Meandering Melody: 10*20*30 minutes to sew.

10*20*30 Minutes to Sew is the title of a Book I own and love by Nancy Zieman. In it she gives lots of time saving ideas sent to her by viewers of her television show. She also teaches that you can organize your sewing projects and then when you have only 10 minutes to sew you can! And in a few days of ten minutes each you will have a project completed. Once I stopped thinking that I needed to have a whole day free to get a big project started or completed I began sewing more frequently and more happily.

Last week I did some updating of my wardrobe by creating two spring skirts. They ended requiring a lot more patience then I ever imagined but turned out reasonably well. The first one was created from a treasured remnant saved since high school.

When I was a junior the chorus dress we wore was made from the softest cotton jersey I had ever felt. Although the dress wasn't very flattering to many of us, wearing it was a pleasure to my skin. Later when I was married I turned the high school chorus dress into a two piece maternity set. This week while going through my fabric stash I found the left over fabric and the well worn “maternity” skirt. I cut the front of my new skirt and the “kick out” panels from the fabric remnant and the back of the skirt from the least stained and worn part of the original dress-now-skirt. What tried my patience about this project is that I was creating the triangle inserts without a pattern. And the sewing in of the triangles turned out to be very fiddly and frustrating.

The next skirt was created from a skirt I purchased last fall in England. I purchased the skirt because I loved the color, it was like nothing I owned and the price was fantastic.

But I didn't really love all the velvet on the skirt so thought I'd remove the top two squares of velvet... unfortunately once I'd cut off the velvet I realized I really did not like that look. unfortunately I did not think to take a photo of the original skirt. so photo shows the cut out panel of the squares that I removed the velvet from, the original waistband and one of the side pieces that I cut off the skirt.)