The final chapter of the dress: Clutch sewing tutorial

Hello! Again, my rate of refashions has taken a toll because of the wedding planning and dress sewing BUT! It’s over (sad face) but it was literally a perfect wedding (happy face).  I still plan on doing a post on making the wedding dress (even though it wasn’t a refashion) 

But TODAY we are going to finish the dress to bag-things series that I seem to have started with a clutch made from the rest of the dress! Now I have a complete matching set, it’s pretty swell 

I took the leftover white part from the bottom of the dress and made this little clutch. I liked the ruffled gathered part from where I trimmed it off, so I kept that free when sewing the zipper in. This project is SUPER easy and can be done with any fabric scraps and a zipper! 

What you need is:

• 7 in zipper
• 2 pieces of lining fabric cut to 10in x 7in
• 2 pieces of outer fabric cut to 10in x 7in
• A strap piece however long and wide you want it. Remember it will be folded in half lengthwise and in 3rd or 4ths width wise. 

ta-da!

When I cut the ruffled piece, I tried to keep the ruffles straight when measuring, hence the now bowed looking rectangle. This gives me the cute ruffled look and the slightly rounded bottom of the finished piece. Also, let’s talk about how wrinkly my fabric is ha! I know, I’m going to have to face the wrath of the sewing gods. This darn fabric was just so darn hard to get unwrinkled!  Oh well, too bad, it worked out fine! 

Now the ONLY tricky part to this whole project was figuring out how to make my ruffled edge stay in tact when sewing in the zipper. Usually you’d do right sides to the zipper so it made a nice clean edge, but in this case I wanted it sticking off the top of the zipper. To do that, I went against all sewing lessons ever (it hurt a little) and did this:

Basically, I laid the zipper face down on the right side of the lining fabric, lining up the top edges, then on top of that, in the opposite direction, laid the outer fabric lined up with the bottom edge. I hope that makes sense! Then, I sewed as close to the zipper from the top as I could with my zipper foot. This caused the lining fabric to fold in towards my outer fabric correctly, as well as attaching my outer fabric and leaving my pretty ruffle. 

I repeated this on both sides of the zipper. 

Speaking of the zipper, check this out!

Holy cool vintage zipper! A while back I received a bunch of my grandmother’s old sewing supplies and this came with it. SO COOL! Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to zip haha 

Anyways, back to the clutch. Now that I have both sides sewn onto the zipper, I’m done with all the hard stuff. Next, let’s make the strap. To do this, I took my strap piece and folded it in thirds. Normally you wouldn’t do this as it leaves a raw edge showing, however I had one finished edge that I thought was pretty and complimented my ruffled edge, so I just folded it in thirds and kept le edge. 

Once I sewed the strap using a straight stitch close to the left side fold and finished edge, i folded it in half long ways, awaiting it’s placement into the clutch itself. 

At this point, I just constructed the clutch like any other easy zipper pouch - photo story below! To read the whole refashion, visit my blog at recreatables.com :-D 

I hope you enjoyed this! Now time to go out with my new set!

Dress into Tote Bag Refashion

Hey! Hi! It’s been FOREVER! Like, a really, long, unacceptable time. I haven’t been here for so long because my mom and I were sewing my wedding dress!!! Head on over to my blog to read this whole post, and to see the DRESS SNEAK PEEK! AHHHH YAYAnyways, let’s just jump right into the refashion:

Turn a dress into a tote bag!!

Yes, I only tilt my head to one side obviously!

So I found this dress like a year ago while Steven and I were in Florida. It’s Calvin Kline, I love the colors and the fabric feels amazing. The only catch, it’s WAY too big. I haven’t done anything with it until now because I wasn’t quite sure HOW TO do anything to it. My normal sew-up-the-sides wasn’t going to work because of the tiers and the bunchiness, I feel like it would just get off and weird, plus there’s a side zipper so that really throws that out the door. It’s also super wrinkly, I tried ironing it for a moment then said heck with it, I’m making a tote bag haha

This project is actually SUPER EASY and I can see it being adapted to many many different dresses or tops (and consequently, me having WAY too many tote bags… or is that even a thing?) I feel like this dress made it even easier because it basically had lines saying CUT ME HERE – so yeah, tote bag. 

As you can see, I literally just cut the bottom white part off (I’m thinking about making it into a cosmetic bags of sorts to go inside the tote) Two of the things that make this dress so great for a tote bag, are the facts that it's lined, and it has pockets that turn into outside pockets for keys and cell phones! 

So from here, I just sewed the bottom! The ONLY tricky thing about this project is how you sew the lining and outside, and remembering to leave a hole when sewing the outside so you can flip it back right side out. Basically, you want the lining seam to be facing OUT towards the outside, and the outside to be facing IN towards the lining, so in the end you cant see any of the seam allowance. Does that make sense? To do this, first I sewed the lining WRONG SIDES TOGETHER as is like so:

And you're pulling the outside fabric up, so you can sew RIGHT SIDES together, so it looks like this:

Sew across just like the lining, and remember to leave the flipping hole!

 Flip it through, and you're done!!

Thanks for reading! :-D

- Hillary  

Hello, introduction, and refashion!

Hello world!

My name is Hillary! I currently live in Northern Virginia (the once place I promised I'd never live) with my wonderful husband, rescue greyhound and sassy cat. I work as a graphic designer for a college by day, refashioner by night (err.. eveningish, before bedtime.) I was first introduced to the wonderful, exciting and fulfilling life of a refashioner about 2 years ago and have been all in since. I've been on this "no new clothes" kick for almost two years now (minus undies - those are definitely new) (although I plan on making my own soon) and I'm pretty much addicted to the thrift store game. I am a self-taught seamstress and I'm far from perfect.

I have this refashion blog, ReCreatables.com - It's like this great diary of my learning process, some of them are awful and my pictures are awful and my writing is so goofy but I want to keep them all up there for those many times people tell me "I can't sew". I feel like every sewing blog out there is perfect, flawless, the stitches are great, only the good sides are shown, and I'm reminded about my need for instant gratification which leads to poor decisions and bad stitches. Blah. But you know what? I have fun, and I keep sewing and getting a little better, and it feels great to finish something. I want other people to have that experience in place of the mental "I can't sew" block. 

ANYWAYS, enough of that. Here's one of my favorite recent refashions: 

I had the top half of a dress left over from a previous refashion, as well as this sparkly nude/pink dress thing which I thought went well with the green.

This is pretty straight forward (I'm sure there's a diagonal joke somewhere in there) I basically measured where the diagonal would look best on my body, pinned some marks, then cut. I cut a rectangle tube out of the dress skirt, and attached right sides, raw edges together.

When I tested it out and put it on, The corner of the diagonal was a little funky looking. To fix this, I pinched, pinned, sewed, and disguised with a bow (seriously the fix to all the world's problems)

I also really like to promote sewing in PJs, this should be a thing :-) To check out a more in-depth tutorial and how I did the bow thing, please visit my blog righttttt here!

I hope you liked it, I look forward to doing many many more for you guys!! (let's be internet friends!)

Always sew in PJs, (I've just decided this is my new closing line now)
Hillary