We're Back!!!

Blame it on a rainy day, or blame it on Eric working on the weekend, or blame it on Chris' awesome campaigning to reinstate my blog .... regardless of the reason, the blog is once again alive!

And to kick off the new season with a successful start, I have decided to pay homage to one of my favorite blog's (www.newdressaday.com) by blatantly copying its premise and format.

For those of you who are not familiar with New Dress A Day, every day Marisa takes an old piece of clothing and remakes it into something fabulous. So here we go.... it all starts with Eric's favorite sweater.

This is me in Eric's sweater.



If it wasn't immediately apparent, you can tell it was one of his favorites by the giant holes he has worn into the elbows.

My inspiration for today .... Veronica Mars. We have recently latched on to this show and are making our way through season 2 at a fairly rapid clip. Eric is drawn to the petite blond and I am oddly drawn to her sweater vests! So now, to transform me into Veronica. Petite check. Blond check. All that's left is the green sweater vest.



My first step was to take off the arms and about 6 inches in width from the side ... out comes the seam ripper.



Side note: Doesn't the pin cushion in the corner make it look like I know what I'm doing!

Next out, my trusty sewing machine. I have had this machine since 2002. My main goal in selecting a sewing machine was to have something simple with a decent number of features, but that was easy to store and carry around as I move from city to city. The Singer Featherweight II fit the bill perfectly!



I then used my old grade 7 home-ec skills to sew up the seams, taking care to add a zigzag stitch on the outside of the main line to reinforce the seams.



With the sides sewn up, my next step was to add the trimming to the arm holes. Here's where I ran in to my first dilemma. My plan was to take the cuffs off from the sleeves and resow them to the arm holes as trimming. It was at this point that I realized the radius of my wrist is very different than the radius of my arm-pit. And while I am thankful that I do not have chunky wrists, this was a problem. The solution ... well with little fabric available, I decided to cut the cuffs in half to give me twice the amount of fabric to work with.



I then painstakingly pin the cuffs to the edge of the arm hole to make sure that I have enough fabric to go around. Luckily this did the trick!



I then had to hand sew the cuffs on to the arm holes because unfortunately the only thread colour I have is brown and I needed to hide the stitching. I pushed my sewing machine aside and pulled out the needle.

After sewing on both cuffs, here are the result: a cute sweater vest just like Veronica`s - it even has a little embroidered moniker on it just like hers. I wanted to do a v-neck as well, but I realized after the arm hole fiasco that I would not have enough ribbing to redo the neckline so I decided to leave it alone.



Of course the fun part for me was waiting to see what Eric`s reaction would be. I predicted two outcomes: 1. He would realize immediately I had cut up his favorite sweater 2. He would look at it and think "that looks familiar it must not be a new outfit" and not really realize that it was his. While the latter was the funnier outcome, he actually did notice right away that I had redone his sweater. Frankly, I think he is a little jealous that it is now mine!


Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did, and thanks for all the continued readership support!