Fall'g back into sewing...

Being soo caught up in various pattern making activities, coupled up with two weeks of Olympic coverage, followed by two more weeks of Convention coverage, I have not sewn a thing in almost a month!!... Bad Mica!

So, seeing as it looked like I was just going to be sitting on my tooter all day on Monday, mustered up the energy to work on this...

This is another one of those patterns that I kept screwing my face up at coming back to since it debuted earlier this summer.

Then a few weeks ago I looked, again, at the artist rendering (in blue) and imagined myself (standing JUST like that) and said to myself, with the right hair and shoes, that dress just might be a tinsy bit fly.

Then, as fate would have it, I ran my eye over this really drapy/light weight denim I picked up at P&S fabrics a few weeks ago and thought 'Bingo!'

It has a really nice handfeel and the softest sheen. I thought it would lend it self well to this dress. I've only gone so far as to trace the pattern and pin the fabric. I have to re-pin it (... realized I was wasting too much fabric) but the plan is to cut it out tomorrow/Friday and sew it up over the weekend.

And, I'm super proud to announce I used my newly acquired sloper making skills to adjust the pattern for a better fit... instead of the randomly placed slashes and cuts and taping that I would have done OTHERWISE... ((sniff))

I think I can safely name this dress my first Fall wardrobe piece... I'm not quite SWAP'g yet, but I'm trying.


OOHH, I ALMOST FORGOT!

Okay, so, I was reading thru the tips on Threads.com a few weeks ago and stumbled across this article on Rotary cutters and mats....

Well, I have been eyeballing the cutters at one of my local fabric shops for a few months now, but one of the major reason I put the idea aside was purely the cost of sizable cutting mats.
Most of the ones I see online are around 24 x 36 or some other minuscule size. Anyway, rambling thought stopped short, this article offered the most unique alternative to a gridded cutting board... POLY-VINYL FLOOR MATS!

You know, the big hard plastic mats you see under office chairs?!?

The Threads article suggested that the composition of the chair mats make it very similar to some of the solid vinyl styrene options you can get at your usual sewing supply vendor. But at a considerable savings...

So, you know me.... I went Straight to Staples and bought this!

....AND!! And it's clear and fits neatly over my cutting board so I still have my grid lines...BONUS!!

Its exactly what I wanted, a large mat that I can lay out a number of pattern pieces at the same time....

... all for a cool 24.99.... SCORE!

HOLLA!!!