SEWING TIP: Making Continuous Bias Strips

I'm freaking out, people!    ;)


I am sew excited that I get to be a guest blogger over at Family Ever After today.  I just love her awesome blog and I am so honored that she considers me to be a "Sewlebrity".  Thanks Rach!



I am sharing a super cool Sewing Tip over there today:

How to Make Continuous Bias Strips

Please hop on over and check it out!  Then check out her sweet blog and all the neat stuff she does!  (Then you can come back here to visit and leave me some comment love  :) )








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My Home ~ Daughter's Bedroom Redo Part 1

It has been a few years since we moved my daughter into this room. 

The story is this: we have three bedrooms in this house that can be used for kids's rooms. (Until the basement is finished, which will be in a few years...) One bedroom has it's own bathroom. The other two bedrooms share a Jack-and-Jill bathroom. When we first moved into our house, we only had 2 boys and one girl. The boys had the room with the attached bathroom. The girl had one of the Jack-and-Jill bedrooms. My sewing room was the other Jack-and-Jill bedroom. It was great for a while.

Then I had a few more kids. And I moved my sewing room downstairs because the older boys needed that room. Add my last child...and I now have a grand total of 5 boys and 1 girl. It made more sense now to have all the boys sharing the Jack-and-Jill bedrooms and the only girl to have the room attached to it's own bathroom. Right?

I decided to move her into that room. By then, she had outgrown her toddler furniture and had more space in that room for more furniture. I also wanted that room to double as a guest room. In order for her to get her own special bathroom and make the room change, the deal was she'd have to be able to give up her room when we had guests. Then she got the good furniture (it used to be our master bedroom furniture).

But I was not ready to do any painting or redoing of anything yet. I still had other rooms to finish - my master bedroom still has not ever been painted - we have been in this house for almost ten years now...but that is coming sooner than ever now :).  So all we did was make the move.

  

 

We did strip the boys' "construction trucks" wallpaper border down though at least.  We left the blue paint above and the brown paint below, though.  Ugly for a girl I know and so did she,  but we were just making progress getting her moved.  Baby steps toward the goal. 

{I wish for real though that I could have kept this room a little longer for my other small boys now (not that they were not ripping the border to shreds in their beds...boys!) but it looked really cool with everything in there.  And my daughter's old room was really beautiful too - I had painted a garden mural with a big tree and everything (I think I will post this later).  If I had had the foresight, I would have arranged the rooms this way from the beginning and saved a lot of work but I have learned that we do not always GET that kind of insight...5 boys and 1 girl!!!!?!!!!}  Moving on...

  

So she put her own stuff up on the walls and tried to cover the boyness of it all with her cute girl things.  It was not the same of course, but progress was being made, it was a step toward a goal.  Plus it gave us time to really figure out what we could do to make this room HERS.  We bought paint about a year ago but it sat in her closet forever...

 Well, this last weekend, my husband went with my son to 11-year old scout camp and my daughter did not have plans so we decided to bust out the paint and at least get the main color on.  We just shoved all the furniture into the middle of the room and went for it.  

It was a great time - I taught her how to roll the paint on, and after I did the taping and caulking, she did some cutting in with the brush while I rolled.  

 Ooh, that was fun covering up the old stuff and seeing that beautiful color come into view.

 So here are the beginnings of the new room...

 We have lots of fun new fabric treatments planned:

 bedding, pillows, curtains, etc. 

 So stay tuned for all the fun stuff to come...

 

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Studio Update: RUFFLED SPLIT BEDSKIRT

One of my favorite things to sew up is a bedroom set. I have a client right now who is redoing her young daughter's bedroom - so I have been whipping up a new bedskirt, duvet cover, window valance, bed pillows, maybe a new lampshade cover, etc. (I will post all of these components of the room soon...)

The first thing I need to explain is the "split". The girl's bed is a beautiful metal antique-ish frame that has these railing rods or bars(I guess you call them that - we are) every 15 inches down the length of the bed. These bars by the boxspring are such that a continuous bedskirt would not work. So the bedskirt has to be split into 5 sections so that it can hang down from the bed to the floor and the bars can sit between the sections. (When we have a completed pic of the room, I will post it so you can what I mean).

Her mother had purchased a bedskirt that was pretty basic and asked me to make it AWESOME! It was the right color but did not fit the boxspring with the bars and needed my TLC, and some fanciness! So I cut up the bedskirt into sections, hemmed the sides of each section, and began to embellish!



We had cut off the selvage of the fabric for the window valance (coming soon) to use somewhere in the room. (It was a cool selvage with awesome fringe on it - I left enough of an edge to attach it to something and show off the fringe). I attached a piece of selvage to the bottom of each bedskirt piece.



Then I made lots and lots of narrow ruffles, gathered down the center. This was another of the fabrics to be used in the room.



I attached a row of ruffles on top of the selvage to cover up the serged edge, but left enough showing so the selvage fringe could peek out.



I sewed down the center of the ruffles to attach them above the selvage piece.



Cute so far! (I know - it needs a press with the iron!)



All sections are done the same way - ready to now attach to the old bedskirt deck! I just had to layer them all to see all those gorgeous ruffles together!



I lined up all my sections along both sides of the deck and sewed them on. You can't tell that they are in sections - it just looks like a continuous bedskirt, except for the corners.



Here are the corners at the foot of the bed, where the end bars are.



This is the foot of the bedskirt. It did not need any splits - there were no bars here.



Here I seperated the sections so you can see how the split looks.






Before it gets set up on the bed, I test how the corners lay and how everything looks, just on my table. Can't wait to see it all put together on the bed!



Do you have a bedskirt you could redo to fit your bedroom scheme?


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Wednesdays Adorned From Above

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