Sewing Project Plans

(I started graduate school yesterday; so far it seems a lot like college, only harder.  I will talk more about it in another post.)

My father brings me fabric when I need it, because it is cheaper and easier to get where he lives.  He has a Wal-Mart super center accessible; I do not.  I give him color, and sometimes pattern, ideas and let him loose.  He usually picks out something wonderful.

My current sewing project is a really big wall hanging, several feet long, to hang over my dining table.  It is the final thing I need hanging; after it's done I will go around the room taking pictures of everything on the walls, except my diploma because it shows my last name, and then I will blog the pictures.  This wall hanging is much the biggest I've made, and it's also the first to be an actual picture.  It will be a garden scene with purple flowers; my grandmother let me pick out fun buttons for the flowers' centers, and they will add just the right touch.  I planned this project so that each phase would be more interesting than the last; first a hem, then the grass, then the stems and flowers, then the button centers.

When my father brought me the fabric for the project described above, he also brought me the ultimate fun fabric: purple background with pink, purple, blue, and yellow elephants and pink polka dots.  I cannot use it for the wall hanging because the print is too big.  I would never get a full elephant showing, and it's a waste of perfectly good elephants to chop them up.  I decided, however, that what I need to do with that fabric is make another tallit katan; the width is perfect, and it is even a little too long.  I will hem the border and the head hole in purple; each hole for the fringes will be done in an elephant color.

The plans for the new tallit katan started me thinking, and I decided I needed to phase out the plain white men's kind I wear during the week.  (I will keep the ladies' kind I wear when I dress up; they work for that better than anything I could make, and they are already special.)  Therefore, I now have a new Hannukah gift idea: four or five sets of strings (if the budget allows five I will get five, but I haven't priced it out yet) and the material to make the garments (fabric is so cheap I'm sure my parents will let me max  out the budget on strings).

I need to think about, and decide on, colors for the garments.  I instantly chose brown and pink, because they are my favorite colors after purple.  (I go back and forth on which I like better.)  Then I chose blue, because if I had to pick a color to represent Judaism, it would be blue.  Finally, a while later, I settled on yellow.  I love yellow, and I really can't wear it anywhere that shows; this way, I can.  If I get a fifth, I'm thinking orange or green, for the same reason as the yellow.

Now that I'm in school again, my sewing time is limited.  I've decided to set aside ten minutes before bed as craft project time.  That way, I won't stray away when I'm supposed to be working on schoolwork, because I'll know my sewing time is coming to me later.