Room Makeover

What is a normal "mourning" for taking over the room of your 20-something daughter? While at college? After college graduation? Or when they have been out of the country for two years?

That should be enough time.  She is always welcomed back, but we have several guests coming over the spring break, and needed her room.  We wanted it to still be "Zoe's" room, but cleaned up (from removing stuffed animals and prom corsages) and grown up.

Here are some before pictures:

Zoe was supposed to clean up some of her stuff when she was here for a couple of weeks last summer. But she didn't. So to facilitate the process we used three different color post-its and FaceTime. I showed her an area and I flagged it Trash, Donate, Keep.  It actually went pretty quickly. I also marked on the post-it if she wanted me to take a picture of it, and then get rid of it. She could use the pictures for a scrapbook, blog posts, or whatever. Here is her Zoe collection.

So after everything was sorted in huge bins in the hall, we had her room painted.

Now here is the final reveal! This was from her dorm room - the bottom half is for notes and mail, and there are small hooks for keys.

This bed (Ikea) is awesome, not only does it have big drawers, the bed rolls out to form a huge queen bed. There are two mattresses stacked and when you roll it out, you slide over the other mattress. We also got the side table on wheels so it can move out of the way when expanding the bed. Inside the door of the side table is a outlet so you can charge up your phone.

I was inspired by a pillow at Anthropologie.  So easy to make, cut out circles, fold them into quarters, line them up, and sew them along the top. 

But I also can swap out the pillows from some of Zoe's. The doll pillow has the border from her old "blankie."

It was fun and sticky to make the string globe lights, but I think they turned out nice. I followed the directions from here - Made Everyday.

These are her prints she made as a college photography student.

This is what is left of her clothes, plenty of room for guests.

Whew! That's done! Now onto the bathroom, always something to do!

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Sewing Surge

I go through phases where I lock into a particular hobby and do it until I'm sick of it, right now it's sewing with knits (using my new Brother DZ1234 serger).  Here is my latest creations - a Peter Pan french knit shirt (the collar is reversed to see the terry part).

and a striped cropped knit jacket thing.  I modified a pattern from Grainline studios, by cropping it, and not making it fully lined, but just the neck and placket.  I also narrowed the sleeves.

Once I get going it's hard for me to stop, because I figure out short cuts and routines that I'm afraid if I stop I won't remember the next time. So this time I'm taking lots of notes.

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Sewing with Knits

I'm finally feeling a bit confident with my serger, so decided to take on a couple of sewing projects. To get some cool knit fabrics, I bought a couple of Knit Fixes from Girl Charlee.  They send you a surprise bag of 2 yard lengths of 6 different knit fabrics. Here are some of my most recent projects using the Girl Charlee fabric:

This easy raglan was from a pattern from Patterns for Pirates. 

Here is my latest project, from a self-drafted pattern.

1.  I used the pattern that I made in the teal elephant print above. But I made two back pieces for the front and back instead so that the neck line was smaller to accommodate the turtleneck.

2.  I sewed the shoulders, sleeves, and then the sides like normal.

3.  Then I made the turtleneck piece, it's slightly smaller than the neck hole, only about 3/8 an inch. Here is the pattern.

4.  I unfolded it, and then sewed the two sides together right sides together,  the right and edge side in the picture above.  I then used bias tape to cover the seam. To make it, I just cut a 1.75 inch of knit fabric it, used iron on tape between it, and then iron both sides on top of the iron on tape. Laid it over the seam and top stitched it on both edges.

Then I folded it back together, right sides out. I lined up the raw edges and then serged it all around, it's a tube. Then I attach it to the neck hole.

5. I made more tape to finish the sleeves and the slits. This time I put the iron on tape on the bottom half and then folded it over and ironed it down.

6. To finish the sleeves, I sewed it on, right sides together, folded in on the inside, and then sewed it on.

7.  I used this tutorial to add the tape to the side slits.

8.  To hem, I served the hem, used the iron on tape to fold up the hem, and then I used my double needle. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you got a bit inspired!

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