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With all this free time on my hands I’m catching up on various craft projects I’ve wanted to do for a long time! Here’s the low-down on what I’m doing.

I bought some clearance fabric at Jo-Ann at least a year ago, and have been too busy lazy to make anything out of it until now. I picked up a simple pattern —Vogue #8495—, and made this cute blouse. I also used it as an excuse to become better acquainted with my serger; a device that is pretty complicated, yet utterly fantastic. I used it to finish off the blouse’s side seams, and I think the whole thing looks pretty darned professional. Despite the fact that the blouse wears like a maternity shirt, I’m very happy with the final result.

Next up is this adorable yellow checkered hankie with crocheted edge. I inherited a bunch of vintage hankies from my Grandma (the pink one in the picture is hers) and I’ve been using them for a while now. I’ve started to phase out paper tissues as much as possible because, as I learned, “a total of 300 million tons of tree fiber from virgin forests in the US are used to make its paper products each year.” At any rate, some of Grandma’s hankies are very delicate and I’d rather not ruin them, so I decided to make some.

I want to point out the purple magnetic pin catcher… it is one of my favorite things in the craft arsenal. I used to lose soo many pins, but now, I can just run it over the floor and grab any rogue pins that may have escaped. Sorry, that sounded like a commercial! But anyway, on to the hankie!

First, I used the serger to create that beautiful rolled hem, and then I tried to copy the crocheted edge that my Grandma did on the pink one. I will say this about the crochet: while it’s cute and feminine, I won’t be doing that again too soon. The super-fine thread and tiny needle made it blinding work and it took me about a day to do. Also, as you may remember, I only have a very limited knowledge of crochet, so I spent the first few hours on the internet re-learning my stitches. For the rest of the hankies I plan to make, i’ll do something simpler, like just the rolled hem. That way, I can have a hankie done in 5 minutes as opposed to one a day.

Tags: crafting, photos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 5:58 pm and is filed under photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.