A Little Makeup Bag

My mum asked me to make her a little makeup bag, just big enough to hold a few essentials for her trip to Europe. My parents are gone for a month, and staying with friends in Germany and the UK. How I WISH I was there!!

I decided to use a piece of sample fabric that I got from Darrell Thomas, an Oscar de la Renta home dec fabric in a linen/cotton/silk blend. The zipper is set in a slightly curved top, and it’s lined with a rich red poly satin.

As I didn’t have any hefty interfacing, I interlined it with a fine white diaper fleece. It feels nice, but it sure was bulky at the zipper ends when I sewed it all together.

It turned out all right, but I think I’ll buy Florence’s slouchy bag pattern, it looks neater at the sides! I’m definitely making another, I love the idea of using these home dec fabric samples for small things like this!

Me-Made-May 2013, Wrap-up

Even though it’s not quite the end of May, I’m going to wrap this up now. When I saw the number of participants in MMM’13 I was amazed! It’s fantastic how it’s growing each year. And for that reason I decided to keep it simple and not post daily pictures…well, that and the fact that I just don’t have many me-made clothes yet.

This month has been an interesting and very useful experiment. I wore me-made things and some thrifted things just about every day. Some of these things were finally fixed or mended! And I did manage to make the 2 new pieces that I pledged this month. I did photograph myself when I wore these, but by the 3rd week I ran out of steam! It was already becoming apparent to me that there were key items missing from my wardrobe, like cardigans and jackets for starters. Bottom pieces too for that matter.

Anyway, here’s a glimpse of what I managed.

Week 1:

• Day 1:  New! brown bamboo/cotton BCT from 3hourspast (finished the day before, not blogged yet) with Jalie 2908 jeans
• Day 2:  copy of FILA tank top, hazelnut bamboo/cotton/lycra jersey with black stretch denim thrifted capris
• Day 3:  Maria Denmark Day-to-Night Top with black thrifted capris
• Day 4:  copy of FILA tank top in fuscia polyknit, and my mum is wearing the New! burda pants I made this month (yet to blog)
• Day 6:  Colette Sorbetto #3 with another pair of navy stretch denim thrifted capris that were sitting on my mending pile for about 2 years…just needed 2 new buttons
• Day 7:  Burda 10-2011 #119 - Skirt

     

Week 2:

• Day 8:  New! Colette Sorbetto #4 (made this month, yet to blog) with my navy thrifted capris
• Day 10:  Burda 02-2013 #127 – Raglan Top with my Jalie jeans
• Day 11:  New! 3hourspast BCT #2 (made this month, yet to blog) with my navy thrifted capris
• Day 14:  copy of FILA top (again) with my black thrifted capris

  

  

Week 3:

• Day 16:  Sewaholic Minoru jacket and Jalie jeans
• Day 17:  Fixed! Colette Sorbetto #1 (armholes needed opening up a bit more) with black capris

 

Week 4:

• Days 22 onwards, basically the same things
• Day 25:  New! Copy of the FlipBelt (saw it Friday afternoon at the Expo, bought the fabric before dinner, figured out the pattern later that night, and sewed it up before lunch on Saturday. Yes, I’m mad!) It’s Ottawa Race Weekend and at 5:00 PM I was in the 5K. Love this belt! It didn’t budge at all. Definitely need to blog about this.

So, by mid-month I knew what I needed to make, and also had some things to make for my mum. But I’ll tell you more in separate posts, because there was a lot of me-made stuff going on!

Sewing Journal Pages (PDF download)

UPDATE: Version 4 is available from this post:
https://escapadesinsewing.blogspot.com/2020/08/sewing-journal-update-version-4.html

I’m sure many/most of us who sew, at some point started to keep notes on all the stuff we make. I only started doing this about the time I started reading sewing blogs, and just used a me-made notebook with blank pages. It worked well enough, but I felt it could be “better”.

So, after 4 years my OCD, pedantic self decided to create a form to record all the various notes, machine settings, etc. It fits on one page, both sides. I love forms!

It was seeing Portia’s beautiful leather planner and her cool printable planner pages that made me think I should put this up for anyone to use.

You can download the pages in PDF format. Let me know what you think, and if you’d like me to put it up in Microsoft Word DOCX format so you can adapt it for your own needs.

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Update (January 2014)

Over the last year I’ve been refining the journal pages to reflect how I actually use them. There are now 3 versions, in PDF and Word (DOCX) format.
Note: For some strange reason the DOCX files are being scrunched by Google Drive so I've had to edit them to fit properly on the page.

Version 1 (DOCX) (shown above)

 Version 2.1 (PDF), Version 2.1 (DOCX)

Some projects involved many more machine stitches, so this form was useful.

Version 3.0 (PDF), Version 3.0 (DOCX)

This is the version I use most often now: