Monday's Supper

DH cooked a chicken and asked me to make the side dishes.  I started the rice in the small rice cooker, and selected one zucchini and one yellow squash.  The rest is here for you in pictures (the first picture includes coconut oil, butter, and cut scallions).

What I Wore Today

Remember the skirt I altered?  (click here to see)  I wore it to work today with a thrifted slinky tank top and a thrifted cotton shirt, and here it is:

Inspiration

I don't go shopping for clothes very often.  I don't get catalogs in the mail.  The only magazines we currently get in the mail are Reader's Digest, Time, and Sew News.  I do visit my favorite sewing sites on the Internet  often - Delphi's Friendly Sewing, Pattern Review, and many sewing blogs.  I just don't feel like I'm getting much fashion information. On the other hand, at this age, I really don't care what other people are wearing - beyond fit - because I like to do my own thing.

I want to share one of my most recent inspirations.  I saw this picture in a coworker's Coldwater Creek catalog.  I think I can sew a reasonable copy of it with knit fabrics and a T-shirt pattern.  Once you see this picture, you can view other (mostly) inspiration pictures in my Styles album:

From Styles

Sewing, One Day at a Time, and a Question

I finished that skirt.  Of course, it could not have been as easy as I thought.  I stitched on an elastic casing made of purchased bias tape - with the ends folded under - and inserted the elastic.  When I tried it on, I decided that I needed to narrow the skirt a bit.

After figuring out how much I needed to cut off, I laid the skirt out on the cutting table and just hacked it off.  I ripped out the casing's lower edge of stitching for about three inches to each side of the cut.  I opened up the casing, pinned the cut edges right sides together, and stitched the seam.  I followed this by zigzagging over the cut edges.  I turned down the casing and stitched it down along the lower edge.

Have you ever had to undo the work you've done on a project?

Sewing Mojo Problems

My sewing mojo has been inconsistent lately.

I started to alter a RTW skirt that was too long.  I cut off the waistline casing with elastic and drawstring, then serged the cut edge.  I left that on the cutting table for a long time.

I traced and cut out stretch woven, above-the-knee shorts, but left that project on the cutting table for a few weeks, too.

I traced a pattern to make my DH some knit pajama shorts, then cut it out in a light-weight woven fabric.  I know that a test garment should have similar properties of the final product.  What Was I Thinking?!?  That sat there for a couple weeks, on top of the cutting table, in the mess of tsunami-like piles of stuff.  You know - flat-surface syndrome.

Realizing that files of stuff were not helping my attitude towards sewing, I decided to do something that I Really Wanted To Do.  Read that as:  Make Something for MySelf.  Easy stuff first.

Using the "one step at a time" method combined with the "one day at a time" method, I managed to iron open packaged wide double-fold bias tape, pin it to the top of the skirt, and press the bias tape to the inside of the skirt, which took at least three days.

One day last week, I was wearing a particular skirt that is just simply getting old.  It's made of cheap navy jet knit and I'm not enjoying it as much as I used to.  I decided to replace it.  I bought some navy ponte roma knit, which I really like.  I will probably use the same pattern as the skirt it's to replace, but add some length to it - about three or four inches.  Here's the original skirt:

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