One Woman's Trash is Another Woman's Treasure

wI know I've been gone for quite a while. A lot of things have been going on around here. Made it hard to get the creative juices flowing much less able to sit at a computer and blog about it all. Things seem to be calming down. At least there's an attempt at calmness. I'm hoping that it will at least last the rest of May. I need a break. And my sewing machine has been calling my name.

Why my sewing machine would be calling my name? I have no clue. I guess it's feeling neglected. Each time I use it though, it complains the entire time. Material is too thick, material is too thin. Rarely does it do exactly what I want it to unless I do some major tweaking. I suppose if I was just making plain fabric pillow cases my machine would be happy. But I like doing crazy stuff like button holes, and sewing in zippers. And my machine needs a bit of persuasion to accomplish the task.

I suppose this is great training for the day I can afford an upgrade. After all the frustrations with my sewing machine, a new one would seem like a God send.

Anyways, the old lady is going to be put to work again. See my sister cleaned out her wardrobe and was going to toss out two large black garbage bags worth of clothes. I convinced her to let me have the bags. After sifting through them and tossing what really should be tossed (never hand down underwear, it's just nasty), I found some gems. These clothes are currently too big for me and some aren't even my style. But the fabric is great and my clothes budget is nonexistent these past months. So I'm taking some inspiration from the blog New Dress A Day and am going to turn my sister's toss outs into new duds for myself.

So my challenge for myself is to turn my sister's old gothic punk clothing into classy pieces with a touch of whimsy.  My goal is to produce something new each week. I'm allowing $5 to be spent on notions (thread, ribbon, lace, buttons, zippers, needles) for each project. The bulk of the item has to be from the discarded clothes.

Wish me luck.

It would be encouraging if you considered donating to my transplant find at http://cota.donorpages.com/PatientOnlineDonation/COTAforSolanaC/