Snappy Dyed Wallets

I might be crazy for doing this, but I just signed up for my second half-marathon!  This one is in just a few weeks, but my sister and I picked it out a few months ago and have been training diligently (ahem, almost diligently) so I'm suuuure it will go splendidly.  We chose one in Annapolis, Maryland, and we're going to make a weekend of it and spend a few days with my parents (and of course, their two pugs, Lucy and Ricky) on their sailboat.  I can't wait to parade those little dogs around town, eat ice cream and seafood, and do some exploring in Annapolis.  Here's to hoping I survive the race, as well!

Before I embark on that adventure, however, I have a few more projects up my sleeve: including the second installment  of the dip-dyed adventures (earlier adventures can be seen here!)  For this project, I used a couple of dip-dyed striped pieces.  I have been steadily working my way through them, in an effort to use these pre-cut pieces up before I forget what project I cut them out for (not like that's ever happened before or anything.)  To create the stripes, I folded my fabric pieces, clipped them with clothespins, and then dipped them into the dye, leaving some un-dyed at the top.  Once they were somewhat dry, I unclipped them and set them with a fixative to avoid bleeding.  What a triumph it was to pull my little pieces out of their buckets and to see that they actually had stripes on them!  Once all of the dyeing was completed for the outer pieces, I cut the insides bits and pieces from this great light blue/silver metallic lining that I found last week at Joann's, and already used for some zippered pouches.  I layered the inside pockets to make room for credit cards (or in my case, a vast array of coffee shop loyalty cards) and a few larger pockets for cash, receipts, lists, pet photos, etc.  I put a zippered coin/trinket pocket on the outside, and voila…a wallet!  I hand-sewed a snap button to the inside (post-photo shoot-I'll upload a complete photo as soon as I snap one!) to keep everything tidy and closed up, and declared these beauties ready for their internet debut.  

One of my many sewing "helpers" taking advantage of some good morning light

My mom and I have also been spending some time on a super-secret project that I will be able to share in just a few weeks (if you can manage to contain your excitement that long, that is.)  I'll be posting a sneak peek this weekend, and the will be revealing the finished project soon, so stay tuned!  Hope your weeks are going wonderfully, thanks for stopping by!

  

Adventures in Dip-Dyeing

Hello, there!  I've spent the last few days trying my hand at some dip-dyeing, and I'm so excited to share what I came up with!  This recent dyeing experiment came out of a valiant, if vastly unsuccessful attempt to right a pair of my sister's pants that had been quite wronged by some hand sanitizer.  By that, of course, I mean that she tried to remove some tree sap from her pants with hand sanitizer.  While it took out the sap brilliantly, it also seeped through to the front of the pants and caused some massive bleach stains (oopsies!)  Of course, my first response was "don't even worry about it, we can dye them" only to realize that bleach stains don't really want to be any color than white (or really, some gross yellowish variation of actual white.)  After employing many creative (read: ridiculous and very messy, even for an outside project) dyeing techniques, I threw in the towel (or pants: I literally threw the whole pair of pants in my dyeing bucket in an effort to unify the color, to no avail) and moved on to Plan B, which was dying some lace to match the pants, cutting the stains out of the pants, and adding the lace behind the holes.  We'll just have to see what happens with hair-brained scheme #2.

However, the real up-side to this dyeing disaster was that the pants in question are a great coral color, which I matched by mixing two boxes of Rit dye: magenta and orange.  It seemed such a shame to make a whole batch of dye for just a little bitty stain, so I planned a few projects, picked up come unbleached cotton, and had a blast experimenting with dip-dyeing.  For the most part, I just dipped parts of the pieces into the dye, leaving the other portions white.  For a few pieces (once I had some confidence in my dipping skills, really) I folded the fabric to make stripes, which I'm pretty proud to say actually look like stripes.  I've been making my way through the dyed pieces, cutting lining pieces to match and sewing them into little pouches, wallets, and bags, and I have just a few to share with you today.  

These four pouches were the simplest of my planned dip-dyed projects, so I started with them.  I interfaced all of the dyed pieces, cut linings from some great metallic prints I found at JoAnn Fabrics, and just added a 9-inch zipper to each to make some simple pouches.  I have been meaning to try a half-circle pouch for a while, and I love how they came out!  The only thing missing from these little pouches is a great zipper pull.  I'm thinking…tassels?  Maybe a little pull made out of lace?  So many possibilities!

In other news, I'm working up a simple photo tutorial on how to make your very own zippered pouches.  They've really become one of my go-to projects…they're simple, quite quick to whip up, and leave lots of room for customization (the world is your oyster with this kind of simple project template.)  I hope to have that up tomorrow, so stay tuned!

I spent the rest of the weekend doing lots of running, practicing, spending time with my sister, and of course, with this guy.

  I hope your weekends were as lovely and relaxing as mine was.