Scrapbusting in style: Stashbusting Sewalong February 2016

The theme for February at the Stashbusting Sewalong is sewing with scraps. I figured I should at least manage to sew something out of scraps this month. Along came this blog post from Sue. She made some gorgeous therapeutic neck pillows. The free pattern is available here. What a great way to use up scraps!

Stripe Knit Dress

Following on from how much I loved my first wrap top, half circle skirt knit dress aka Quik Knit Dress (maybe I should come up with a catchy name for my pattern?), I made another one, with a few much needed improvements. I was thinking of making the next one with a plain blue knit that's been in the stash for a few years, but The Husband thought it would look a bit boring all in one colour, so when I took the kids  to the recent sale at the Fabric Store (mentioned in this post), I came home with this striped knit.

Stashbusting Pledge 2016

With February well underway already, it seems rather late in the year to be talking about my stashbusting goals for the year. 2015 is done and dusted, and I just scraped by to meet my goal of not adding extra metres of fabric into my fabric stash. But my stash is not getting any smaller. So that means I am in again for the Stashbusting Sewalong 2016.

The Pink Leopard Dress

When my daughter tells me what she wants in a new dress, I listen, usually. She has been known to come up with weird wacky ideas, but this time I think she was onto a winner. This is how Miss 6 described her newest dress to me, complete with hand gestures - straight across at the front with a halter neck, low at the back, and with a high-low skirt.

Stashbusting 2015: A Year in Review

So, another year has come to an end for the Stashbusting Sewalong.  To recap, my pledge for this year's Sewalong was

"I, Andrea, of Obsessive Creativeness, pledge to end the year with no more fabric in my personal stash than I started with"

So, I was aiming for a breakeven position with my stash. I made myself a little spreadsheet to track incoming and outgoing, and printed out some pages so I could just grab my folder and write everything down as it happened, without needing to wait until I had the computer on.

This year for stashbusting, we had guest hosts for each month, and I hosted May with the theme of lingerie. I tried my hardest to sew at least one item each month that was on theme, but for most months that had school holidays I wasn't always able to do this.

My totals for the year were

Fabric intake ........ 56.2 m
Outgoings ............ 58.49 m

Quick Knit Dress

Here's my last last-minute stash bust for the year - a fairly simple knit dress, with wrap top and half circle skirt. It is made from a knit fabric that a friend and fellow seamstress gave to me last year (I think that's when it was anyway) It used up 1.5m of stash.

Reverse applique flower and leaf top

It's been a while since my last foray into an Alabama Chanin style project, a dress that I finished back in April. It was about time that I made something else in this style. I actually started planning this top shortly after finishing up my dress, and have had the pattern lying around my studio for a number of months now, just waiting for me to have the time (and attention span) to make it up.