Apron

I was very inspired by watching the Great British Sewing Bee over the winter and I think that the idea of re-using things and up-cycling is terrific. I know that this is huge fashion thing at the minute as well - which really isn't the reason why I like it.

I have always hated the idea of waste - I like to re-use as much as I can - I hate throwing anything away: food, clothes etc I really cannot stand being put to waste. This is probably why I have had and worn most of my wardrobe for at least 5 years and am only ever really persuaded to buy new clothes when my Mum takes me shopping! I am still then really awful at throwing these things away even when I then have new clothes. The old stuff is always just the comfiest and most enjoyable to wear!! Oh well - you know me, if I could then I would happily walk around in my PJs all day, every day.

So, with that in mind, as my first project, I didn't end up recycling any of my clothes at all! I decided to cut up and adapt one (or two) of my husbands shirts (old one's I might add - that he really shouldn't have been wearing any more!)

I only had this tiny little sewing machine to use as this was the cheapest little machine that I could find. I had no idea how I would get on with machine sewing, having never really used a sewing machine before in my life.

As my first project and an experiment to see if I was able to use a sewing machine, I decided to convert this old shirt into an apron. Not too much of a dramatic change but my favourite part of the show for The Great British Sewing Bee was always the converting of a garment into something totally different. I also didn't want to waste any good material that could have been used for something better if I wasn't able to create anything at all from it.

Here is the end result:

It's by no means perfect but I didn't think that this was too bad for a first attempt ever of sewing at all with a machine. The thing that I found most annoying was that due to the basic-ness of the little machine there wasn't an automatic tension on it and therefore if I forgot to loop it through the correct bit, or looped it through wrong, I did have a few disasters where the machine ate my material and a load of thread or it would just not sew and would snap the thread all together.

And here begins my new hobby - sewing!