Almost there...

I am within spitting distance of having all the non-wardrobe sewing caught up...do you suppose I might actually get to spend a little of the holiday weekend doing a little personal sewing?  Maybe?

Finished...all the costume pieces I have had assigned to me so far.  There may be a few more before the kids go to camp...after all, camp is pretty much the epic high point of the summer theme...but at the moment, I'm done.

Finished...a little sewing room organization project that's been languishing for about 2 years.  I had some remnants from sewing a table cloth, and I got the brilliant idea of making a long skinny sack with a pocket on it to store my rulers.  Ignoring the still out-of-place-due-to-home-renovations clutter around my little cart, and you can see the finished product:

The cording is a remnant piece, and is probably just a little too long; the bottom of the bag is on the floor, but it is sufficient for the task of keeping my rulers handy.  I didn't make a pattern, and I didn't even really make a plan...just made it up as I went.  But those pieces have been cut to size and floating around my sewing room for a LONG time while my rulers wandered about on their own.  So glad to have that finally put together and put to use!

The other long-languishing project is a salvage job on a mattress pad.

I've talked before about the difficulties of finding good bed linens for our waterbed; I've made the last 4 or 5 sets of sheets, just because I can't find them ANYWHERE.  The mattress pad is a similar story.

We bought a pad when we bought the bed back in 1980; after a number of years it began to get thin so we replaced it.  Now, the original pad was just a flat piece of quilting with strips across the corners; you lay the pad on the mattress, reach between the pad and the corner strips and grab the corner of the mattress, pull it through, then flip the strip under the corner.  Easy and anchored.  But the new pad that we bought was not made that way.  No, the head and foot edges were elasticized, and there was a tricot knit side piece, all of which was supposed to be wrapped around the mattress.  It wasn't easy, it wasn't secure, and after a ridiculously short amount of time the tricot side panels began to split.  So we went back to using the nearly worn out older one.  But, I had the brilliant idea of using the old pad as a pattern and cutting the new pad to size, using the remnants for strips and...ta da...new pad that actually worked.

But, well, I never really got motivated to do it.  Until I laundered the old pad for the last time and the worn spots just became large gappy holes.  So.  Last week, I pulled out the newer, useless pad, cut off the tricot, unpicked all the elastic, and laid it out under the old, shredded pad and did some whacking.

It was fortunate that the newer version was meant to wrap around the mattress somewhat; I had plenty left over for those corner anchor pieces that you can see on the old pad on top.  I have now serged all around the cut-down pad and corner strips and sewn the corner strips on.  All that remains is some bias tape binding just to make sure it's not going to fall apart on me too soon.  Not sure what I'll do if this one shreds...but, in all honesty, at this point it ought to do us until we decide that things like acid reflux will have made the waterbed a thing of the past...

But tonight, I hemmed a dress for a friend to wear in, um, let's just say a special event coming up very soon.  My only request for compensation will be that she doesn't tell ANYONE who hemmed her dress.

So...I'm breathing just a bit easier now that I'm nearly to the end of this tunnel...trying to decide what I'm going to sew next.  Choir clothes, I'm sure...I got no Tangerine for next month... ;-)