Repurposing mania

I've discovered I really love to recycle old things into new things. The thing is you can be a lousy seamstress and still achieve decent results when you start with a base and modify existing pieces of clothing.

I found this large sweat shirt on the give-away tables of our apartment complex and thought I could do something with it. A few weeks before I had participated in a sewing class my friend and colleague Helen was hosting where I learned how to make kids T-shirts. I cut the sleeves and the body of the shirt and turned the sleeves into sweat pants and the body into a T-shirt for William.

This is how they turned out:

And here's a picture of the T-shirt I made for William at Helen's sewing club. He loves this T-shirt because there's monkeys on it. Josh was jealous William got a handmade T-shirt with monkeys so I made him a T-shirt with fire trucks on it. They're both happy now : )

A few weeks later I saw a really cute tutorial on Welcome to the good life. This girl is really talented and I've already followed several of her tutorials. I fell in love with the dress and decided to make it for my nephew's wedding (it was done in one evening, it's that easy!). I found a basic large purple dress for $8 at Savers and modified it according to the tutorial. Here are the before/after pictures:

(Hem, hem the yellow broom is totally part of the design - everybody knows yellow and purple are complementary colors). 

I'm very happy with it, except it's a tiny bit too short so it's not super comfortable, but it was hard to find a dress long enough. I'd like to make another one, a bit longer next time.

I also made the jewelry I was wearing for the wedding. It was the second set of jewelry I made (I made one similar for my friend's birthday) and I think I like it. At any rate I enjoyed making it.