Worknite Whip-Up

A little background on me…I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 17. I had an apartment and put myself through full-time college by working two jobs at anywhere from 40 to 70 hours a week. Whew!

And yet I still sewed. Every single day. I even worked in a fabric store and probably spent half my paycheck on fabric but at least then I was keeping up with what I bought.

Being single, if I want to keep swimming in the deep end of the fabric pile, I have to work for it. Boo! I don’t know if it was the benefit of youth that enabled me to go to class, to go one, possibly two jobs, and then come home and sew. But most days now I am pooped by the time I come home.

Still, I miss the days of coming home to my sewing machine. It’s like therapy to me. It’s relaxing. And maybe if I sewed more during the week, I could be much faster at using up my stash.

Hence, the Worknite Whip-up where I’ll feature a quick project that a working girl like me could reasonably accomplish after a long day at work and still have enough time to hit the gym or cook a healthy meal. (Alternatively, SAHM’s out there could do these projects when the kiddos are napping).

To make it work, a good Whip is something I can do either without a pattern or by using a pattern that’s so familiar to me that I don’t need to spend time marking fabric or reading instructions.

So this is my first project. I wear a lot of turtlenecks in the winter but don’t like wearing necklaces over them. I’m trying to accumulate more scarves to accessorize with instead. But my goodness are they expensive!

(Sometimes being a sewist is a curse. I can’t help but look at the prices of off-the-rack items and figure out in my head how much DRASTICALLY cheaper I can make them).

Jo-Ann Fabrics always has a nice selection of drapey fabrics. But at $12 or so per yard, I can’t afford to make an entire garment out of them. However, when they go 40% off, and I buy only 3/8 of a yard…I can get a simple scarf for less than $3.00. Not too shabby. This is the one I Whipped-up to wear to work this Friday for Valentine’s Day.



Try as they might, the clerks rarely cut my 3/8 perfectly straight. So first I hold it up high and fold it in half right sides together and line up the salvages. I slide the top salvage on itself until it feels like it’s hanging straight. Then I pin the top salvage to hold it and drape the piece over my ironing board.



Now that it’s laying on top of itself flat, I pin it up the length with the pins a good two inches in. Then I lay it out on my work table. Since it’s usually crooked, I find the shortest spot. That will be the width of my scarf, in this case, 6 ½ inches.



Then, I do it the lazy way and, starting from the bottom, I hold my tape at 6 ½ inches with one hand and cut with the other until I’ve trimmed off the crooked edge. With the pinning done two inches in, there’s no need to remove the pins which is great since this fabric slides.



I then sew my side seams. For this scarf I wanted angled ends so I measured one end in by five inches and marked it. Then I stitched starting I the corner until I hit my five inch mark and trimmed off the excess. I flipped it right side out, used a point turner to push out the corner nice and sharp and gave all sewed edges a good hard pressing.

Then I marked five inches in from the open end.



But THIS time, you cut off the corner first. Then turn your ends in. Pin the end shut or press it. I did neither and just held it closed as I stitched it shut.



Topstitch the first end so that both ends have topstitching. And you’re done. A nice, new scarf in about 20 minutes or less.

And the Last Shall Be First

Welcome all to my blog. I’ve actually wanted to start this blog for over a month but I’ve gotten sidetracked by one disaster or another – including two of my three sewing machines konking out on me. But here I am! I’ve been reading so many awesome blogs by sewists, crafters, do-it-herselfers and other very creative women. They’ve given me so many great ideas and (I like to think) I have great ideas of my own so here I am.

Plus I have so many people that know I sew but, as my friend Catherine often says, “I never SEE what you’re working on”. So I hope this blog is a good way to show everyone my projects. I hope you enjoy it. It’ll get prettier as time goes on. I look forward to your comments and suggestions!

This blog would have been started shortly after the New Year. But my main sewing machine, a 1970’s Kenmore, started to die off. It would zip along just fine and then….nothing. The motor would be running but the take up lever wouldn’t go.

So fine, I moved on to my second best machine. It’s a practically new 2007 Singer. I bought it because the Kenmore doesn’t do zippers or knit fabrics well. The Singer does ‘em beautifully – but the tension is ALWAYS messed up and the presser feet are impossible to change. (I broke a nail switching them once). Which means zippers are a no-go and, with the tension issues, so is any kind of detailed sewing. Which left me with the 2005 Kenmore I got from my Grandmother when she passed. It’s one of those cracker-jack prize machines that come from local Sprawl*Mart. It moves at the speed of mud and all the presser feet were missing. Pathetic.

So I took my main machine to the repair shop. For $115 they could fix it for me. “But at this point”, the guy tells me, “you might as well get a new one.” Well, coming off of Christmas, I really didn’t want to drop $115 on repairs and I certainly didn’t want to drop $250 or more on a new one. I’ll just chug along with Gramma’s cracker jack prize machine and make do.

But then I got asked out on a date.

And I had NOTHING to wear.

But thankfully I’m a seamstress. “I’ll just make something”, I thought. But how do you make something fabulous to impress a new date when you have one machine that is no good for zippers and detailed stitching and another machine that is so slow that you just won’t have time for properly finished seams or the ability to handle harder to work with fabrics?

Thus began my first sewing challenge of 2010. This is what I came up with:




I used New Look 6204(A) to make a knit pull-over top. It features a simple casing down the front to create the rouched look. The skirt is McCalls 4245(A) which has an elastic waist and is casual enough to get away with a rolled, machine-stitched hem. Made the whole outfit THE DAY OF my date in about 6 hours. Whew!

It wasn’t as fancy as I could’ve gotten with my best machine. After this, I decided to spring for a new machine. Ironic that the last project on my crummy machines is now the first one I'm featuring on this blog.

And apparently I pulled it off. I got asked out again.