After what seems like forever, and loads of anxiety over lining up polka dots, the summer dress is finished!

To be honest it needs a bit of finishing but I don’t know exactly how to do that on my machine. I was thinking of sewing ribbons over all of the rough edges. Anyone know what the best thing to do is?

As cute as this is, the best part was how much fun we had making it (except when I nearly had my fingers sewed together!)

Here is the front:

And this is the back:

I’m incredibly proud of how well we lined everything up, especially around the zipper:

My last post on the dress is here, if you’re interested!

I’m sewing again! I invested in a nice machine and have been busying myself hemming jeans and converting our eyelet curtains into track ones. I’m trying to keep a running total of how much I’ve saved in DIY to justify the cost.

Now I’m trying something challenging – dress making! It is a slow-going process because, really, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. When I was younger my mum made me take a sewing course because she thought it was a useful skill for everyone to have. I agree with her now but at the time I’ll admit it felt a bit mortifying! But because of that course and her help, I used to kind of know what I was doing. Now I’m far less confident and I keep having to google things to remember the way to do things.

But we’re making progress. I took the picture below of my pattern-pinning:

And this is the top half. I worked really hard to make sure it was symmetrical!

To take a break from the tricky stuff, we used the extra fabric to make a bag that required no pattern! Very proud of making this from scratch, even though it was pretty simple:

I love the way the fancy stitches on the new sewing machine make even quick projects look really good!

Having a few basic sewing techniques in your budget mum arsenal will prolong the lives of your family’s clothes and potentially save you lots of money.Sites like WikiHow and eHow are invariably useful resources when you’re trying to do your mending, and I highly recommend checking them out.

Here are a few worthy tutorials to help you tackle basic mending chores:

Patching up jeans

http://damselindisdress.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/patching-jeans-cute-method/

http://www.ehow.com/how_902_patch-jeans.html

Hemming trousers

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A209008

http://www.ehow.com/how_2281295_hem-trousers.html

Replacing a button

http://www.ehow.com/how_4604_sew-button.html

http://www.wikihow.com/Sew-a-Button

Darning socks

http://www.ehow.com/how_648_darn-sock.html

http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/03/darn_it.html

Mending split seams

http://damselindisdress.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/mending-101/

http://www.ehow.com/how_113353_mend-split-seam.html