I am very excited to announce that I won the BurdaStyle Pink & Red Competition. That means I have $1200 worth of this coming my way:
I also won the opportunity to model my dress in a charity fashion show at a national sewing expo, but unfortunately, I will not be able to make it because of this.
But anyway: woooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Went fabric shopping for camera bag fabric last night! I am still on a tight budget, but I think I got some awesome selections. I brought my husband along to to help me because he: #1 does not have slightly psychotic taste and #2 does not have a completely addled brain. As usual, his input was invaluable.
So this is what we ended up with! {I am also hoping to incorporate some recycled leather as well).
It’s a fact: camera bags are hideous. Or, if they’re not hideous–then they are $300! I have been working on a design for a stylish camera bag that will be available at a decent pricepoint. I have a great, unique design…now I just need to get the materials together–which is in the works!
I really want to have a few protoypes made to show off at WPPI! What better place to debut a camera bag design than the world’s largest gathering of photographers! Wish me luck getting all the materials ordered and shipped on time!
Over the summer, we moved to Worthington. In my quest to keep it as local as possible, I went on a search to find all the new places I would frequently be haunting. My favorite to date: Sew to Speak.
(photo: www.sewtospeak.blogspot.com)
It is a beautiful little shop, filled with gorgeous fabrics. Cotton, jersey, decor weight–they have all the great patterns and designers that you can’t get at those big box fabric and craft stores. Visit the shop!
Well, that gets me to the subject at hand, I uploaded another project on Burdastyle. It’s an oldie but a goodie! It’s from this summer: the first thing that I made with the first yard of fabric I ever bought from Sew to Speak!
This second picture was actually taken at the shop! The shop owner let her play with a stuffed owl, which made her day…and resulted in us buying some great owl print fabric!
I am very excited to say that my dress is up for voting in Burdastyle’s Pink & Red Competition! To be eligible to vote, you have to be a member–but it’s a great network. Burdastyle is an open source sewing community made up of novices, intermediates, and full fledged seamstresses all sharing tutorials, instructions on technique, patterns, fabric resources, & photos of completed projects etc. all in the name of inspiring everyone to sew, sew, sew!
You can vote for my dress here:
I am very excited about a little side project that I have going called Hearts & Crafts. It’s just a little group that will use crafting to help others through various events and projects. Because our first event is scheduled this month (due to the unforeseen tragedy in Haiti), I am going to push back the store launch date a bit. I want to make sure that I have the time to make this a great event. We set a fundraising goal of $500 and I’d really like us to meet that!
You can join the effort here.
Please teach me, o great one:
I’m sorry, this was just so bizarre, I couldn’t keep it to myself. Neither of my cats would ever let me do this to them, I think she slipped that cat some valium.
“WHO’S THE BEST CAT IN THE UNITED STATES?”
I just narrowly escaped mowing down my hand with my sewing machine, and as I laughed my maniacal “no hospital visit today, you sonofabitch” cackle at my feed dogs, I thought of this:
It is entitled “Thinking about sewing machine accidents makes me wanna barf.” by Natalie Dee.
One of the many websites I spend entirely too much time on is Burdastyle. It is a (mostly) open source sewing website where users can share patterns/discuss techniques/fabrics, and upload pictures of personal projects they are working on (great eye candy). Burda themselves add free patterns onto the site, do articles on featured members, and sponsor a lot of fun contests.
This is the first time I’ve entered one of their contests, I’m a little over-excited, I’d say. But eh, whatever, it was a lot of fun. I mostly wear all black and grey–so it was fun to have to design something pink and red.
I designed the dress from scratch, I literally just played around with darts and tucks until the top “looked right” to me. And of course, I made sure the back cut out displayed the third biggest love of my life, my wedding tattoo. Ha! The skirt is just a classic circle skirt attached to the bodice using my sweet new serger. The top was made from a piece of material that Ms. Alana B gave me, which I am pretty sure was a curtain in a past life. The rest of the dress was made from a solid cotton and a cotton print. For the hair band, and the top of the dress for that matter, I made some flowers. I had already made the solid pink ones (from a former experiment using this wonderful tutorial) . I saw them lying on the floor and figured,”what the hell, why not?” I also had a ton of buttons lying on the floor from when the holy terror was last in my sewing room, so I figured I would toss some on the dress/some buttery yellow vintage gloves.
It’s not perfect, I couldn’t find my invisible zipper foot anywhere and I had a few boo boos here and there. Overall, it felt really foreign to make something this bright, but I kept it true to myself by making it as obnoxious as possible!
