Of Ankles and Frogs.
The many moods of PollyFrog. I finished her today with the coconut buttons for her eyes. The material is from a skirt I picked up at Savers for $3. Whoot whoot cheap fabric! She came out super well, her limbs are nice and dangly and her body is very firm and snuggle-able. I put a bag of plastic pellets in her butt to allow her to sit which she does pretty well, though sometimes you have to thwack her into place. She’s really rather dee-vine darlinks.
The other thing I did today was crack my ankle – again. As a teen I had very weak ankles which would give up on me when walking down steps or slops, leaving me to fall in a heap at least once every couple of weeks. Seems like this is happening again, as two mornings this week I’ve cracked it getting out of bed. Today it actually made a noise when it did it, so that’s new. I know it’s directly related to my weight. The other day when it happened I was mostly alright, except for when I’d been sitting. Then it would give way as I stood up and send pain up my leg. This morning and until lunch time the whole lower leg throbbed. It’s better now I have it braced. I’m waiting for the other one to go now, which it will as it’s been aching for a while. Oh the fun of a collapsing skeleton!
It always starts in the left side, which the physio pointed out is again about an inch lower than my right. Which is a sign I really do need to pull my finger out and get some weight off as I was aligned quite nicely for a while.
It’s a Frog Thing
I yoinked the idea for photographing on scrapbook paper from a flickr person. I am all about idea yoinking. Anyways, that there is the latest frog in my fast growing collection of frogs. I got him at savers for $2 so you can’t beat that! He’s even a money box, so he serves two purposes.
Today I didn’t sew a skirt, although I planned to. Two in one weekend might have been a LITTLE bit overachivey, don’t you think? I did start to sew a frog out of a green/beige skirt I got at (here’s a shock) Savers. I’ve done her legs and.. other legs and tomorrow after work if I have a skerrick of interest in anything left I’ll put her together. Shouldn’t take too long.
I also pretended to turn out my chest of drawers on the basis there’s too much crap in there. Seriously, I pulled out a pair of pants i have NO recollection of at all. I didn’t end up throwing anything away (read: Bagging for op shop) because it was like getting new stuff. One of the bonuses of being a total slob I suspect.
PS: The person I stole the idea from was Dyxie, who does beautiful wonderful things with colour.
Saturday Bedspread Day
Fairly full day today. Matt is back from his holiday (no I will not say vacation) so I got to hang out with him properly this morning rather than at the mercy of the phone godlets. Then Mum and I went to Savers because she saw a shirt there yesterday that would go with the skirt I cut out last night. Sadly, someone else had nabbed it, but I managed to pick up a few nice shirts, couple new pairs of jeans and 2 headscarves as well as more ties for my tie skirt project.
Once I got home and tossed the new stuff into the wash, I settled down to make me another skirt from a bedspread I picked up at Savers months ago. I’ve been meaning to make this forever. Again, it’s a cheaty hem (I kept the decorative hem on the edges). It wasn’t originally going to be a jeans top, but as I was sewing I realised that the jeans I had on were REALLY overdue for throwing out. Knees and inner thighs were gone, and I was keeping them around as spares, so I took em off and hacked the waistband off to use here. This is good because I am not good at waist bands, so reusing the jeans was handy. The legs are in the ragbag waiting for something to be used for.
So, overall, a productive little day. Hope yours was goodly too 
The Cheater Guide to Good Hems
I suck at hems. I really seriously do, I am terrible at them. I have two skirts currently shoved in a cupboard until I can be bothered trying again to make with the non droopy hemline. Which may explain why I prefer to hack other things to bits to make skirts out of.
Peek at the picture (you can click to see the full sized one, we have the technology). The waist “band” is an old pair of jeans, and the panels are made from the legs of several pairs of cords. I love how this came out, and I LOVE that I was able to cheat totally on the hemline and simply use the prehemmed bottoms of the cords legs.
The major tip I will pass on to you is if you ARE going to recycle the hems of an existing something, when you sew your panels together, sew from the bottom up. That way you can match your hems perfectly, even if you’ve been a bit slapdash with the measurements of your panels (which I always am). You can fix any unevenness in the topedge very easily when you sew your waist section on, it’s a lot harder to tidy up mismatched hems.
As for making the above skirt, it’s really just a gored skirt but with the top measurement for the gores taken from the width of the bottom of the jeans section, if that makes sense. I’ll try that again. Instead of measuring your waist and dividing by X number of panels, you cut the legs off the jeans and measure the width of the new hole, then divide that.
To find the maximum width of your gores, measure the bottoms of the legs of the cords, and pick the narrowest. These gores are cut on the seam to give me extra width, but if you like you can cut down the leg. Narrower gores, less of a seamed look. Up to you.
I’m not going to go into technical detail here, simply because when I made this thing I ended up with a spare gore, so I’m clearly not the person you should be seeking advice from. Apart from the hem tip, that’s awesome advice :nods: