewaholic.

on granola, bread, and ‘taking what one has’

There is a saying in Norwegian that goes like this: “man tager hvad man haver” – one takes what one has. Though, if it’s a proper saying is perhaps debatable. The origin is from a book on housekeeping, published in the mid-1800s by one Hanna Olava Winsnes. She ran a large household, and her book covered everything from husbandry, butchering, and baking, to cooking soap and making candles. The line of “taking what one has” seems perfectly in line with her belief s in the importance of good planning, and making the best use of the available raw materials.

It is also a saying that, while perhaps not directly shaping my beliefs in sustainable consumption and deep desire to get good use out of what is in my hands, has certainly encouraged it – again and again.

In a more tangible way, it affects my cooking and baking. I find it much easier to make meals based on whatever I have lying around, and baking is the perfect place to use what I happen to have on hand. Bread and granola are two things I make on a regular basis, and where the ingredients differ with the contents of my cupboards.

This is what I had for bread-making one day:

3 cups of warm water
Packet of yeast, pre-proofed with ½ cup warm, sugery water
A dash of oil
A dash of salt
Whole and white flour
***
A couple of handfuls of oats
Handful of potato starch
Handful of wheat germ
A dash of milk

Other things that would work: seeds of any kind, such as sunflower seeds or flax seeds, uncooked brown rice (yes really!), flat beer.

I wouldn’t call this a bread recipe as much as a guide – kind of in the way that a lot of Elizabeth Zimmerman knitting patterns aren’t really patterns, but more so a hand to hold. While bread truly isn’t hard to make, there are a lot of variables in baking due to elevation, humidity, oven peculiarities, etc, so bread-making usually involves some trial and error before you figure out what works the best.

So! Proof the yeast, dump the water, oil and salt in a large mixing bowl. Dump the non-flour extras into the water, add whole wheat flour until the dough is like a thick soup. Add white flour and knead until the dough is firm and doesn’t stick any more.

Let rise in a warm-ish spot for 30-60 minutes, knead and place in flour-dusted bread-pans. Let rise again for 30-60 minutes, and bake for 40ish minutes at 400° F (200°C). The breads should slide out of the pans, if they don’t, let them bake a little longer.

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Similarly, granola bars are not hard to make. I find them particularly satisfying to whip up because they are much cheaper than buying them in the store, but also because they are so forgiving in terms of ingredients. They practically beg to make use of whatever you can find in your cupboards! I use this recipe on allrecipes.com, but my simplified version reads something like this: 1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk, 3 cups of oats, 3 ½ cups of other stuff.

This time around, this is what I had lying around:

3 cups oats
1 cup shredded coconut
1 cup sunflower seeds & honeycake
1 cup raisins
½ cup white chocolate chips

Other things that would work: nuts, flaxseeds, cranberries (dried or fresh), dried fruit, wheat germ.

Mix all the dry ingredients together, add the condensed milk. Spread out in a greased 9 X 13- ish inch pan, and bake for 20-25 min at 350° F (175 ° C).

Use what you have, and happy baking!

Baby blanket in progress

In my everlasting quest for frugality, especially in my crafting-life, there is hardly anything as satisfying as using up scraps of fabric. Of course, small pieces of fabric is the hardest to put to good use, but I’ve found that baby-blankets are excellent projects for scrap-usage. The summer before last, I made a baby-blanket for my then soon-to-be-born nephew:

Now I have another one in progress, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the color-combination is pretty much exactly the same as the last one? I think only one fabric is the same, but my stash does have a very consistent color story – I keep gravitating towards the same colors!

Unlike the first blanket, where I made the colored strips by fairly randomly sewing together pieces of fabric, I spent a lot more effort setting up a composition of colored blocks that I was happy with. I left the blanket-in-progress laying on the floor for several days, shifting pieces around every time I walked past, until I was happy with the rhythm and balance.

This blanket still has a graphic feel to it, but it’s more blocked off, and with fewer fabrics than the last one. The grey fabric is a lovely shiny linen, the two green tones some quilting weight cotton, and the mustard colored corduroy is precious left-over scraps from my mustard shorts.

I have the blanket about halfway sewn up, using strips of the blue patterned fabric to connect the colored blocks. I’ve been topstitching too, which I think makes for a nice and polished finish. I’m using the same ribbed jersey from the other baby blanket as the inner layers, but I’m thinking of machine-quilting this one, and quilting it a lot more than the first blanket. Now I just have to decide if I’ll match top-quilting to the green and orange blocks, or to the blue background!