Sister fun and projects with sweaters.

My lovely family combined resources and sent me the best birthday present ever: My sister!  10 lovely days!  Thrift shopping, sewing, smack talk, drinks, smokes, silliness! And we can't forget the Dim Sum! The hardest thing about moving to Seattle has been missing all the people I love.  But how 'bout I skip the maudlin moment and get to the good stuff.

My sister is always COLD!  The girl wears long underwear through an Indiana summer!  We had planned on making some hats out of shrunken wool sweaters to warm her up.  Of course she showed up with a goofy idea we just had to pursue.  She had taken a sweater, put the waist over her head with the neck at the back of her head and wrapped the sleeves around her neck and voila a hood and scarf.  Here is my husband rocking this fab look

Of course we couldn't leave well enough alone.  We just knew we could make it better.  So we cut and we pinned and we sewed and we came up with....almost exactly what we started with.  Here is my sister laughing her ass off at our project fail. 

Yeah.  On to the next thing.  We took apart all the sewing we did on the hooded scarf failure and made a simple hat like this.  It worked out pretty good.  Not terribly exciting though and that may be why we never got around to taking a picture of it.  We also made some underwhelming leg warmers from the sleeves.  They were incredibly warm but left the cheeks chilly.  I showed Sis this lovely and bizarre video someone sent me.

Of course we wanted some swants.  So we looked over the tutorial by the original designer. (Rant about f-ing designers muffled by my scarf)  Here it is.  I read it over twice.  Maybe I'm slow but I just didn't get it. So we started surfing and found this alternative design.  Her instructions made a lot more sense and we had our swants wearable in just about an hour.  (We decided we liked the term pweater better than swants.  We also toyed with spweater but....well... say it out loud with out laughing I dare you to try)  I will spare you the details of our making these.  Read Sade's tutorial at A Year of Handmade if you want to know how.  But here are my notes in case you try it.  

1.  I'm not sure how you could possibly do this alone.  Many contortions ensued and I admitted defeat.

2.  Only do this with someone you are 100% comfortable with as they will be pinning at your crotch.  

3.  We are both short girls so we ended up not needing to add the waist band part.  Sis wanted hers as flat as possible  to go under pants so we just cut around the top at her hip line and we were done.  I'm a skirt girl so I folded the top down once and put in an elastic.  

4.  We used the left over sweater fabric to extend the legs all the way down to our ankles.  We cut the bottom of the legs (sleeves) open at the seam. We cut pieces to match the width of the bottom of the legs and sewed them on to each other with two lines of zigzag stitches.  Then we repinned and sewed the seam of the now longer legs.  Here we are wearing our new fabulous pweaters 

We are so Hot!