Celebrating the Lifeliners’ Return with Remnants!

For this week’s Remnant Redo, I first want to say how much I appreciate our Armed Services, particularly the 101st Sustainment Brigade Lifeliners as they come home now from their past year’s deployment. Can I get a Hoo-rah? And I also want to honor the ladies associated with that brigade! The soldiers, officers, and the wonderful military wives!

So, I made a project that borrows a little motif from the military: camouflage, but in this case, pink. I started weeks ago with a skein of the most soft and comfy-cushy acrylic bulky yarn, made by Hobby Lobby, in the color Pink Camo.

purse body in Pink Camo yarn

I used size 19 needles and just mindlessly did stockinette until I felt like it was big enough. The strap is in a rib knit with garter stitch at either end where it will be sewn to the purse body. I knitted a big fat rose and leaf from a pattern in the July issue of Simply Knitting magazine.

After sewing together the body, straps, and flower, using cotton quilting thread and a big needle, I needed to make a lining. What do you know, I just happened to have some Cotton Rib knit Camo Pink fabric in my stash, having gotten it last summer from fabric.com. I eyeballed the size of the purse body, then cut a rectangle of the fabric that size, folded it in half, and serged the two sides, leaving an opening at the top. I also cut a narrow rectangle, turned under the edges and hemmed them, then sewed it to one side of the liner with a row of stitching down the middle, so that the liner would have a few pockets. Naturally I had a zipper in the stash that would serve. I machine stitched the zipper to the liner top, then hand-sewed the liner along the zipper tape to the purse body at the top opening.

Cotton Pink Camo lining

Finished purse

Woo-hoo! to our awesome, awesome military! Welcome back, 101st!

A little sewing, a little knitting, a little whatsit

I was inspired for this week’s postaweek project to combine knitting with sewing after I was notified that I won this Burda FiberPlay contest . I have already gotten the Laura Zukaite knitting books in the mail, and they are thrilling! I can’t wait to read them more thoroughly and choose a design to work on. The instructions look to be logical, and thank goodness they are all rated as to level of difficulty.  Zukaite explores and explains the process of designing and experimenting with fibers. Excellent food for thought, and more depth than the average knitting book, more focus on high  fashion rather than DIYing. I love all the background info, history, and thought processes of people who feel compelled to work with threads.

This week’s project idea is not new, it’s similar to what I did with the Go Gators! felted wool purse. It is also a purse, but I knitted the purse and strap my very own self!
I started with a couple of skeins of Sensations Angel Hair 22% wool, 50% acrylic, 28% nylon yarn that I got on sale; I wanted to just knit something without a pattern and see where it led me. I tried doing about 5 rows of stockinette and then a row of purl. Somewhere the pattern got boogered up so technically it needed to be shipped to the Island of Misfit Toys, but I persisted.
I found a remnant for the lining, a white-silver lamee piece dated 2005.

Silver lamee remnant

And, never doubting, I found a zipper in my extensive stash that was a good fit, and with plastic teeth.

9" sturdy zipper

I sewed the zipper onto the lining, then seamed the edges, and sewed lining to knit at the edges of the zipper tapes. I had to finish the ends of the zipper with hand-quilting thread, as the machine balked at the angle of the plastic zipper teeth.

Sewing lining with attached zipper to purse opening

Did I mention that the cats love this purse? They can’t get enough of it. Normally I try to keep them out of the sewing room, but they seek out the woolly bully–usually whatever I’m knitting–and ecstatically try to knead it and sniff into digestion its animal essence.

Paulie, wanting a rendezvous with the woolly bully

I had another remnant, a scarf which is the first thing I made when I started knitting again a few months ago. Since it is rather short for a scarf, and not pretty, I did not hesitate to felt it for use as an embellishment.

Heather green wool scarf, before felting

It was felted in the washing machine and dryer once, and then cut and sewn onto the purse.

Knit purse with felted wool decorations

I learned how to make the felted roses from Felt It, Stitch It, Fabulous, an amazingly inspiring book of projects by Kathryn Tidwell Bieber. This red rose was once part of an old wool sweater that I bought at a yard sale. The strap is knitted in seed stitch. The zipper pull fob is a rhinestone ball button from my bead and button collection, applied with thin plastic-coated wire (if you click on the pic you can barely see it sparkling in the upper left of the same-color purse body). You can also see this project at My Studio on the Burdastyle site.

By the way, I finished the top that goes with the remnant Goth skirt from last week. That wonderful Nancy Zieman pattern McCall’s M6247 includes the skirt, this top, a sleeveless shell, pants, and a jacket with a sash. Which belt do you like best?

D-ring self-fabric belt

Bullet belt

Brass brad studded black waist cincher

Woolly gator redo

This week’s project starts with the remnant of a felted wool sweater.

Sweater, with sleeves cut off

Years ago, my friend Fay and I used to spend Saturdays trolling the yard sale market in Marion County. This gorgeous woolly bully was one of a bonanza of sweaters that were displayed in the sweltering heat of August, going for $1 each. If I’d had $50 left I would have bought them all, because I love woolly sweaters, but I only had $3 or $4 left from my YS fund that day, sadly. Some had tags saying “Made in—” Iceland, Russia, Ireland, even some South American countries where our summer is their winter. I cut off the sleeves and made mittens from this in a previous blog post “Warm, woolly woollens for Fall,” I think.

Embroidering the felted wool

When I looked at what was left, I thought “purse.”

More specifically, “gator purse.”

I know I’ve got some collegiate gator fabric remnants in the barrel.

The first step was to make the creamy white and brown look a little bit gator, by adding some orange and blue.

Here is what will be the purse body, cut on one side because there’s no way I could have effectively made this sit flat on top of the hoop unless I opened up a seam. No worries, once the knit has been felted in the washer and dryer, you can cut it up and the knit won’t ravel. To felt wool sweaters, throw them in the washer with a very miniscule amount of detergent, wash on warm, then dry in the dryer on normal. You can throw a towel in there with the sweater to give it something to agitate against. If the resulting felted sweater is not shrunk to your liking, you can repeat the washing and drying and it will felt further.

I chose to machine embroider “GO GATORS!” on the purse in an Orange and Blue Athletic font that was included in my machine software.

I used 2 layers of cut-away stabilizer with a spray adhesive so that the sweater would stick on the top layer. I didn’t try to hoop the heavy layer of felted wool; I had visions of the hoop popping off during the stitch-out–horrors! Then I added a Solvy topper and basted the design area with the machine so it wouldn’t have a chance to shift around during the process.

Would you believe there are over 27,000 stitches in GO GATORS! and it took almost an hour to stitch out.

I was running around monitoring the stitch-out like a crazed mother hen, because things kept going wrong: the bobbin thread was bird-nesting underneath, the thread was shredding as it came out and causing “check thread” messages every 5 minutes. Finally I switched from Robison-Anton rayon to Robison-Anton polyester, got another bobbin and needle, and the machine seemed more at peace. Funny, at the Viking store here, the proprietors recommend RA rayon thread but the guy at the Janome store in Ocala only sells RA polyester and thinks everything else is no good. Later, Glenn at A-1 found that there was a little rough thing inside the thread path, and I haven’t had any problems since (knock on wood!)

With the ever-present gator fabric lining

I cut out some gator fabric for the lining and for the tabs to attach the purse handles.

The handles came from JoAnn Fabric, using a coupon of course.

I sewed the lining to the sweater fabric with a machine-overlock stitch. I started with a straight stitch, but the fabrics kept slipping. The overlock reached out and grabbed everything in a very satisfactory manner.

Felted wool takes machine stitching amazingly well.

I did hand-sew the seam at the side and bottom of the sweater, with hand-quilting thread.

Maybe I’ll put a magnet closure on at the top; depends on how paranoid I feel about getting pick-pocketed while out at a game.

Orange! Blue! Remnant Redo!

The blue ribbon and gator head fabric motif cut-out finished it off. It was hand-stitched on for a bit of whimsy.

You can also go to my studio on Burda Style and download a pdf that shows how I made this.

http://www.burdastyle.com/projects/felted-wool-gator-purse

Practice for the security check, see? No contraband in here!

Gator Hat Giveaway

New gator hat!

Hello, I made a new gator hat with some remnants of other projects. This one is Butterick B4532 in size medium (22 1/2 ” head circumference), which is a little too small for mah big-gah head! So, if you want this hat, just make a comment on this blog, and I will randomly pick one winner. Deadline is Friday Oct. 22 at 5:00 PM EST. Measure you head and see if this would fit you, first.  And any Georgia Bulldog fans who enter will be subject to the utmost scrutiny as to their motives…

Sigh, with the way the gators have been playing lately, I might get no responses and the hat may have to go to the bottom of my closet.  But surely they will beat Georgia?

Oh, here is a pic of the bag that is from the same Butterick pattern as the hat. I’ve been promising my daughter-in-law a gator purse, so now I can deliver on that! Liked the pattern a lot. Easy to understand instructions, much more so than the Kwik Sew hat pattern, in my opinion!

Butterick bag (pattern view D)