This Post Was Supposed to be Tuesday Thursday - Christmas Stocking

This was one of the most frustrating pins to date, guys. Of course, this post would come after a Throwback Thursday that I posted to prove to you that yes, I do mess-up sometimes. Here's the thing though - this one was pure user-error. Nothing with the pin was wrong - instructions were great, easy to understand and legitimately was as easy as the lady said it was going to be.

This is how you know it is frustrating: I have a whole 3 pictures. A before... and two afters. Are you excited yet?

Fantastic choice in colors, Colette. Incredibly photo-friendly... #photofail

So no, the snowflake stocking is not mine. What is mine is the blue velvet underneath it. Now, as one big chunk of fabric it wasn't very stretchy. However, when you pin that stupid stocking to the stupid velvet fabric and stupidly cut it out - it turns into water. You heard me. Water. This stuff suddenly was super stretchy, fell apart when you cut it, and left behind all sorts of velvet fluff. It was quite ridiculous.

So I followed the directions to the T and ended up sewing the toe completely off. Yup - I essentially had a sack. I truly did think about stopping there and just saying it was a Santa Sack (see what I did there?) but I couldn't. I planned on making a stocking, a stocking I will make. Eventually.

After I ripped out the seam of that one (ultimately creating a ton more velvet fluff all over my machine - awesome) I sewed it all back up and managed to get it in a stocking/sock-like fashion.

I also made the hang thing about a foot longer than necessary, but a little bit of snipping with scissors and a whole lot of "I don't freaking care anymore" fixed that situation reallll quick.

In the end, I had a stocking that wasn't so bad. I was almost proud of myself.

Until I hung it up.

And it immediately returned to looking like a misshapen sack. I should have stopped while I was ahead on that one, I suppose.

Until next time... get hungry, because I'm pretty sure my next few posts are going to be surrounding myself with Christmas-cookie Pinterest things.

Throwback Thursday Thrifty Sew (see what I did there?)

Well hey there friends :) If you weren't aware before, I used to have a blog that focused on (mostly) refashioning using my limited sewing skills. So far on this blog (cross your fingers here) I haven't had any major fails. So before I have you guys thinking I'm actually good at this crafting stuff, let me throw a little Christmas Throwback Thursday out there of a major fail that happened right before Christmas. When my blog was still new. And skills still mediocre.

To switch it up a bit... my comments to my own writing are in bold.

I'll warn you now - this is not pretty, and I'm not happy about it. I'm sure I'll re-visit this project at some point, (Note to self: stop lying to yourself and actually revisit it) but here's where it was left. This one was inspired by Pinterest, the site I'm extremely obsessed with and totally okay with that fact; (see? this blog idea was essentially born in 2012) it gives me a lot of good ideas. Recently, I had pinned an outfit that I liked and it had a boatneck sweater that was gorgeous. So when I saw this sweater, much like the one that I pinned, I had to snatch it up for $3.99. (Note to self: start shopping at Salvation Army again.)

Voila! It wasn't perfection yet, but I swore I could get it there. (Spoiler: I was wrong. Very, very wrong.) And yes, I realized that I did the "hand on the hip" thing again that I swore I wouldn't do. So... here you go.

This angle is worse. Thank God I went back to "hand on hip" pose immediately. So yes - no hand on hip happens, it's just not my favorite way to "pose". The plan: a) cut off turtleneck in boatneck-esque fashion (for those keeping tabs, this is literally where I went wrong on this one.) b) sew up the hem c) be done for the next 4 days of Christmas vacation and wear my sweet new comfy sweater for the drive between the parents houses.

So task A commenced:

Done. So far so good.  (This is a lie. As I've learned since, you don't cut the neck THAT much on a stretchy sweater.) So then I pinned it all around and sewed the seam to complete task B. This is where things got shady.(Too late, Colette. Too late) First of all, the sweater was puffy and didn't want to fit under the footer very well, so I may or may not have (read as: definitely did) freestyled a lot over the manufacturer's seams where it certainly wouldn't go under the footer when it was down. One would think this was the issue but alas, it was not (although it could have been. Who knows - I'm new at this.) So I finished the hem and put the sweater back on. And it rolled like no tomorrow, making a HUGE gap in between the sweater and my skin. (Gee - could this be because you cut off a shit ton of sweater at the top?) So I decided to do a second hem to make it a bit more stable. It didn't help.

When I walked out like this, my husbands first reaction was "it doesn't look bad. What's wrong with it?" (So supportively wrong.) And then I put my arms down and the whole thing fell down to my elbows. Problem found. So, I turned the whole thing inside out and pinched the top seams together. Knowing that this certainly would have been too thick for my sewing machine to handle, I hand sewed the seams together so it wasn't falling off my shoulder. To my absolute horror, this is what I saw when I put it right side out and put it on:

It looks like a shoulder pad in there, (or an arm boob. Is arm boob a thing? It is. It's pictured above.) but it most certainly is not. That is the result of my hand sewing at 11pm. I don't even know how this happened. The worst part wasn't even this nub(my husband called it a shoulder nipple) (SEE?) - it was the fact that I tried to cut off the excess fabric creating the nub, and ended up with a huge hole in the shoulder. This is where I threw in the towel for the night and decided that I would attempt to fix it after the holidays. For now - no cute and comfy travel sweater.

So there it is - Throwback Thursday completed.

And yes, this was a sweater that I planned on traveling in. In a car. With only my husband. 

The idea of this boatneck sweater still attracts me, thought, so I will revisit this idea at some point to see if my smart ass comments hold any water either. Plan to see this in the next few months.