Sew Green 4/7

When I walked into Sew-Green today, I was a little disappointed to find that I wouldn't be working on my project right away. But I quickly got over it, realizing that I was getting a ton of help, fabric, and fun for free, so I better be ready to help out when I can. Our task wasn't even work. It was fun too!
We were supposed to design and remodel t-shirts for Sew-Green's booth at an event in the Women's Center encouraging young teenage girls to be confident and outgoing. There were guidebooks on how to re-fashion t-shirts, and our job was to make a few demos, without sewing a single stitch! At first, I was perplexed. How am I supposed to do that?? But after flipping through the book, I found a t-shirt that had been made into a cowl, and since I've been in a total cowl-obsessed phase, I pounced on the opportunity and started cutting up the t-shirt, and weaving strips of cloth for making the seams. My cowl ended up looking pretty good! It wasn't as good as the demo (somehow they never are), but it was wearable! I'll be able to take it home and show you guys after the show.
After finishing the shirt (honestly I did it a little fast, not just because I was excited to see it made, but honestly because I wanted to move on as well). Autumn was a little panicked. She wanted to start all over with the draping, using a pre-made cowl as an example instead, since she was worried about it not looking like my sketch in the end. It was sort of nice to know that someone was concerned about my project, but also ironic that she was more worried than I was! I felt really bad for making her worry, and reassured her that during my project, one of my goals is to learn how to be less of a perfectionist (an new goal, which I've made up on the spot!), and that if I don't finish five pieces, that is absolutely okay, just as long as I learn more about making clothes. I wanted to learn how to drape a dress, and so it was okay if it wasn't perfect. It was a learning experience, and an experiment.
So I set to work with the design I had draped, and after unpinning it, I set to work using chalk paper and a pokey rolling tool to copy the pattern on the other side of the cloth with chalk paper. I did this by pinning the cloth directly in half, and then slipping the chalk paper under the cloth. I then pressed the pokey rolly thing into the cloth, and the chalk imprinted the other side.
I then added a one inch seam allowance to both sides. Afterwards, and this was the scary part, I cut the cloth along the seam allowance line! After cutting the cloth, I pinned it back up, and it looked like a dress! Yay! I've been told that next time I will be able to finish the dress, but I'm not sure. We'll see.

Towards the end, I was able to look in the fabric bin that Autumn brought in for me to sort through. It was very kind of Sew-Green to offer these fabrics for free! A lot of them weren't usable for my project, but I did find two pieces of cloth that were quite nice! There was an orange stretchy material, and a blue material. I took swatches of both (though I think I've lost them unfortunately!). My homework this week is to design a garment using this cloth, since I need other cloth to start my next few pieces.