Sweater Surgery

Contemporary crafters are thriving on personalizing, modifying, and altering fashion, and as a way to take a greener approach to their creative lifestyle. This book shows you how to upcycle all your slightly worn, slightly damaged, or out-of-style sweaters into fabulous new items for your wardrobe and your home. Readers learn how to choose, cut, restitch, felt, and embellish old sweater fabric, transforming it into beautiful handbags, mittens, scarves, hats, hoodies, skirts, jewelry, soft toys, pillows, and more! Complete instructions for 27 projects, plus a huge gallery of exciting ideas for further inspiration.

Each project in this book combines bookbinding with a specific craft such as quilting, jewelry making, or polymer clay, and offers levels of expertise: basic, novice, and expert.

Custom tailor your garments with short row knitting—the easy way to create darts, shape shoulders, set in sleeves, and more. Add curves and three-dimensional shaping to your knits to create figure-flattering cardigans, wraps, and perfectly fitted hats and socks. Working partial rows into your knitting is simple: instead of knitting the whole row, you stop before you get to the end, then you turn your work, and knit in the other direction. These short rows create the extra length in the fabric needed to fashion graceful curves and silhouettes. In Short Row Knits you'll master the technique via four different methods, so you can choose your favorite. Then find out how to apply short rows to different stitch patterns—20 striking knits you'll want to wear every day.

A real life account of what is was like for an Urban Indigenous Woman who spent much of her life battling drug and alcohol addiction to recover during a worldwide pandemic. _ e year was 2020 one that will forever mark a period of time in history when a deadly virus known as the Coronavirus took the globe by storm. _ is virus known as Covid-19 would forever change the way in which people thought, felt and behaved. _ is story is about a woman who used the year 2020, when the world stood still, to heal and recover from a lifelong journey of abuse, trauma & addictions. When everything was shut down she took it upon herself to take autonomy over her own healing and recovery. Find out just what it took for her to do while the world was on chaos from Covid-19.

Learning from failure is an effective—and entertaining—way to make information stick. This fun and engaging guide showcases tons of common screw-ups and how to avoid them. Do you know how to tie your shoe? Or do you just think you do but you’ve actually been screwing it up for decades like most people have? This witty, light book takes a fresh spin on all the mistakes we make everyday that end up costing us big in our wallets, our health, our homes, and beyond. Topics covered are Yourself (appearance, skills, all things you), Your Home, Your Cooking, Your Money, Your Relationships & Family, and Your Health. This perfect combination of humor and wisdom entertains readers as they learn how to make their lives better by avoiding and remedying common screw-ups. Things we all mess up: *Using chopsticks as spears because you just can’t figure them out (Yourself) *Throwing Frisbees behind you, sucking at horseshoes, and other game/sporting fouls (Yourself) *Getting your sofa stuck on moving day (Your Home) *Gluing your fingers together (Your Home) *Turning your brown sugar into a brick (Your Cooking) *Breaking the yolk every time you flip an egg (Your Cooking) *Your taxes. Argh. (Your Money) *Overdrawing your account and paying a fee even though you have overdraft protection (Your Money) *Cracking someone’s ribs in the Heimlich maneuver (Your Health) *Inability to make a Band-Aid stick or get a Band-Aid off without tearing out your hair (Your Health) *Forgetting your loved ones’ birthdays year after year (Your Relationships & Family) *Embarrassing yourself on a date because you don’t understand the French menu or the 90-page wine list (Your Relationships & Family) The ways in which we flub and flounder are infinite, and this book taps into that boundless fountain of foul ups in a way that will entertain and enlighten readers of all kinds.

15 Patterns Included! Simple but elegant fashions requiring minimal sewing and cutting! Each modern and stylish piece is made using a single pattern piece, which is then snipped, trimmed, twisted, folded, and stitched. Each garment is accessible to even those with little sewing experience but also novel and appealing enough to attract experienced sewers. Projects provide readers with the inspiration and instruction to make customized, versatile wardrobe pieces that can be made in any range of fabrics and worn in combination or alone for a variety of style and fashion effects. Each project featured in this book is made from a single pattern piece. Requiring minimal investment, simple sewing techniques, cutting, and creative yet simple folding, fashions can be made out of a range of fabrics providing limitless styles for each pattern. Many pieces can be worn multiple ways and in many different combinations with other pieces, ensuring endless style variations and to create an all-purpose wardrobe for all occasions.

Reduce, reuse, and recycle with ideas from The Craft-a-Day Book. You can put the three Rs to work with these thirty awesome crafts! Using recycled and reusable materials from around the house, school, or a thrift store, you'll find directions for making colorful lanterns from paper and jars, ruffle skirts from t-shirts, scarves and mitts from your favorite old sweaters and socks, and much more. Learn to make bobbles and pom-poms and other easy decorative embellishments. You'll also get a window into how one experienced crafter—Kari Cornell—finds inspiration for her projects. Colorful photographs and step-by-step instructions turn each inspiration into something you'll love wearing or using—and will lead you to new ideas of your own! Ready, set, let's get crafting!

A dynamic resurgence in sewing and knitting is under way, with many people enjoying making and mending their own garments at home. However, stories abound of homemade clothes languishing at the back of the wardrobe. Amy Twigger Holroyd draws on ideas of fashion, culture and craft to explore makers' lived experiences of creating and wearing homemade clothes in a society dominated by shop-bought garments. Using the innovative metaphor of fashion as common land, Folk Fashion investigates the complex relationship between making, well-being and sustainability. Twigger Holroyd combines her own experience as a designer and knitter with first-hand accounts from folk fashion makers to explore this fascinating, yet under-examined, area of contemporary fashion culture.Looking to the future, she also considers how sewers and knitters might maximise the radical potential of their activities.