How I Wonder

So this Turkey Day break has been full of making things. Mostly food, actually. :) For Thanksgiving dinner, I made red bean paste buns...not very, uh, "traditional" but whatever, I spotted a can of "aduki beans" in the store for the first time on Tuesday and knew I had to try making them. This week in cooking, therefore:

Tuesday night: bean paste.
Wednesday night: dough.
Thursday: red bean paste buns.
Friday: quiche (spinach, bacon, and turkey)
Saturday: pumpkin pie
Sunday: pumpkin potato onion cheese soup.

Yay, food. :)

In other making-stuff news, I've been sewing. Since Halloween, I finished another wrap shirt, made a skirt and matching socks from a turtleneck (from a tutorial on craftster.org), reconstructed the heck out of the ugly pink sweater (also based loosely on a tutorial from craftster.org), made a couple of sleeves, started a light purple top from scratch that is taking a lot longer than originally planned since I'm improvising on the fly :P and....started the replacement duvet cover. Eep. Oh, and I started sewing scraps together to make a rag rug. It's kinda ugly as hell but I don't care. :D

Things I've learned in the process:

-My pattern for sleeves does not include seam allowance. Oops.
-Ruffles are surprisingly easy and somewhat meditative to make, even though I'm not really a ruffly kinda girl.
-Wal-mart has a "remnants" pile for sale that is *so* not remnant-y; I bought a good bit of yardage from under there that really wasn't small at all! (Also, they play O Tannebaum a LOT.)
-Fabric glue is my friend.
-Sewing on a bigger zig-zag stitch is way easier to seam rip when I fuck it up. :)

Pictures...are on Facebook, sorry.

(Oh, and the impostor on said Fbook is really and truly gone now. Yay!)

Still in the works:
-CCAC hoodie (I keep scaring myself off of this one. I did prove to myself that I can, in fact, sew sleeves onto a top properly, today, but I'm still nervous about screwing with my really beloved shirts. The purple top? One of the cheap-ass remnants, so that's not so bad.)
-Brown satiny skirt from a button-down shirt...want to finish this by the holiday party, but we'll see.
-The aforementioned duvet cover needs to be finished
-Deciding what to do with the too-tight sleeves I made for the purple top...cut and make into short sleeves? Leave open and dangly? I dunno!

There are dragons hiding back here! ;)

No pictures just yet, but I made another skirt out of the remaining half of my long denim skirt. It ended up being a drawstring skirt that I sent to my sister for her birthday (today). We went to the thrift store this afternoon to find stuff for costumes...I picked up a few extra long-sleeved shirts to make into other shirts. I made a wrap shirt out of two of them already :)

For my autumn fairy costume, I've got this brown skirt that I'll wear as a dress, plus the start of wings and lots of leaves to hot glue onto stuff this week. And I still have to figure out how to wire one of my squirrels to sit on my shoulder...

I don't know how to make this stupid t-shirt dress work!!! And I pinned myself in the side and fucked up the goddamn bobbin winding twice and this is supposed to be my stress relief, dammit! Ronnie says I should go to bed now.

So...more sewing. I might be a little addicted. One wonders how long this particular hobby will last. Hopefully at least through the stack of t-shirts on my floor...

( The bag I made for Julia )

( Reconstructed tank top & long sleeve )

( Reconstructed t-shirt )

DIY reconstructions thus far:
-shortened denim skirt (which I'm wearing right now!)
-resized and re-shouldered bright green Central Bucks CCAC 2006 shirt
-paneled double dragon skirt
-little sleeve purse for Julia
-resized and recombined Philly Folk Festival shirt
-re-shouldered & re-waisted Hannibal 2008 shirt

Still to come:
-mystery project ;)
-a pleated skirt from a sheet (which, wow, I really hope I don't screw it up 'cause it could be really cute)
-CCAC hoodie
-a wrap shirt (still don't know which two shirts to use!)

So...another day, another crafting exercise. This time, I'm most of the way through making a paneled skirt. It's sort of based off of this tutorial but I didn't make a pattern to make all the panels the same size/shape so it's got lots more panels than originally planned. I used three shirts:

-the black Dragonfest '99 shirt that I got from a former roommate
-the white Chinatown shirt Ronnie got me (that also had a dragon on it)
-the back of a brown shirt I got from Ronnie's little cousin's bat mitzvah a few years back

It's hitting about knee-length right now; I wonder if there's a way I can go back and ruffle up the hem to make it a little less like a pencil skirt.

I still need to make a waistband and install the bits to make it a wrap skirt.

Also, it has some weird puckers in it that I should probably fix.

DIY reconstructions thus far:
-shortened denim skirt (which I'm wearing right now!)
-resized and re-shouldered bright green Central Bucks CCAC 2006 shirt
-nearly complete paneled double dragon skirt