Thursday, August 11, 2011

5 Days of Art - Part 1: Sewing

Sew.... last week when both my sweet girls were away with grandparents and my husband was at football practice I got to drag art & sewing supplies out all over the house and just create to my hearts content, without a single interruption.
Oh my goodness. Now you guys know, I love my babies and I was truly elated to have them back .....but that quiet "me time" was sooo much appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed.

I did mend a few things, hem a dress, and repair a wind suit jacket but the really fun stuff was in altering some of my shirts.

Since shirt style trends are longer these days I've had a few shirts that were cute but too short just taking up space in my closet for a while. I decided to take two of them and see what I could create with some simple changes.

This is what the first shirt looked like before. It's a lovely soft material in a deep eggplant purple with a light lavender camesol attached underneath.
 I have a basket full of old lace and trim pieces that I pull out every once in a while for projects. I decided to use the lace to add length to the shirt and embellish it.
 Layer number one.
 And a second layer, because the first one just didn't feel like enough. ;)
 Then with the same lace, I scrunched and wrapped and stitched until I had a full flower. I cut out a circle from a piece of soft white fabric and sewed on a pin so that the flower could be removed from the shirt for washing. It can also be used separately on a hat or different outfit.
 In one of my jars of buttons (oooh I love buttons!) I found some pearelescent pieces that detached from their gold rings.
 So I took several different sizes and glued them to the center of my flower along with a couple of tiny silver pieces.
 And here you can see it all put together, a lovely longer embellished shirt.
 I also had a green shirt that I did something similar to. I used part of an old skirt for this one, adding a layer to the shirt's length and then using a few strips from the same fabric to create little rosettes of varied sizes. I did sew the rosettes to this shirt instead of making three individual pins.
I always love these kind of wearable art projects.

More to come tomorrow from my 5 Days of Art   .... on to another creative medium.

2 comments:

Tiffany said...

Those shirts are so YOU. You're awesome.

Re Use said...

very interesting blog!!