Stitch Adventures

What is this supposed to make?

Yesterday at the Craftcation conference in Ventura, I was surrounded by  wonderful craft business energy - learned so much.  Lots of ideas, business seminars, like-minded people, and cute things:

Painted bottles with fruit tree branches, and starched yarn balls.

I also received a bag of goodies for registering, with an interesting muslin bag containing the following:

Four small wax paper bags, one with confetti; three strips of stickers; four miniature closepins; a wooden spool of red/white cotton yarn; a jam jar top with a design cut out; and a blank drawing ticket.

Okay, my mind is dead from all of yesterdays input.  But what is this for???? The "kit" (or is it?) came from ana spick at we love citrus. And yes, I can look it up on the website.  But what would you do with it?  No fair cheating - I just want to hear some ideas!

It's okay to just let a project hang out for awhile.

A few weeks back, I decided to sew a jacket from an unusual pattern - from Indygo Junction.  The pattern was originally printed in 2005, and somehow ended in my stash.  Probably found it at a sale somewhere.

It's got several views, with no way to tell which view is which.  And definitely not the best directions either.  But, I decided I wanted to make a wool jacket for the Sewing Expo in Washington.  Even though it was spring weather in California, I knew it would be freezing in Puyallup! 

With just a yard of my favorite checkered black/gray fabric, I knew I needed to find other wools to combine .  So I bought a new grey wool jacket at a garage sale for $1.

Even though it looks like there's a lot of fabric, it was difficult to decide how to piece the various pattern parts to use all of the fabric I liked, and just a little of this garage sale fabric. 

I decided to bind all the seams with black seam binding because my checkered wool is loosely woven. And even though I worked on the jacket a lot, there was just something that didn't look right. (The way the front draped!)  And with no more time before my trip, I just left it on the form.

I used the gray fabric from the garage sale jacket on the back and back sleeves.

Now that I'm back from the trip, I've decided to figure out what else I can do to make the jacket turn out great.  I looked in my boxes of wools, and found these amazing rolls of firm wool binding.  Probably found these at a garage sale too.  (One of the advantages of getting older, I find all sorts of wonderful things hiding in boxes in my sewing room!)

The light lavender looks kind of neat on the front edges of the jacket.

So, I've decided to take out the jacket facing, which was too stiff for a drapey jacket.  I am going to try and add some of the wool binding, maybe even both colors of purple?  It should wrap around the edges, and can easily be cut narrower, without raveling, because it is tightly woven wool.

Truly, it's okay to let sewing projects languish awhile, so you can think about them.  It's when you put it away in a bag that it gets forgotten and never finished.