How to Make the Easiest Sewn Fabric Baskets

If you have enough fabric baskets to hold all your stuff, then obviously you don’t have too much stuff!

So what if my solution to my minor tendency to hoard interesting rocks, empty thread spools, soda can pull tabs, and pretty matchbooks is just to toss them into these beautiful sewn fabric baskets? The stuff is out of the way, attractively stored, and if one day you really need me to make you some pull tab chainmail, I will be able to get right to it!

These fabric baskets are purposefully a bit on the droopy side, because I don’t like to sew with artificial materials like interfacing. A little interfacing or even cereal box cardboard would firm them up, though, if you prefer that look. I like my baskets to look as slouchy as I am!

To make these baskets, then, you won’t need interfacing, but you WILL need the following:

• five 6″ squares of outside fabric. I generally use quilting cotton for this, although I’ve also upcycled some curtain fabric that was definitely some kind of polyester, and it turned out beautifully.
• five 6″ squares of lining fabric. Quilting cotton is also great for this, but I’ve also used old bedsheets or other random yardage in my stash.
• cutting and sewing supplies. I know it’s just one more thing to buy, but I finally gave in and bought myself some of those plastic sewing clips that are on trend. I’m not as obsessed with them as TikTok, is, and they’re a lot less eco-friendly than the steel pins that were good enough for your granny, but I WILL say that I never again want to sew binding without them!

Step 1: Cut the outside and the lining fabric.

Cut five pieces of fabric that are 6″ square for the outside of the basket, and another five pieces for the inside. Arrange your pieces like this:

If you’ve ever in your life done any math, then right now you’re asking me why you have to cut five different squares of fabric for these baskets, when obviously you could just cut one piece of fabric three times that length and save yourself sewing two seams.

The answer is that 1) I own a 6″x12″ gridded quilting ruler that I’m obsessed with and all I do all day is think of things to cut that are 6″ or 12″, and 2) the seams help the basket have crisper edges. If you want to save yourself a couple of seams I won’t stop you, but your basket won’t look as cute.

Also, if you’re sewing a print fabric, like my pink one in the finished photos, you can rotate each piece so that its aligned in the proper direction before you sew it. No upside-down prints on YOUR baskets!

Step 2: Sew the pieces into a T-shape.

In order to make these baskets look the best, you need to be REALLy precise with your seams here. If you have trouble sewing a perfect seam, consider drawing yourself a sewing line in washable ink.

You will sew each piece with a precise .5″ seam, and you will start and stop precisely .5″ from the end of each edges. I know it’s fiddly, but your baskets will look soooo nice this way!

Ironing each seam open also really helps you sew precise seams on those cross-pieces. In the photo below, the stitching line is my starting point for sewing a cross-piece. At the end of the seam, the other stitching line is my stopping point!

Do this for both the outside fabric and the lining fabric, until you have two perfect T pieces.

Step 3: Sew adjacent sides together to form a cube with an open top.

Sew each adjacent side together, again with a .5″ seam allowance. You can start sewing right at the top of each seam, but down at the corners, stop again .5″ from the end. If you’ve been really precise sewing your T, you will see exactly where to stop stitching, because that’s where all the stitch lines will meet. If you overshot on a piece or two, though, just snip the stitches that went too far.

Step 4: Insert the lining into the outer fabric and sew a fold-over binding.

Insert the lining fabric into the outer fabric, wrong sides together. Make sure the corners match and that the seams are lined up.

Fold the top of the lining and the outer fabric over twice, so that the raw edges of both pieces are enclosed. Two .25″ folds will give you a perfectly square basket, but feel free to fold them over more if you’d like a shallower basket and a wider binding.

Pin the binding well with the pin or clip of your choice!

Edge stitch the binding in place.

These sewn fabric baskets are so quick to make that they’re an easy way to give some handmade love to your loved ones. Every now and then I’ll surprise one of my teenagers with a new little basket that matches their room decor, and that homemade matching game that I made a few weeks ago was lovingly packed into its own little fabric storage basket when I sent it to my niece.

The most important use of the fabric baskets, though?

Holding all my pull tabs, empty thread spools, interesting rocks, and best bits of sea glass, of course!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Finished the Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet (and the Dolch Sight Word Cards!)

 

Once upon a time, waaaay back in January 2023, Past Julie thought, "Ooh, I have the perfect idea for a cute Christmas gift for my niece! I'll hand-sew her a moveable alphabet out of the rest of my stash of wool felt. I'll just sew, like, one letter a week and she'll have SO many letters by Christmas!"

June 2023 rolled around, and Past Julie thought, "Hmm, no big deal. I'll just start stitching a couple of letters a week."

During the October meeting of my mending group, I happily cut out letters and burbled to my fellow menders that "I just need to sew one a day and they'll be done in plenty of time before Christmas!"

During the November meeting, I said, a little more grimly, "Just two a day and I can squeak them into the mail just in time for Christmas."

Those last couple of days in December, it was more like six a day while binge-watching Chicago Med DVDs, but look at the glorious result!

I am SO pleased with them! 

Here's a rooster for size comparison, because the entire flock could not get it out of their heads that these colorful nuggets were perhaps made of delicious chicken food:

My favorite part of this project is that even though yes, it took a lot of me-hours to accomplish, the materials are ENTIRELY stash!

The felt is a really nice merino wool felt that I bought long ago for projects with my own kids (it's this exact set, but I bought 8"x10" cuts instead of the 4"x6" cuts shown here). I blanket stitched the letters with basic-grade Amazon embroidery floss and I stuffed each letter with snips of that same felt, and won my own personal game of wool felt chicken because after the very last letter was stuffed, I had less than a handful of little wool felt snippies left. 

I even had all the colors left! I managed a complete rainbow to start the set--

--and also had enough grey, brown, black, and white to make a nice variety and multiples of every letter (except for X and Q, ahem):

My partner handled creating all the Dolch sight words in the same font and size, and I backed each one in pretty paper and laminated it so my niece can use them as templates to make words with the wool felt letters:

Wool felt has such a lovely feel, though, and the colors are so pretty, that I'm hoping that the letters alone are a fun sensory experience. Sensory experiences build intrinsic knowledge and increase one's love for a topic.

It's clear that the chickens, at least, appreciate the sensory appeal!

Even though this project took a loooong time, it was not hard at all, and I actually would recommend it as a beginner-level hand-sewing project for absolutely anyone. Over Thanksgiving break my college kid sewed a perfectly acceptable "I" after about five seconds of instruction, and it's now mixed in there somewhere with the rest of the letters, completely indistinguishable from the lot (well, *I* can distinguish it, but definitely nobody else could)...

Best. Christmas. Yet. Now, to figure out something even more unwieldy to make for next year!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Mending at the Library in Mid-December

 

Every month, my mending group volunteers at the library for one afternoon, mending whatever people bring in.

Sometimes, we do send people away--like, we can't resole shoes or anything--and sometimes we'll tell them something to buy and come back with next month, like if they need a very specific zipper or something, but the group actually has a pretty big stock of bits and bobs and notions and fabrics, so mostly people can walk in with a damaged piece and walk out with it mended. 

To be honest, I didn't attend this latest Mending Day expecting to mend anything; I'd hoped I could set up at a table in the back, just happen to let all the patrons wander over to someone else, and spend four hours sewing my Girl Scout troop's Elf Project stocking and the wool felt moveable alphabet for my niece's Christmas present.

Well, I did get the stocking sewn!

After that, I had time to take about one stitch in my next felt letter, and then I was too busy actually mending things to pick it up again.

Our group has a regular monthly clientele of older single men who bring us their mending every month, which... fair and valid! I'd totally do the same! So I mended a couple of tiny holes in a sweatshirt and a hoodie, then let the patron borrow my needle and thread and talked him through mending the rest while I sewed up a rip in a pair of fleece pants and another in a sheet. For my own mending, I like to stitch only, with no interfacing allowed to muck up my sensory experience. But for this mending, another volunteer taught me how to use tricot interfacing, which comes in both white and black for matching purposes, and stabilizing the fabric DID make the sewing go a LOT more quickly!

Then a librarian from a different branch came in to ask about the possibility of the group mentoring teen learn-to-sew programs. I am VERY interested in that, so we spoke for a while and hopefully next year, I'll find myself sewing with teenagers.

Then I sewed up a very fiddly rip in a very fiddly open-weave decorative pillowcase, using even more tricot and a bunch of stitching lines across the rip to ideally stabilize the fraying seams so that I don't see this patron again in January to mend that same rip again.

Near the end of our session, a patron came in wanting us to sew up a rip in his pocket. The only problem? He was literally wearing those pants right then...

His marching orders were to come back in January, with the pants washed, dried, and NOT on his body.

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December WIPs: Grapefruit, Cinnamon, Wool Felt, and College Application Essays

Nutcracker is finished, and Christmas is on the horizon! 

Here's what I'm currently working on, trying to finish, or at least determinedly not abandoning:

SUCCESSES

Look at that Mouse King army, all sewn and stuffed, labeled with ribbons that read "Team Mouse 2023," and ready to be wrapped and handed off to a corps of little mouselings!

I sewed these mini Mouse King stuffies from the Nutcracker stuffies fabric that my teenager designed a couple of years ago. I also sewed a complete set of the mini stuffies for the teenager so she could hang them on our Christmas tree... but it turns out that the performance casting document that the ballet department sent out to the parents omitted one kid's name from the Mouse corps, and therefore I was short exactly one Mouse King!

Obviously, the solution was to give that kid my own kid's ornament, lol.

So technically this remains a WIP, as my own teenager's set is short a Mouse King until I upload a fabric panel to Spoonflower that's all Mouse Kings, have it printed and sent to me, and then re-sew that stuffie for her. That's an AFTER Christmas project for Future Julie to enjoy...

Also in the realm of Still-But-Not-Really-A-WIP is the stocking that I sewed for my Girl Scout troop's Elf Project kid. I managed to sew it start to finish during my mending group's monthly Mending Day at our local public library--

--then the next day the troop met to wrap all the presents they'd bought for our sponsored kid and stuff this stocking. I just have to run out today and buy a couple last things, have my teenager wrap them, and then I can pack up everything and drop it off for the kid's caregiver to pick up before Christmas.

Also at that meeting, we made a pretty epic version of these gnomes, which required me to score some faux fur remnants from Joann's, dig through my fabric stash for the body and hats and noses, buy five pounds of rice, make a sample project, then walk five Girl Scouts through their own versions. We had to do some on-the-spot trouble-shooting when their bodies came out weird and none of us could figure out why, but eventually five ADORABLE gnomes are now all sitting fat and happy in five Girl Scout homes.

FAILURES

Unsurprisingly, I suppose, after all the extra holiday projects I put on my own plate, most of my November WIPs remain WIPs. I haven't even touched the skull quilt block or the weaving loom or the England travel journal since then. 

That kind of project is what the cozy, relaxed week between Christmas and New Year's Eve is for!

CURRENT WIPS

I called my teenager in to take a process photo of my hands kneading this cinnamon dough for an upcoming tutorial, and while she was at it she also took a photo of me fighting for my life to keep my fuzzy monster foot slippers (I bought these in 2019 and still wear them allll winter every winter!) out of the frame.

These grapefruit slices took a LOT longer to dehydrate than I thought they would. I think I cut them too thick?

My goal is to write tutorials for both of these projects for my next couple of freelance writing pieces, in the process making a nice winter dried grapefruit slice and cinnamon cut-out garland for my kitchen.

Y'all, I only have SIX MORE LETTERS to sew to complete my niece's hand-sewn wool felt moveable alphabet! They are turning out as cute as they can possibly be! I still need to sew a carrying bag, print and laminate some sight word cards to go with the set, write my niece a holiday letter, and then pack and mail it all off to her. Do you think a Saturday mailing is too late to get it to California by Christmas?

Other remaining tasks: finishing up one last handmade-ish Christmas present, keeping an eye out for the last of the family presents to trickle in and then wrapping them, helping/prodding the teenager to finish up college applications and her Gold Award proposal, and picking my college student up from Ohio after she finishes acing all of her final exams. 

After that, it's nothing but cookie baking, movie watching, gingerbread house decorating, and board game playing for the rest of the year. I can't wait!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Make Upcycled Embroidered Cardboard Ornaments

 

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Clean out your recycling bin and your floss stash to make embroidered cardboard ornaments!

I am very drawn to patterns and geometric designs, and I’m always looking for ways to incorporate them into my favorite crafts. These embroidered cardboard ornaments are an easy winner, because although they lend themselves very well to creating spirals, mandalas, and other mathematical designs, they also lend themselves very well to… well, anything!

So whether you’re obsessed with soothing symmetry like me, or you like to make your stitching free-form or representative, you can stitch the design of your dreams onto these embroidered cardboard ornaments. Here’s how!

To make embroidered cardboard ornaments, you will need:

• upcycled cardboard. I know that I usually have a recommendation, but for this project, both corrugated cardboard and food packaging-weight cardboard work equally well. I prefer corrugated cardboard for smaller embroidered cardboard ornaments, just because I think the additional width keeps them from getting lost on a Christmas tree. Thinner cardboard is easier to work with, though, and works well, I think, with more intricate designs that require a larger diameter of cardboard. I prefer thinner cardboard for all the ornament backings, but more corrugated cardboard would work, too.
• measuring and cutting tools. You’ll want scissors, of course, and something to trace to make the ornament form (for these ornaments, I used a Mason jar lid and a saucer). For wheel designs, you may want a divided circle template; two templates that I often use are linked here and here. To poke holes in the corrugated cardboard, use a safety pin or thumbtack.
• embroidery floss and tapestry needle. A tapestry needle has a blunt tip, which will keep you from poking holes that you don’t want to poke through the cardboard. It’s also useful for stitching plastic canvas or cardstock. Even cheap cotton embroidery floss works perfectly for this project, but my favorite embroidery floss actually comes from my local thrift shop!
• tape and hot glue. You’ll use both on the backside of your ornament, so that nothing shows on the front but your beautiful stitching!
• ornament hanger. Ribbon, more embroidery floss, yarn, or anything that you have on hand!

Step 1: Trace and cut an ornament template.

Find a circle template, anything from a jar lid to a ceramic saucer, and trace it onto cardboard. Cut it out with sturdy scissors.

To make ornaments with radial symmetry, you’ll probably want to mark divisions around your cardboard circle. You can actually eyeball this up to a fairly high number! But it’s also not cheating to use a template. I use my DIY circle template to divide my cardboard circle into twelve, and I use the templates linked here to divide it into 50 or 100.

With these cardboard ornaments, you DO have to pre-punch the holes you want to stitch through. Sometimes, I just cut eensy little slits or notches around the edges of thinner cardboard. With corrugated cardboard, or in the middle of either kind, use a safety pin to poke holes where you want to stitch.

Step 2: Embroider the cardboard ornament.

Thread your needle, and either tie a knot at the end of the embroidery floss OR tape it down on the backside of the ornament.

Embroider your ornament however you’d like. When you reach the end of the floss or you want to change colors, tape the end of the floss to the back of the ornament.

The tape won’t show, and will keep the embroidery floss super snug on the front of the ornament. Nobody wants saggy embroidery!

Step 3: Add a backing to the ornament.

When your embroidery is complete, add a backing to hide the ugly side of the stitching.

But first, hot glue an ornament hanger to the backside of the ornament. I like ribbon, but yarn, twine, more embroidery floss, or anything that you have on hand is fine.

Cut another cardboard circle (I prefer thin cardboard for this) the same size as the first one. Hot glue it to the back of the ornament to hide the rough edges of the ornament hanger and the ugly side of your stitching.

You can also embroider this back piece, or write a name and date, or really just embellish it however you’d like. Or not! I personally like the look of the plain cardboard back to contrast with the fancy embroidered front.

I know I said that mathematical designs are my favorite, but any simple embroidery pattern works well for this project. Monograms are super cute, and a Google search will reveal all sorts of inspiring holiday patterns and other cute designs. Feel free to also experiment with floss weight, or even to switch to yarn for younger crafters or thread for making intricate, detailed designs.

If you prefer crafting with natural materials, get out the drill, because you can also embroider wood slices!

November WIPs

 

All this year I've been trying to be more organized with my various craft projects--including, you know, *actually* completing the projects that I start. 

I've been doing a fairly good job with it, too... until November. Things seem to have run off the rails a bit this month.

Here's what I'm currently working on, trying to finish, or at least determinedly not abandoning:

Skull Quilt Block

I actually sewed this skull quilt block back in October, a couple of weeks before Halloween. I was wanting a quick little homemade holiday thing to give to my teenager and put in my college student's care package, and I thought that this skull quilt block would be lovely as the front panel of a zippered pouch big enough to hold their ipads. And while I was at it, I could make one for my nook, as well!

Well, this little sucker was a LOT more challenging and fiddly to sew than I'd anticipated, and it took me two days of seam ripping and swearing to get this one wonky, crooked block.

I DO know what I did wrong, though--when a pattern tells you that the seam allowance is 1/4", they mean it!

Even though it's well past Halloween now, I'm determined not to abandon my project. After all, I have the kind of kids who'd welcome a patchwork skull ipad cozy in their Christmas stockings just as much as they would in their Halloween candy buckets!

Weaving Loom

This was also technically meant to be an October project. In early October, I taught a workshop to Girl Scout leaders on the topic of upcycled cardboard crafts. I'd wanted to include this simple corrugated cardboard weaving loom, but ran out of time to demo it and write/photograph a tutorial. 

I DO actually have plenty of process photos now, so at this point I could write the tutorial up, but now I've gotten wrapped up (ahem) in various weaving patterns, and I checked out a ton of pattern books from the library, and I want to make a few more long braids to use as hangers for all the Christmas ornaments I hope to make.

England Travel Journal

For Mother's Day, Matt and the kids gave me a beautiful blank book and some themed stickers and accessories so that I could keep a travel journal during our upcoming trip to England... which I did!

After I got home, though, I realized that I had plenty of room to intersperse many of my trip photos, as well as other embellishments I'm cutting out from old travel guides and National Geographics. It's... gotten a little out of hand, to be honest. I'm only about halfway done with it, and it's already so fat that Matt's talking about finding a larger set of book rings and rebinding it for me. 

Hand-Sewn Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet

This might be my most unwieldy project to date. I've had a partial package of very nice wool felt (I got it from this shop 11 years ago, and the shop is still in business!) kicking around my stash ever since I got on that Waldorf materials kick back when the kids were small, and I settled on the plan of using it to make a hand-stitched moveable alphabet for my three-year-old niece's Christmas present. 

While fabricating this plan, I conveniently forgot about my extreme myopia and my newly-middle-aged eyesight that means that there are a few specific distances at which I literally cannot focus my eyes... one of them being the distance to a piece of embroidery held in my hands. 

Nevertheless, I am nearsightedly soldiering on! I finished cutting out all the felt letters just a few nights ago, while Matt plied us with cocktails and read me crossword puzzle clues, and my benchmark goal is completing two letters per day--a couple of days ago, I completed three! Alas that currently, most of these letters are being sewn while the teenager and I listen to 12 Years a Slave, which is the most harrowing, saddest, emotional book I've read in I don't know how long. I can't think of a better book for making the human cost of slavery tangible, and it's the best possible book to read with a teenager, but I do feel a little weird sewing away on a three-year-old's toy while listening to Eliza's screams as she's torn away from her small daughter in the New Orleans slave market. 

Hopefully, all these WIPs will be finished by mid-December, and I will try very hard to discipline myself not to start anything new until they are!

I mean, though, I DO need to make some Team Mouse gifts for my own mouseling's fellow Nutcracker warriors, and I've got a couple more handmade Christmas gifts in mind, and we were thinking of really leaning into the Christmas cookie game this year, and I have some England photos that I want to print but first I need to thrift and makeover some frames for them...

Maybe I'll just start the Team Mouse gifts and the Christmas cookies...

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Made Some Oven Mitts, and I'll Probably Make Some More

 

It was my birthday last week, and the kids and I had made all kinds of plans. The teenager tipped me off on signing up for birthday freebies, so we had some of those to pick up, and we also thought it might be fun to buy iced coffees and hang out for a while at our favorite indie bookstore. For dinner, a local pizza place gives you your age as a discount on your bill on your birthday, and at 47, I feel like I am finally old enough to really work that discount! Afterwards, Matt said he would set up the projector in the family room so we could all eat cheesecake and watch my favorite movie on a super-sized screen.

But first, the kids had to cool their heels for a couple of hours, because I told them that what I REALLY wanted to do the most on my birthday was sew some new oven mitts!

Our current oven mitts were all old and raggedy, which doesn't actually bother me, but Matt kept somehow grabbing pans with the raggediest part of any given oven mitt and burning himself, which is obviously not an oven mitt success story.

So I found this oven mitt pattern from Suzy Quilts, printed it out, and spent part of my birthday happily sewing away!

The exterior pieces are canvas--a couple of years ago, I got into buying canvas remnants whenever I stopped by Joann's, and for a while I was sewing all kinds of stuff with it, but now it's just sitting in my stash and I'm stoked to have a good use for it!--and cotton batting. I bought a TON of cotton batting yardage online during the Covid lockdowns (just between us, I mathed incorrectly and waaaaay overordered, ahem), and after being used on tons and tons of quilts over the past three years it's finally down to a scrappily remnant amount, as well.

The interior pieces are all quilting cotton of unknown provenance and in patterns that I LOATHE, but I keep it around anyway because quilting cotton! So useful! So a couple of these oven mitts have American flag insides, and a couple have pitchfork and straw hat insides, shudder. Don't look inside my oven mitts!

Here's a little of the quilting on the exterior pieces:

These oven mitts sew up SO quickly! I put a few shortcuts into the Suzy Quilts tutorial to make it even quicker, so if you, too, want the absolute quickest way to a new oven mitt, do this:

1. Follow all the regular steps to cut out the pieces, baste the lining to the fabric, quilt the exterior pieces, sew the two interior pieces together and the two exterior pieces together, and turn the exterior side of the mitt right side out.
2. Insert the interior side of the mitt (which should still be inside out) into the exterior mitt. The two parts of the mitt should be wrong sides together.
3. Turn the raw edges of both parts to the inside, clip it well with those super handy plastic clips you finally bought yourself after seeing them on Tiktok and wanting them for years--

--and sew around the edge to finish!

Here's a photo of Luna helping me photograph my brand-new oven mitts on the back deck, right before the kids and I headed off for iced coffee, my free Crumbl cookie, and a couple of hours of book browsing:

These oven mitts have been in use for a week now, and we love them! The two layers of canvas, two layers of quilting cotton, and four layers of cotton batting feel like plenty of insulation, and the size works for every hand from the teenager's to Matt's. Even though I don't think we need more than four oven mitts in our rotation, I'm very tempted to make more while I have the canvas and the cotton batting and a pattern I love at my fingertips. I could save a couple each for these kids' future first apartments, and I could put a few in my handmade presents stash, or just set them aside to replace these when they get worn.

Actually, though, our current hot pads are just as old and raggedy, so maybe I should make some new ones to match my new oven mitts!

An Easy Alteration To an Amazon Dress

 

Remember the teenager's end of the school year ballerina murder mystery party? One of the reasons why it was so fun is that it was not just a murder mystery, but ALSO a pretend high school Homecoming dance! 

Which means pretend high school Homecoming dance clothes!

This was, quite honestly, quite a lot of the appeal of the party for my own high schooler, since she's never been to a Homecoming dance... nor does she particularly desire to go to one, frankly, but dressing up and dancing with one's friends is SO fun.

Our local Goodwills do have a terrific selection of dresses, including plenty of beautiful formal ones, but dang, have they gotten spendy! Our local locations used the Covid lockdowns as an excuse to take away the monthly storewide sales, and when they reopened it was with higher prices and no more discounts, not even Color of the Week, grr. So even though I'm very much an advocate of thrifting and upcycling, I wasn't big sad when the teenager said she'd rather buy a cheap, fast-fashion, sweatshop-manufactured dress from Amazon. If it was gross, we could just return it and hit up Goodwill, after all.

The kid picked this one--

--and actually, it was pretty nice! The velvet and lace both looked good, the neckline had a well-constructed binding, the stretch fabric gave the garment good drape without needing darts (which means I didn't have to worry about misplaced darts), and the fact that it wasn't lined really just meant that I didn't have to work too hard on my alterations.

It definitely did need alterations, though. The length of the hemline and the sleeves were good, but the shoulders were way too long for my teenager's torso, and the waist was too roomy. We probably could have sized down, but the needed alterations were so easy that I could make them in less time than it would have taken to package up the return. 

For alterations this easy, I had the teenager put the dress on inside out, then I pinned the dress to fit the way she wanted it to.

I'm so glad I bought those plastic sewing clips that everyone was raving about on Tiktok!

I pinned the waist to fit, using the pins to mark my sewing lines and thereby skipping several traditional steps. Same for the shoulders, although I unpicked the top of the sleeve first:

To take in the garment, I just had to sew along the line my clips marked:

The sleeves were already slightly puffed, so I just regathered them to make them a little puffier, then pinned them and reset them into the shoulder. 

This was SUCH a quick alteration, and it really worked to show me that it's not the quality of the fabric that makes a garment look good, but the quality of the construction. The dress, pulled on straight from the package, looked okay, but it also looked as cheap as it was. But after doing nothing more than taking in the hems to fit my teenager's specific measurements, that cheap dress looked really good! It fit great, and therefore it looked great. 

A few weeks later, at my mending group's monthly afternoon when we sit in our public library and mend clothes for patrons, I used the same technique to alter a pair of work pants for a young adult who'd just started her first real white collar job. She'd purchased some khakis from Goodwill, but didn't like how wide the legs were. I had her put them on inside out, stood her on a stool, used my handy pins to narrow them the way she wanted, and then sewed along the pins. She tried them on again, and they looked great!

I'm telling you: easiest. Alteration. EVER!