It was another crazy busy weekend at the shop last week- we got an AMAZING custom mural done in our courtyard by local artist, Chris Gliebe! He drew up this incredible sketch a few weeks ago, and I was amazed how much it looks like the finished product!
He completed this masterpiece in FOUR HOURS! That blew me away. I will do a separate post for that though, because I’d like to try to make a gif out of all the pictures that Maya took while he was painting it.
So we had a little shindig that night to celebrate, complete with lots of PBR and NorthSlice Pizza, the deeeeeliocious new pizza place that just opened across the street from us. It was a spectacular night and hopefully I’ll have some more pictures from the party soon too…… We’ll see what I can finagle.
Anyway- this post is really about not wasting stuff! My fellow Cincy blogger, Paige of Midwest Darling has set everyone to the challenge of saving a once-loved but now ruined item of clothing and make it wearable again. I really love the spirit of this challenge, we could all save a little more. I do a fair amount of altering and hemming on my own clothes, and have recently started to do a little tweaking on some clothes at Chicken Lays An Egg. A very fashion-forward friend and photographer was in the shop the other day when he suggested that we start doing some serious alterations (more in the vein of upcycling). I am really excited by this idea and although I have never used a sewing machine and have very limited sewing education, I think I could do it. I’m sure I’ll mess up a few dresses along the way, but this idea is really exciting to me. Since Rosie of The Brush Factory will be doing alterations at U-Swap on Saturday, I plan on chatting with her about that a little.
Right now I don’t really have anything that has been messed up and needs a new chance at life, so I thought I’d show you guys some little things that I’ve altered or hemmed instead. This first one I found at a yard sale for $1, at just had to buy it even though it was about 5 sizes too big and 3 feet too long for me.
That's about what it looked like (before I cut that big chunk out of the middle to hem up)
So to fix the giant waist, I added a pleat in the back. Thankfully the material is busy enough to hide it for the most part.
To accomplish this I just kind of pulled the slack inside and then folded the elastic waistband down to stitch it. Sorry the picture doesn’t illustrate that very well…
Sorry the picture is so blurry, my camera would not focus on what I wanted it to.
In the end, it was a fantastic save. Just look how deep the pockets are in this thing!
This next project actually was more of a destroyed piece that I brought back to life. Dana brought this beautiful dress into the shop, and the original material that was in the sunburst was very sheer and light and was very quickly ripped in the dressing room. I told her I’d fix it and bring it back, but instead she just gave it to me! (She’s very generous like that.) I was thrilled and couldn’t decide what to use to replace the ripped fabric until I found this super shiny gold shirt at the thrift store.
Now I just need to lose a few pounds (or ribs maybe) to fit into it… I think I can do it. I do also have a dress that I recently picked up at a thrift store and would really like to repurpose into a little tube dress for myself (with maybe a little sweetheart neckline?)
I haven’t ever really tried anything that ambitious though, so we’ll see how it turns out. Thanks to Paige for encouraging more reusing, we should all do it when we can!