“Sew” {Not} Easy

Remember when I posted my New Year’s Resolutions? Well, one of the my goals that I DIDN’T mention was that I wanted to try to sew something this year. I’ve got an entire folder in my Favorites links dedicated to projects I’d like to try.

Rewind to last Saturday. We took an impromptu trip to the mall where I happened upon the CAH-UTEST little Valentine’s outfit at Gymboree.

It was sweet. It was adorable. It was…$112.75!!!!

Seriously, had I bought each of those matching pieces that’s how much it would have cost me. And I mean, I love me a cute outfit but that is what we call A WASTE OF MONEY.

So the wheels started turning…and I started thinking…couldn’t I MAKE a cute little Valentine’s outfit for Lily?

I started looking back through my links and found two sewing projects that I thought I could handle and I started getting creative.

Except…I’m not really very creative.
On a scale of 1 to Martha Stewart, I’d say I’m about a negative 5.

But that didn’t stop me. It probably should have, but it didn’t.

The first project I attempted was a pair of Baby Legs. You can find tutorials for these all over the Internet. I used the one here.

Seriously, these are like the easiest things ev-ah. It should take 20 minutes, tops.

It took me 3 hours.

And I ended up with this:

Something told me that’s not how they were supposed to look…and after much head scratching and brow furrowing, I figured out my mistake. Luckily, those were my “practice socks”.

Here’s how the real ones turned out:

Not too shabby – if you look closely you can see that my stitches aren’t exactly straight, but when they’re on Lily, you really can’t even tell {at least that’s what I tell myself}.

Next up was the shirt. My super cool bloggy friend Kim is always doing fun little projects and I got this idea from her. I got myself a plain white shirt, a scrap of pink fabric, and some ribbon.

Cut out a heart and applied it to the shirt using Wonder Under. So far, so good.

At this point, I thought to myself, “Self, do you really need to sew around the edge of the heart? It looks like it’s fastened pretty securely with that Wonder Under there. Why don’t you just call it a day?”

But, no. Of course, I couldn’t just leave well enough alone. I just thought that the zig-zag stitch that Kim did around the edges of her appliqués were so cute and after all my machine HAS a zig-zag stitch feature on it, it does all the zigging and zagging for you I mean really HOW HARD CAN IT BE?

Well.

Pretty hard, apparently, if you’re me. Because as it turns out the machine won’t do EVERYTHING for you. Like, for example, the machine will not make your stitches straight.

Or turn corners for you.

Or keep you from accidentally sewing the front of the shirt to the back of the shirt.

*AHEM*

It took me six an embarrassing number of attempts during which I stitched and then ripped out stitches and stitched some more and ripped out some more stitches and the final product still looked like it had been sewn by a drunken sailor.

It was at this point that I decided that the crooked stitches were just going to have to do because the very thought of redoing it all pretty much made me want gouge out my eyes with the seam ripper.

I think the crookedness sort of adds to the charm, don’t you? (Don’t answer that)

 

At any rate, the shirt, fabric, socks, and Wonder Under only cost me a whopping $8.57 which beats spending over a hundred dollars any day.

And as Dave reminded me – Lily doesn’t care. And she still looks stinkin’ cute, if I do say so myself :)