Back to old favourites by learning to sew
It feels so damn hard to get rid of favourite clothes, doesn’t it? Sometimes you might shove them aside to be fixed later, thinking, Maybe I can still use this material somehow. I confess: done so for a while now. And I did not always muster up the willpower to actually fix the clothing. Not even though it would’ve required a really small effort. This time I did go through the it – while recognising that sewing is not my strong suite and it’ll take a while to get decent.
The inspiration, small wins and print I wanted to save
I do not have a sewing machine so I started by hand. During last summer I got courage to do the leather jacket restoration project – that I wrote about in this blog – after fixing an armpit seam from a shirt I really loved. After that I did some very minor fixes by hand to other pieces of clothing as well. But it took until the fall season to actually get started with trying to make something out of the the Noisy May–shirt that had the all-seeing-eye printed on it. And as a bonus I wanted to utilise my worn off skinny jean legs to make arm warmers.
When inspecting the print shirt I noticed that some spots of the fabric had worn thinner within time. Mostly from the sleeves and around the armpits. I removed the sleeves and sewed around the cuts. The top itself would be a bit scandalous to use by itself so I’ll be using a grey top underneath it.
Denim arm warmers and Singer Handheld mending machine
To match the vibe of the printed top I made the denim arm warmers by cutting thumb holes and a little bit of fabric off horizontally. First, I sewed around the thumb holes. Then, I folded and sewed the top and bottom openings, and stitched the sides closed.
Bought Singer mending machine from sale for 5 euros since I was curious to try what it could do. It did not come with a power cord so I needed to buy four AA –batteries to get it powered on. I tried sewing arm warmers with the handheld mending machine but I got frustrated pretty quickly. I feel like the machine is better for more straight pieces like curtains. If the thread slips out of place, it is annoying to have to remove the batteries for safety before threading the needle eye again.
However, I will give the hand sewing machine another try when I have a home decor project going on. I ended up sewing the arm warmers completely by hand. Considering whether I should make ribbons or something like that around the wrist part. Not sure but so far so good:
Maybe I could actually wear this for a concert?
