Thrift Store Fabric and Current Project

This is the latest acquisition from Savers (thrift store)


One yard of the butterflies for 99 cents and about 2 1/2 yards of the funky orange retro stretch twill for $2.99. The orange print just screamed to me to buy it, though I am NOT a fan of orange at all. But, look at that pattern! So funky! I was thinking a handbag of some sort from it.

My current project is McCall's 8107, princess seam dress, view G (the center one with the belt). I'm not really a dress person, but I figure if I go to the trouble of making a muslin, doing the fitting and then another muslin and finally a finished object that I will probably wear it! So far I just cut out the second muslin after the first turned out to be a size too big. Who knew? I should have started with the high bust measurement, but that hasn't worked for me in the past, so I decided to just go with a size 20 off the bat. I was swimming in the dress (what I hoped would be a wearable muslin). I have had to do an FBA on the size 18, and trimmed away some excess in the back. The book Fit For Real People was instrumental in learning how to do adjustments on princess seamed dresses; I didn't know it needed all that!

I hope this fitting and muslin does it; by now I 'm a little tired of all the pattern pieces. Thankfully it sews up rather quickly, even with the little inside out thing the pattern has you do with the facings.

Now, where to find a belt for this dress. I don't even own a belt!

Vintage McCall's Pattern Find

Boy do I love thift stores! I stopped in one last night and they had a lot of nice fabric, which I didn't buy because while it wasn't over priced, I wanted a bargain which some of it wasn't. They normally don't have a great pattern selection, but while walking by it this caught my eye:

So I snatched it up in a heartbeat and saw this one behind it:
Not that I am either bust size (guess higher. No, higher!) but someday I will either be a size 14 (quit laughing) or I will learn how to grade a pattern, which is beyond my abilities right now. Of course I could also turn into an obsessive pattern collector and just buy patterns willy nilly. That is something I'm debating on...since it's already started. I think I have about 50/50 of patterns that fit and those that don't. Quite a few from the 70's, although these are the oldest I've found yet. But I digress; I think these are complete. One is certainly still in factory folds (6759), and the other I haven't taken out yet since I don't have enough room on any surface to spread out until I get my sewing area cleaned up (and a project completed). Overall, a great find for $1.38 total!

Thrift Store Thread

I stopped by Goodwill this evening since Mondays are dollar days on the previous week's tags and after 5pm they reveal the new tag. Not much there for that dollar tag but I found one on a cheapo sheet that I will use for a muslin. But I did find 2 yards of some rad dinosaur fabric for a dollar (50% off tag) and a bag of thread for $1.99. I just now got around to opening up the thread and checking it out. I really just blindly grabbed it thinking that even if it's the cheap stuff I can use it for testing things out. The majority of it turned out to be Lily brand thread, originally priced at 19 cents. About half of it is still wrapped in the plastic sleeve that protects the thread. The other half is loose and very, very weak. I can snap a short length easily. Too easy to actually use in anything.

The greatest find in the bag though were 3 wooden spools of thread. 15 cents? From what little research I did on them they seem to be from the 50's to 70's. I had no clue what boilfast or fast to boiling meant, but apparently I learned something new today when I found out that it means it will retain the color if boiled, since before washing machines people would boil their clothes to clean them.

Ah, modern conveniences, how I love them so.

Color me

I often get yardage or used sheets at thrift stores to try out new things, use for muslins and what not. I got about 4 yards of what I thought was cotton quite some time ago, until I did a burn test this evening and found it to be some kind of poly cotton. I also picked up a queen (or king?) sized flannel sheet to mess with. What I ended up doing with them both was testing my first ever batch of RIT dye on scraps of them. Both were an off white, with the flannel having a pattern along the top edge, which is where I took the scrap from, and the poly cotton having a "natural" linen type look to it.

Flannel is on the left, the blend is on the right

Quite a difference! It was an interesting test. I used the bucket/sink and hot water method to dye these as I don't have a pot that I can dedicate to stovetop dyeing. The cotton flannel took a deeper color almost immediately and seemed to rinse out easier as well. I chose the Royal Blue color because I have an obsession with blue, thinking that no matter what it turned out like, I would probably like it no matter the hue. And, I was correct. Both of them I like and now just need to figure out what to do with them. I don't know if the whole 4 yards (minus 1/4 or so that I cut off for this test) will fit in my container, which is an oh-so-fancy plastic storage container that I got from Walmart.

The Hardware

I decided to create a seperate blog for my sewing endeavors since beginner sewing doesn't really belong on an art blog. But, I mentioned there that I had gotten a sewing machine that my beloved boyfriend found for me at a thrift store for the princely sum of $21. It is a Singer Stylist 6548. It uses discs to get the fancier stitches, but I found out a while ago after playing with it that it won't do any of the fancy stitches. What a bummer! It beats the hell out of my Babylock for straight and zigzag though. Pictures of both machines are below:

The Singer

The Babylock

The Babylock I got from a nice lady on freecycle but it's persnickity. The zig zag skips and the fancy stitches start out well but then start looking messy. I'm sure it could use an overhaul. The Singer is by far the easier to work with. It can pull many layers through while the Babylock gets bogged down without much effort.

I had been doing zippers on the Baby but I just found a Singer zipper foot (that was missing from mine) at JoAnn's tonight and it seems to work. I was putting off ordering online, just because I don't know where to order from. I'm still new to this!

Soon I hope to post some of the things I have made so far. I've been seriously sewing for about 6 months now, but building up the stash, thread, and other notions takes a while when you're a starving artist. Actually I'm not starving and am in fact rather plump, but it's such a visual term isn't it?