I Can Make Clothes!

A couple things about me: I love clothes. I hate spending money. You see my dillema already don't you. In this battle between the clothes and the money, Brian will tell you that the money always wins. And he will be right. Sometimes Brian BEGS me to buy clothes. How many husbands do you know that beg their wives to go buy clothes? Probably not many. He finally convinced me to buy a new pair of shoes a couple of weeks ago. I took them back the next day. I was finally tired of never haing anything new, so I decided to try making myself some clothes. I took inspiration from my friend Kati who is like a sewing machine (pun intended) and has made some really cute shirts, dresses, and skirts. I didn't have a pattern, but I did have inspiration from places like Shabby Apple and Downeast. I have now successfuly made a skirt and a dress...no patterns and very little sewing ability. I loved this skirt from Shabby Apple, and I had some other ideas of what I wanted in a skirt. I also had some leftover material that I had purchased for pillows, but then it turned out to be just the wrong color from what I wanted. The material cost me 3 dollars. The skirt above cost 52 dollars. Below is the final product:

I also wanted a knit dress that was simple, comfortable, and sort of drapey. I took inspiration from the following dresses from Shabby Apple and Downeast. The dresses from Shabby Apple were close to or over $100 and the one from Downeast was in the $40 range. I bought the material for $10 and the belt for $5.

My version still needs a couple tweaks to make it fit better, but I wore it to church today and figured I might as well take a picture while I had it on. Who knows when I will get around to actually fixing it or blogging about it otherwise. Definitely not quite as cute and certainly not as well tailored (real sewing peolpe would be horrified I'm sure) but I think for the price difference it was worth it. Plus, no matter how bad it looks, I'm still proud of myself for figuring it out on my own.