Getting The Hang of It

About a month and a half ago I was talking to my mom about how Jay and I were saving up to buy ourselves a sewing machine.. She tells me that she has one that she never uses (more like she never had the patience to figure it out without referring to the manual) and that I could have it! My lucky day!!!
So I took it home, Jay got it all set up, Johnese helped teach me how to use it and the rest is sewing history!

Since then I've tried to make baby booties - pattern sucked so they didn't turn out so well... Not even picture worthy.

I've made a name pillow (featured in my "one busy day" post)

And most recently I made some stuff for my office/craft room/guest bedroom...
Here is the story of my latest project...

This drives me crazy.

Yes it's a book case and it's function is to store all of our books, but because our spare bedroom serves so many purposes, this book case just looks way too busy.

So, I decided I would make a curtain for it to hide the clutter.

I bought fabric, I measured the book case and I cut the fabric to size. My biggest problem is that I do not have a good spot to cut large pieces of fabric. Nor do I have a large straight edge that I can use to make the sides perfect. I improvised...
Then i just sewed the edges and tacked it up on the inside of the book case. Not professional but it did the trick.

Remember how I said I didn't have a good space to cut large pieces of fabric though?? Well that turned out to be detrimental. Once I tacked up the curtain I looked down and it wasn't long enough!!! I thought I measured??

Back to improvising..

I found an old black shirt that was in my donate pile and decided to cut it up.

I took the long strips I cut out of the shirt and pleated them along the bottom of the curtain.
Note: I have never pleated before, don't know if you would even call what I did pleating, but needless to say I made it work!

It hides the mess and it matches everything else in the room.
What more can I ask for??

I had some more of the fabric i used for the curtain so i decided I would make some matching pillow cases for the bed that's in that room too!

I just bought some white fabric, watched THE best YouTube video and TADAAAA!!!!

Matching pillow cases!
It has all come together.
I am proud =0)