Dress Alteration

A few months ago, maybe mid-December, I went to JCPenney's to do some dress shopping.  I probably tried on 30 or so dresses because I went in with low expectations.  I was sure I was only going to be able to find something that needed some kind of alteration.  Well, I found three dresses that looked good on me and (probably) wouldn't need any alterations to make them work.  Unfortunately I only had the budget for two, so the one you see here is the one I didn't get.

Fast forward a month or so and I was at Penney's again. I decided to stop by the dress section and I found that third dress on clearance for $14.  By that time I had $14 in my budget for a new dress so I scooped it up.

While trying it on it felt like it was going to be long enough but the first time I wore it it felt just a little too short.  So I decided to lengthen it.  The original hem used that fancy stitch (I can never remember what it is called) that doesn't actually show the stitching and I don't remember how to do that and I didn't want to figure out how to do that plus everywhere else on the dress had a little black lining, so I decided to finish the hem with a similar black lining.  And it was easy.  Here's what I did.

Step 1 - Take out the hem.

Step 2 - Do some measuring. I measured the width of the black lining on the other parts of the dress (about 1/4 inch) and of the stitching at the hem (also about 1/4 inch).  This led me to believe that I would need at least a full inch of fabric for my lining: 1/4 inch on each side to match the lining and hide the stitching + 1/4 inch on each side for a seam allowance.

Side note: I actually used about 1 1/4 inch fabric just to be sure.

Step 3 - Cut and iron the fabric.  Once I had a long strip of black fabric, long enough to go all the way around the bottom of the dress, I ironed it.  If you are a talented enough sewer, you could probably skip all or part of this step but I'm going to say what I did even if it wasn't necessary.  I started by ironing the strip in half width ways.  After that, I folded the outer sides into my new crease and folded them down.  That is all.

Step 4 - Pin and sew.  I started by laying the black fabric so that the ends that were sewn to the middle were on top.  I then placed my dress hem on top - right side up (this means the dress was inside out and the inside of the dress was toward the black fabric's ends).  Then I pinned.  Then I sewed.  To finish the ends together I did it kind of like I do the binding on a quilt - when I got close, I sewed the two ends together so the black strip was one big circle, then just finished sewing the strip onto the skirt hem.

As you can see in the last image, I got about 1 1/2 inches of extra length on the dress, so it should be perfect now!

New Wall Decor

I actually have something on my living room wall now!

As you can see from this first picture, it was just a big, ugly, beige wall.  From the second picture you can see that it now has decor.  It is just a cheap poster frame with some fabric in it but it sure is better than nothing.

I got the frame from JoAnn.  It was originally $60 but I had a 40% off coupon and a 20% off the entire purchase coupon so I didn't pay anywhere close to $60.  The fabric is left over from when I re-upholstered my kitchen bar stools.

The plan for the future is to paint the frame the same green color that is on the opposite wall, but I don't really want to do that now.  My goal for this iteration was just to get something up there so the wall wouldn't look so empty.

Now for that room all I need to do is replace those ugly folding chairs with actual sitting chairs. I have my eye on some old restaurant chairs that I've seen on KSL that I'll re-upolster and re-paint but I haven't gotten around to buying them yet.  Hopefully they are still available when I do go to buy them.

Latest Quilt

 I've made another quilt. This is the first one I've made for someone who isn't born yet. Barracuda is due at the beginning of March so I tried to make this quilt spring-y.

I chose a subway tile type pattern because, well, it looked fun.  Somehow my longest tiles ended up  being 1/8 of an inch too long each so I had to sew a little extra to all the background rows between but, luckily, the background pattern is really busy so it is nearly impossible to tell that I had to add those pieces.

While I was at the fabric store I chose the paisley fabric first, I just fell in love with it.  From there I chose the other two greens and decided to use the yellow as binding because it added a little brightness to the whole quilt.

It took me a while to decide how to quilt the quilt but I ended up doing a whimsical, curly line around all the tiles.  I did this the same way I did c.b.'s quilt: freehand using the embroidery foot. The biggest lesson I learned was to make sure the fabric was pulled tight as I quilted because I ended up with some loose fabric between tiles.

I also used the whimsical, curly line for my binding.  I thought it would be super cute and, well, it is.  I learned several lessons here (see the next picture for the big, nasty one), one of which is that if you forget to put your sewing machine's feet down when sewing free-hand, it isn't a huge deal.  I also learned that if the fabric is too thick for the sewing machine needle, the machine will beep at me.  I ended up having to do a little of the binding by hand - in some places you can tell but in one place (on the front) it looks pretty good.

The biggest lesson that I learned with this binding was that I didn't do it very well.  As you can see, my tension was off. Even though I did a test with several layers of fabric (I got the tension perfect in the test, it really was beautiful)  I just couldn't get the tension right while actually quilting.  I ended up giving up on trying to fix the tension so I'll just try to convince everyone to never look at the back side of this quilt.

I think a contributing factor was the the quilt side was just two layers of fabric and one layer of 6 oz batting while the binding side was up to 6 layers of fabric plus the binding, so getting the same tension to work on both was a tall order to begin with.

If anyone has any ideas about how I could have done this better, I'd love to hear it.

DIY: Bench From A Coffee Table

I made a bench seat.  From a coffee table.  It was easy.

I got part of my inspiration from this blog that I found via, you guessed it, Pinterest.  There was another pin that was similar too but I liked the above linked to blog better.

You can tell simply from looking at the pictures that my bench is a little bit different from her ottoman.  She covered the top and sides of her coffee table with foam, batting, and fabric then stapled it all underneath the coffee table.  I didn't want to do it exactly like that because I wanted to keep the drawer in the coffee table functional. . . and my way was a little easier too.

Materials Needed (based on the fact that my bench was about 40 inches x 20 inches)
- foam to fit the top - you may need to cut it to fit
- batting to fit the top, sides of the foam, and go under the foam- I got 28 inches of 48 inch wide batting.
- fabric to fit the top, sides of the foam, and go under the foam - I got 28 inches of 54 inch wide fabric.
- hot glue

Step 1: Cut the foam to fit.
The foam should be exactly the size of the top of the coffee table.  I bought two pieces of foam that were 2 x 22 x 22.  I used a ruler to measure where to cut on the foam and a sharpie marker to draw a cut line.  Then CJ found some exacto-knives and we simply cut on the lines.  The lady at Jo-Ann told me an electric knife works really well but I didn't have one so I made do.

Step 2 (optional): Glue the pieces of foam to each other.
I call this step optional because it is possible to have just one piece of foam or if multiple pieces of foam are used it is still possible to continue with the other steps while the foam isn't glued together - I just figured it would be easier if they were attached.

Step 3: Lay the batting flat on the ground then lay the foam in the center.

Step 4: Glue the batting to the foam.
I did the long sides first then folded the corners of the short sides in and glued them in place.

Step 5: Lay the fabric right side down on the ground then lay the foam/batting in the center.

Step 6: Glue the fabric to the foam/batting.
Again, I started with the long sides.

Step 7: Glue the foam to the top of the coffee table.
I put a line of glue down the middle of the coffee table then put the foam on top of that.  Then I lifted the sides of the foam and just glued near the edges all the way around.  Seems as though it worked pretty well since the foam padding is attached to my coffee table pretty well.

Done.

I put the bench in my entry way. The first picture below shows my entry while we were still using the coffee table in the living room.  The second picture is the entry after we bought a new coffee table (with matching side tables!). The last in the entry with the finished bench.

Christmas Decorations

On the Friday after Thanksgiving I like to get the Christmas decorations out, so that's exactly what I did today.  I've been excited about today for a long time - since last December.  Last year on the day after Christmas I bought decorations for a whole new color theme - a white tree with only green ornament.  And now that it is all put together I can officially say that I love it!

Anyway, I also made a new wreath this year.  It is based off of all the picture frame wreaths with ornaments that you see all over Pinterest.  Instead of using a square frame I wanted to use a round one, so it was more wreath-like.  Sadly, the white oval frame that I found and loved wasn't on sale like every other frame at Michael's that day and I wasn't about to pay $20 for it.  Instead I found a round piece of MDF that is made for making wreaths - it cost less than $4.

All the materials that were needed for this super easy project were the circle, some ribbon, some extra ornaments, white paint, a paint brush, and hot glue.

Step 1: Paint the MDF white.  I wish I would have had a smaller paint brush to get the inside and outside edges but I made due with what I already had.

Step 2: Place the ornaments on some of the ribbon and make a bow out of some of the other ribbon.  I made the bow directly on the wreath so I wouldn't have to worry about gluing it on.

Step 3: Glue the ornament's ribbon to the top, middle of the wreath and glue down the bow's ends.  Originally I was just going to try to tie everything onto the wreath so I could re-use the ornaments and plain white wreath other years but I couldn't figure out how to get that to work with the type of hanging device I had.  Oh well, I guess this just means I don't have to make another wreath when I do this color theme again.

Done.  I think the wreath would look a lot better on my red door if we didn't have a door knocker but whatever.

For your viewing pleasure, here are images of my other decorations:

These are my favorite ornaments on my tree.

The first is a bottomless glass ornament with some tiny pine cones in the middle and some ever-green-like painting on the outside.  Even though the brown doesn't fit 100% with my green only theme, I love this ornament and if the store had more I would have purchased more.

The second is just some glittery green branch like stuff with some glittery green pine cones.  I just set these on some of my white branches to add some tree-like green to the white tree.

The third is a green poinsettia.  It has a clip on the back so I just clipped a few of these to the tree.  I like how they are big and add another dimension to the tree.

This is the whole of my tree.

I took the green candle and white rocks out of my normal centerpiece and replaced it all with some extra green ornaments.

Activity Days: Budgeting Activity

We had our budgeting activity yesterday, the one I made the felt piggy banks for. I thought it went pretty well.  We started with a quick math lesson on percentages then went through the line items on the budget to talk about them and make sure the girls understood what each meant.  Some of these line items were

Pay
Savings
Rent
Car Payment
Groceries
Cell phone

That wasn't everything, just a sampling.  For the activity we were assuming that each girl had just graduated from college (or trade school or whatever applies to the career she chose) and was about to start her first post-education job.

Once we went through the budget items I had each girl choose a job - I had 24 different jobs they could choose from.  I've got a sampling here of what each job card looks like: an image of the job on one side and the associated monthly pay and student loans on the other side.  I looked up the pay based on the zip code I live in then adjusted for things like taxes, health insurance, and 401k contributions so the pay that shows would be the take home pay.  I completely made up the student loan amount.  I had them fill in their budget with this information.

Then I had each girl choose a car.  The options were public transportation, the junker they had in college, a used sedan, a used convertible, a used SUV, a new sedan, a new SUV, and a new electric car.  Once they chose their car they  filled in their budget with the information on the back of the car card: monthly payment, gas, maintenance.  The car payment amount came from some research on the internet while gas and maintenance were made up by me based on what I pay for those.  I had to tell one of the girls that maintenance costs weren't optional - she tried to get away with paying no maintenance on her car.

Next, each girl chose a place to live.  They could rent a studio apartment, a one bedroom apartment, a two bedroom apartment, a condo, a townhouse, or a house.  The line items they filled out after choosing these were rent, utilities, and HOA fee (which only applied to the condo, townhouse, and house).  For this information I looked up available rental properties in our area (they even recognized the house and townhouse from being in our neighborhood).

Then we filled in the rest of the line items.  They had three choices for their cell phone: $80 for a data plan, $40 for a regular plan, and $20 for just a land-line (I don't think they knew what a land-line was).  For their cable they also had three choices, well four if you count not having any at all: $100 for premium, $60 for upgraded, and $30 for basic.

The final line item was "Everything Else".  When all the other line items were filled out I had them calculate the number for the Everything Else item: -$20, -$176, -$1,010, and -$1,020.  They were way off! (Just as I suspected - but I didn't suspect I'd have to tell them that negative numbers were bad.)  This was when I got to talk about having to make sacrifices and different choices in order to be able to live within a budget.

They ended up making some changes to their plan.  The architect and doctor decided to be room mates, saving the architect about $950 a month.  The architect wasn't willing to give up her data plan but did switch from premium to basic cable.  The flight attendant gave up her used convertible to take public transportation, downgraded her cell phone and cable plans, and gave up her $1,600/month house for a $500/month studio apartment taking her from -$1,020 to about $680.  Well done, flight attendant.

At the end of the lesson/activity I asked them what they thought of it.  One girl said it was fun, one said it was Ok then asked if she could throw her budget away (lol, kids), and the other two didn't answer because they were too busy trying to figure out their new Everything Else after making changes.

Personally, I liked it . . . a lot.  I love numbers and money and math and figuring things out.  In fact, I based the activity off a project I did in my 7th grade math class.  The difference was that in 7th grade we had to look through the classified section of the newspaper to find our job, apartment, and car.

Anyway, if this activity sounds like something you'd want to do and you'd like to see my cards, budget, and notes, just let me know and I'll email my spreadsheet to you.

Activity Days: Felt Piggy Bank

Our activity for Activity Days is tomorrow and we are going to have a lesson and activity on Tithing and Budgeting.  A while ago on Pinterest (duh) I found this pin - four super cute felt piggy banks.  I was hoping the link went to a tutorial but it didn't, it went to a store where you could buy the product.

Anyway, I thought these would be a really cute handout for the Tithing and Budgeting lesson so I decided to make some myself, which was super easy.

Step One: Cut out an even number pigs from felt (see below the pattern that I used).  Honestly, this was the hardest step.

Step Two: Sew a button hole near the top of half of the pigs.  Because these were going to be used for money, instead of using a button to determine the size of my button hole I used a quarter.

Step Three: Top stitch together one pig without a hole and one pig with a hole.

Done.