Craft Rage

It's done! It took nearly a week (so much for a simple, one-day project), and the rest of the house has been thoroughly destroyed, but I now have a useable craft/sewing room!

Unfortunately, when I told my fiance over the phone, (he's away with his kinfolk participating in the murder of several hapless deer, an activity which I silently judge, unless I am actually in the passionate throes of wolfing down a large bowl of venison stew), when I told him what I'd done, he paused briefly, then blew out a breath. "Well, that sounds like a lot of work. You... uh... did you forget that we're putting on the extension in the spring?" Oh crap. The extension. And my new, huge, bright Rachelle Room, which I intended to be my craft room.

Oh well, at least I've done a good purge. That's always satisfying enough on its own. And I've organized my little stash (about 200m, nothing compared to some of my sewing heros!) by type and color, into clear plastic bins which will keep everything cat-hair free.

And Smooshy is still alive, and is getting along swimmingly with our other cats, as is evidenced by this picture of her napping in the laundry basket with Joey.

Why did feel such a pressing need to clean up and organize my sewing room, you ask? Well, essentially, after my fiance and I got engaged, I decided to sew my own wedding dress. I knew very clearly what I wanted - a corset topped dress with a full ballgown skirt with big pick-ups, preferably non-white, with a scattering of beads. Something like this:

The problem is, as I have mentioned earlier, I have no sewing skills. No technical skills. But a lot of heart, which has to count for something, right?

Anyway, I bought a bunch of junk fabric and made a mock-up, just hand-sewn and draped on myself (thank heavens for closed doors, because if my fiance had seen me contorting and prancing around trying to drape and pin on myself, he might have packed a bag and left me) and was pretty pleased with the result - I achieved the right overall effect of the pickups on the skirt, and did a mock-up of the corset based on a duct-tape pattern, which worked out much better than I thought it might, all things considered.

The thing was, I couldn't really get the whole outfit put together right, because I needed a dress dummy to help out while I toyed with the pickups on the skirt. So I found a good used one on kijiji.ca, and brought her home, only to discover that I really had no room for her. So in actuality, I just spent a week tearing my house apart and putting it back together so I could make a home for my dress dummy. On some level, that makes me very, very sad.

And also, I guess the second reason I did it is because my fiance bought me a serger two months ago, and due to the extreme disarray in my sewing room, I had nowhere to unpack it, because my other six sewing machines were scattered all over the rest of the room. So my ultimate reward for getting this project finished is that now I'm going to go and learn how to use this scary beast;

I suppose it's really not all that scary, for those of you who have used one before. But frankly, I'm new to all this, and I'm pretty intimidated. Wish me luck!

Labels: sewing room