Windfall

Hello, friends! It's been a wacky couple of weeks for me. I've been working on lining up an assistant teaching job for next year at an elementary school near my house (my first full-time salaried job... ever!) and simultaneously been offered a keyholder position at my current workplace. Unfortunately, I'll probably have to turn the latter down, because I can't really picture myself balancing a full-time job, a part-time managerial position, classes, and sanity/creative output, although the part of me that worries about things like credit card bills tells me I should try it.

Anyway, a minor technical glitch with my sewing machine sent me off the rails for a few weeks. I'm a little disheartened by how easily I lose momentum for things - I certainly had no real excuse to stop sewing, but I guess I needed a little time off for my brain! In any case, I'm starting work on my mom's tiered skirt very soon, and I'll be trying some little creative side-projects soon as well. I got an unexpected "bonus" from work the other day, in the form of a bunch of defective dresses that had to be destroyed and thrown out:

Fortunately for me, "destroyed" apparently just means their tags are removed and they get a big slice up the back, meaning a fair bit of fabric is still intact. So when I saw these little beauties sitting sadly at the bottom of a trash bag in the back office, I rang up my manager ASAP and asked if I could take them home.

All in all, I ended up with nine of these gorgeous little patriotic treasures, so my mind is racing with possibilities for a lot of relatively small pieces of fabric. Unfortunately, the red strips on the bottom are the defective part: the color bleeds in the wash. My plan is to slice the red trim off first, and then see if I can wash it sufficiently on its own to set the color. One of my coworkers suggested vinegar as a way to make the color fast - does anyone else have any suggestions?

Did you say you wanted some fabric eye-candy photos? Because I took a bunch for you, so.

Any thoughts on what to do with all this stripey goodness? My mind went first to applique - I've been meaning to experiment with it on some other knit fabric I got, and I think I'll cut out some pieces and give it a whirl in the next few days. I also really like the idea of mixing up stripes into some kind of bizarre patchwork pattern, but I'm not sure what I'd do with it.

Mmmm.... visual disorientation...

One quirk about knit fabric that really intrigues me is its directionality - what would happen if I stitched two pieces of jersey together with their grains running perpendicular to one another? Or at a bias? Suffice it to say that I am excited by the idea of just having a bunch of free, pretty, high-contrast fabric to screw around with. This is where the "sewing" and "visual art" parts of my brain get to play in the sandbox together.

Also, these buttons. So many buttons!

Anyway, I'd love to hear your ideas for my special windfall. My mind is in a very creative place right now, so it's like that my next few sewing sessions will just be me messing around on the machine and making weird things before I really dig into my mom's skirt. So look forward to that, if you want!