Like I said yesterday, I’ve been working on some fun projects lately – mostly sewing. It all started because I wanted to get better at sewing zippers. When I sew, I usually just alter clothes – I love buying thrift store clothes and then remaking them to suit my (quirky) taste. I rarely make clothes or put zippers on anything, but now that I have space for my sewing supplies (I took over the spare bedroom when Noah moved out), I find I want to use it more. I watched a few YouTube videos to get tips on zippers and then made a bunch of little things (mostly bags and pouches) to practice with.
I’ve been doing a lot of spring cleaning/organizing (even though it’s still freezing here) and as I was organizing my “craft room” I decided I needed to put a big dent in all the denim scraps I had. When I use up a pair of jeans for one reason or another, I separate them and use “each” pair in some way. However, since my weight hasn’t gone up and down significantly over the past few years, I haven’t had to replace all my jeans, hahaha. (Note that I said “super” vehemently – this certainly falls short of consensus.)
All of my denim scraps have been sitting around for a while, so after getting tons of inspiration from Pinterest, I came up with a few ideas to try. I *love* how they turned out!
The first one was a small wallet that I originally intended to make into a fanny pack. That might be the case if I changed the straps on it, but I like it as a regular crossbody bag for now. I gathered the seams of the cut jeans and lined them up.
I wanted to keep the entire purse a light to medium blue tone (no dark denim), but I didn’t have enough money to do the front and back a color like that. Instead, I unfolded the ruffles on the legs, ironed them, and used them to piece the pieces back onto the purse. I added some small belt loops on the sides to hold the D-rings (for the watch strap) and a lining that I thought would go well with it. There is a simple zipper on top. And I didn’t need any pockets, inside or outside, so it was easy.
This is the perfect size! It does exactly what I need (including my Kindle, which I like to take with me to appointments and basically anywhere I might have a chance to read), and leaves no room for random junk. This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made.
After that, I started working on scraps that were actually just little scraps of denim. I wanted to make a large piece of fabric by cutting small squares and piecing them into a grid (like I did with my denim quilt a long time ago). I cut out as many 2×2 squares as I could, hoping that would be enough to make a crossbody bag. The size I need is approximately 15″ x 32″. I didn’t do the math or anything – I just hoped that when I put it all together it would be at least that big.
The result is *perfect*. I didn’t leave any extra squares, and the final dimensions were 15.5 x 33 inches. Then I had to decide what lining to use, I have a very large men’s dress shirt that I have my sewing materials in (occasionally I buy clothes from Goodwill to sew later if I like the fabric). I cut it out to use as lining fabric and decided to keep the pockets.
Sewing a million layers of denim is difficult, but the end result is worth it. I love this bag! Being a messenger bag, I don’t know what to do with it, but I’ll figure it out since I want to use it.
Finally, as far as denim goes, I’m in the process of putting denim back together. I took it apart last year with the intention of putting it together in different ways, then got tired of working on it, so I put it in the back of my closet. This is what it looked like before:
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| This is what the quilt looked like before |
I’ve now done all the boring stuff (I *hate* cutting fabric) and now I’m working on piecing it all together. Basically, I just rearranged the squares, cut them smaller, and sewed them together without the frayed edges on top. I had a few pieces of denim that I messed around with embroidery floss on, so I cut them into squares as well.
When I piece it together it looks like this:
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| I turned most of the blocks to the wrong side to get a different look. When I’m done I want to quilt instead of knot it but I don’t know how! |
I have a few other projects, but I have to go to Eli’s baseball game, so I’ll save those for later!