Here they are, all done and ready to put on eBay. I started them at $35 as I’m never sure how much things like this will go for. I think they turned out pretty good!

Now to the frugal part - The patch on the bib was about $2. The vinyl is a small piece of a bigger piece I have that I use on Harley Davidson Christmas stockings. The bandannas I used for the embellishment are some I bought in bulk a long time ago to make potholders, which I have posted before. The trim was some I had from a yard sale that I’ve been saving. It’s extremely old, but in very good shape, so why not use it? The overalls themselves were either free or about $2; I can’t remember. I spent about 6 hours sewing and designing (designing mostly as I fall asleep at night, for real!), and loved every minute of it. It was fun deciding where to place what, how to problem-solve, and how to finish them off. It would be easy to go even more overboard than I did, but I felt like it was time to stop with the ruffles.

Get to work! Find something you can remake.

Yesterday, I worked on the Harley Davidson overalls. I added wings to the back pockets. Sounds easy, right? I took the pockets off, which means that I picked through industrial stitching with my little seam ripper, one by one, two by two, taking great care not to tear the fabric of the overalls themselves. I cut the wings out of the bandanna, leaving a bit of fabric on the edges to provide a base for the machine appliqué. I basted the wings on the pockets, did the machine satin stitching, added some decorative trim to the pockets to girlyfie them, then put the pockets back on the overalls, matching the top stitching on the overalls. This took about 2 hours. It was a tedious process, but the end result is worth it.

Next, I added a Harley Davidson shield to the back of the overalls. I’m not 100% happy with the way it looks, so I am going to fine tune it today. I also took off the tag on the side of the jeans that was a decorative item before I started the redesign. The original tag is still inside the overalls, so the manufacturer is visible.

Last, I added a fray checking solution to the machine appliqued edges.

Today, I work on the shield on the back and start the leg ruffles. I may finish this project today. I haven’t decided on a price yet, but I believe it’s going to be a really nice outfit when I’m done!

Wow, I can’t believe I did it. I finished a fairly big project yesterday. I’m planning a yard/craft sale for 9/20. Having decided that, I decided also to make a slew of potholders and bibs. I’ve been working on 12 potholders and 5 bibs production style - doing the appliqué work, putting them together, machine quilting them, adding the binding (both machine and by hand), and then adding finishing touches finally yesterday (hanging loops for the potholders and closures for the bibs). I can’t believe they’re finally done! Now what?

I’m not one to be without a sewing project, so last night, I took apart a pair of Polo overalls (kid sized) and started designing a girl’s Harley Davidson theme. This morning, I added a leather (vinyl) strip to the front bib pocket and a Harley shield emblem on top of that. I put the pocket back on. Now my plan is to add a shield to the back (from a bandanna) and then the ruffles on the legs. The ruffles will be Harley bandanna fabric alternating with flames fabric. Those will most likely go for sale on eBay as I wouldn’t expect to make any money on them at a yard sale. I have about 10 pair of overalls to work on and have thousands of ideas. Strawberry Shortcake, firemen, dogs, Christmas, etc., etc., etc. I wish I could do it all!

I’ve also been collecting black Christmas fabrics. With that and the “leather,” I’ll be making Harley Davidson Christmas stockings. I’d like to have a few done for the yard/craft sale, but they may be online items instead.

Lastly, I’m planning some blouses for winter. I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight and, darn the luck, can’t wear a lot of what I wore last winter. I have some kicky prints and some fun patterns to play with. I want to do a couple of block tops and maybe a block T-dress (I found an old one I had that I can use as a pattern).

I sew every day. Do you? It makes me feel right.

I go to yard sales almost every Saturday. I go for specific items and sometimes I find them, other times I don’t. What I also find, without fail, is a person or three selling their sewing machine and their sewing “stuff.”

This year alone, I’ve purchased a Featherweight (Singer) and an Elna at yard sales. Combined, I spent less than $50 on those two machines. I had the Featherweight serviced and it’s running like new. The Elna came running like a top. Both were machines of the person having the sale’s mothers. It makes me wonder where mom is, why isn’t she sewing anymore, and why the daughters didn’t want to keep the machines and do some sewing of their own. Are people too busy now? Do they see sewing as a chore? Was it something they saw their moms do that seemed like work and not pleasure?

That’s our secret - sewing is very much a pleasure. It’s the thing *I* do - and I love the time I spend with my machine. Nancy, of Nancy’s Notions and Sewing with Nancy, said to sew something every day. I believe it was suggested that even if it was only 5 minutes, try to sew something every day. I do try, but some days, I just don’t make it.

Back to the yard sales! Today, like every other Saturday, I rummaged through a box of this and that - rick-rack, snaps, old threads, snips, hooks and eyes, ribbons, laces, and untold other treasures. There were two more sewing baskets next to this box, but I didn’t go through those. I just knew I would end up buying it all and trying to figure out what to do with it, and my budget today didn’t include sewing items. But as I handled the items in the box, I wondered what project this and that were from. I wondered who bought them and how they saved the money to do so. I wondered why the daughter of that someone was now selling these items and didn’t she see the value? I’d say that she didn’t. She probably didn’t sew a stitch herself, and there are more people like that than I’ll ever know.

I guess the bottom line is, sewing just isn’t everyone’s thing! Go figure.

My license plate says I <3 SEWING (the <3 is really an upright heart that I painted with borrowed fingernail polish!). I get comments all the time from people and today, an older woman got a kick out of it. She was at the same yard sale. When I left, she was going through the very same box of sewing supplies.

Yard sales are a treasure trove of notions and fabrics, and sewing machines. It’s a truly frugal outing and sometimes, just sometimes, you can pick up a piece of sewing history and make something new and beautiful with it.

P.S. I’ve never bought rick-rack new. I’ve been fortunate enough to pick up a box full here and there at yard sales!

I’ve been a frugal sewing person for a long, long time. I’ve been saving fabric from other projects for well over 30 years.

Thirty years. That’s a long time when you think about it.

Tonight, I needed to clean and organize an area in my sewing room. My task involved cleaning out a WWII trunk filled with fabric and prepare the space for two bookcases I purchased.

I opened the trunk and started sorting. There was the black printed fabric I had made curtains and a tank cover for the bathroom in our old farm house when my oldest son was two. There was the off white printed fabric that had covered all the windows in the front two rooms of the farm house. That particular piece used to be the bottom part of cafe curtains; its mate was a brown fabric with the same print and it had been the top part of the curtains. Oh, I so remember measuring and measuring all these different windows to make sure I had the length and width right. Old farm houses don’t come with windows that are all the same size!

There was the fabric that I had used to make my oldest son and his dad matching shirts for Christmas. Button down with plackets. I remember making them and interfacing the collars and picking out buttons in two different sizes that were designed the same. For the presentation, I packed my son’s shirt in one box and wrapped it with my husband’s name on the tag and wrapped my husband’s shirt in a box with my son’s name on the tag. My son opened his first and had the oddest look on his face. They rarely wore them at the same time, but it was great.

Oh, and darn, I remembered that other bundle of fabric - the ugliest orange and turquoise tropical fabric that had been a pair of “jams” my son wore in the 5th grade. Now we call them board shorts and the fabrics are not quite so gaudy, but this fabric was the height of 5th grade fashion at that time. What am I going to do with it now?

I also found the fabric I had made curtains and bumper pads with for my twins, who are now 24 years old. There were two coordinating fabrics to begin with, and I have very little of one of the fabrics and about a half-yard of the other now.

I also held some Austrian silk that I’ve had since I was a kid. I doubt I’ll ever make anything out of it, but I have it if I want to.

All of the above fabrics missed the “give away” and “throw away” piles. I simply had to keep them. I might make something out of them some day, right?

Going through your stash of saved bits and pieces can provide a wonderful hour or so of wistful remembering. I highly recommend a trip down memory lane. You just might come away with a plan of attack for using some of those prized fabrics!

Here’s the quilt - including the block in the lower right hand corner with Patsy’s name embroidered on it. I did encircle the signature with ribbon to reinforce the hand embroidery. It’s hanging on the line now, and when it dries, I’ll shake it out, package it up, and send it on its way to my grandnephew.

Click on the thumbnail pictures to get the full view. I think I’m as proud of this as any quilt I’ve made thus far.

The quilt for my nephew’s baby is done. I took the last hand stitches tonight as I completed attaching the gingham binding. The back is fleece; the front is primarily made of fabric recycled from a quilt my sister, Patsy, my grandnephew’s grand mother, had made in 1977. I shared some of the story of the quilt in this blog post.

When Brian, my nephew, married Joanna, there was a single rose on the altar at the church. It was there in honor of his mother, my sister. At the reception, Joanna had placed a photograph of Patsy on the grand piano in the room. She wasn’t there in person, but they thought of her and had her at both the wedding and the reception, and it sure meant a lot to my side of the family to see these tokens of remembrance.

My sister is a big part of why I sew. She could make the most elegant things out of the most simple of materials. She could make anything. She embroidered the most beautiful items. For a time, she would take a simple chambray shirt and embroider the yoke en toto, usually adding something to the front pocket. Those shirts were amazing. I had one, but who knows what happened to it. I didn’t realize the work of art I owned until it was gone. She could draw simply anything. It was amazing. I wanted to be able to do the things she did. I learned to embroider from books and never came close to the quality of her work, but I was very proud of it. I saw some of her early quilts and knew they were made of things she already had. I started saving every bit of fabric I could to make a quilt someday. I’ve since made plenty, but they started with a big paper bag in which I collected bits of this and that. She used to joke that she was the “Maxwell Housewife.”

Later in her life, she didn’t sew much. I always wished she would - she was so good at it!

I’ll post a picture of the completed quilt soon. It needs to be washed on the gentle cycle and hung in the sun to dry. I think it’s beautiful. I know it’s beautiful. It’s a work of Patsy’s art combined with my desire to give my grandnephew a little something to grow old with. We miss my sister. She was something else.

Today is my twins’ 24th birthday. Twenty-four years ago, I gave birth to a very small girl and a tiny boy, and after a few years of health issues, developmental testing and treatment, and on and on too numerous to express in just a few sentences, they’ve grown into lovely 24-year-old adults. The girl is always easy to gift. She has 1000 things in mind. The boy, not so easy. But! Every time I ask him what he wants for this occasion or that, the response is always the same - “A jar of bees.”

Why a jar of bees? I don’t really know, but it’s just the stock answer!

I picked up some bee fabric a couple years ago, intending to make something bee-like for him and just never got around to it. Today, I was sitting at the sewing machine working on pot holders for an upcoming sale and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bee fabric. I stopped what I was doing, cut some squares of denim and some strips of the bee fabric and made a pillow top. I cut a simple jar shape out of the bee fabric, neck of the jar from some white, and snipped a piece of double fold black bias tape for the jar top. Two hours later, I have a stuffed “Jar of Bees” pillow!

I attached a note saying, “Dear Tom, Here’s something I know you’ve always wanted - your very own jar of bees. Happy Birthday! Love, Mom.” Then, I put the pillow on his laptop, where I know he’ll find it.

Breaking it down, the bee fabric cost about $2 a few years ago, the denim is recycled, the white is recycled, and the black bias tape was something I already had. I zig-zagged over all raw edges and used polyfil I already had. So, really, the cost of his pillow was about $2 plus a hefty dose of love. Frugal birthday giving with a heart.

I love to make simple things that may mean something to the recipient. I hope he gets the humor in the pillow and gets a smile on his face. It doesn’t cost a lot to make a person happy. So, keep your ears open and listen for little things that those you love want or like. Then get that sewing machine humming and put it together. Recycle something you already have or make it out of alternative fabrics and threads that you can throw together with your imagination.

Frugal sewing definitely doesn’t have to be dull and this pillow was as easy as it comes. No pattern. Low cost. Done.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOM AND ALLISON!

I didn’t take photos of them, but boy oh boy, did I sew them. I made 66 (I think 66?) bags for a project at Child Development Resources. They were given out this week to parents and in the bags, they put activity notebooks, books, and supplies to make a lot of the activities. It was the comments surrounding the bags that were interesting. But first, how they were made.

I cut pieces of about 18″ square, leftover cotton and cotton blends, decorated one side of some of them, and put them right side together, taking seams on three sides, serging the side and bottom seams for strength. Some of them were 18 x 36, so I needed only to fold them and sew the side seams. I then hemmed the top. I made handles out of the same or coordinating fabrics by cutting a 2″ strip, folding it and then folding it on itself, cutting them into 10″ lengths, and placing them 4″ apart in the center of the top of the bag, one on each side. I reinforced the seams and voila, a bag. Simple, right?

I can’t tell you how many people were impressed with them. It never dawned on me that people who don’t sew would be dazzled by a simple bag. It truly was not hard to make! Those of us who sew don’t see the magic that those who do not sew see. The people receiving these bags saw them as something I could sell. I know better; they’re simple bags without even a boxed bottom. They saw them as something creative. I know better; they’re simple bags without any special design work. I could make them in my sleep. They saw them as something special. I know better; they’re just bags.

Or do I know better? Maybe they are something impressive, special, creative and I don’t think about that anymore? I do know one thing - I saw them, all the bags - as something more than they were when I was making them. When I was making them, they were just one more thing to make my machine hum and give me a feeling of almost Zen-like proportions.

Maybe there is magic in that needle and thread.

My oldest sister died a couple years ago. It was a surprise to all of us in the family. She was a very talented seamstress. She did the most beautiful hand embroidery, made quilts, created many things in her lifetime, including Christmas ornaments that were hand embroidered and which leave her memory for all of us - we were all given ornaments at one time or another. They’re all beautiful.

Shortly after her death, her husband sent me her sewing machine from Texas to Virginia. He wrapped the machine in what I suspect he thought was a piece of soon-to-be trash - an old quilt she had made. It was looking bad. There were worn spots, torn spots, and to the uninitiated eye, it was indeed worth tossing in the trash. I couldn’t do that. I put it in a corner and waited till the right idea came along.

Fast forward to last Christmas, actually December 22, 2007. Her son, Brian, who married after his mom died, announced that he and his wife were expecting. Ah ha! A use for the old quilt.

First, though, I needed to finish the denim Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt for my other nephew, Adam! (I delivered that quilt to his mother, another sister of mine, last Sunday.)

It felt good to get this one done. It was done almost 100% by hand. I did do some machine accenting around the flowers themselves to make them stand out. The back is fleece with strawberries embroidered on it. It’s very soft and very sweet. I’m proud of it.

That done, I started the cutting and piecing of the “Patsy Quilt.” It was a large quilt made of some very fragile fabrics and I found enough that I could cut into squares and piece together with gingham. First, though, I zigzagged over all the seams. She had embroidered a feather stitch along all seams with black floss. Some of that had come out over time; I left even the not-so-complete embroidery in place and zigzagged over that too. The goal was to reinforce the seaming that was already there.

I have all the rows done and sewn together now. I sashed the rows with the same gingham and purchased a nice baby print of fleece for the back. I have it all pinned and ready to tie. It has been a super satisfying project because I get to give my nephew something from his mother and get to give the baby something from his grandmother. The block on the bottom row, all the way to the right (not pictured yet) has her name embroidered and the date she made the original quilt. 1977.

It wasn’t trash after all. It did serve several purposes over the years - a quilt that she made in 1977 and most likely used for the father of the baby when he was a tot, a wrapper for her sewing machine as it winged its way to me, and now as a baby blanket for her grandson.

Fabric tells a story. In this particular quilt, there are many stories told. There is fabric from which she had made me a caftan 30 years ago, placemats who knows how long ago, and I’m sure Brian will recognize some of the fabrics.

Nah, it wasn’t trash. It’s a third life piece that will be making its way to a new owner soon.

What have you rescued today?