One of our Sewing Collective members, Sylvia, has been sewing up a storm lately! In response to our January Threads Challenge, she completed a dress she was inspired to make from the July 2012 edition. If you may recall, Sylvia asked me many months ago to digitize the rose that Jennifer Stern had drawn for her machine embroidered embellishment. I wrote about that process here. You never know what becomes of these requests, so I was astonished when she told me she had finished the dress!

This must have been quite an endeavor because Sylvia’s original embroidery machine ended up in the shop along the way. And then before I knew it, she had upgraded to a much nicer Baby Lock! The pattern is New Look 6670 (OOP) made in a silk shantung. The flowers were embroidered on white satin with silver specks. Isn’t it fabulous? Sylvia says now she just needs some occasion to wear the thing at! To see the original photos in the Denver Sews Challenge flickr pool, click here.

Sylvia also recently completed the Bionic Gear Bag, a pattern you can purchase from Craftsy here. The pattern is from RipStitcher who happens to live in Colorado! (Craftsy is in Denver, too, so that’s doubly cool). Now, mind you, Sylvia is primarily a garment sewer. Because this is one of her very first “crafty” projects, she actually had to find some quilting fabrics to finish the project with. Having no quilting fabric stash to rely on (for quilters or quilt-dabblers, this is quite inconceivable), she went with a friend to find some nice fabrics. in addition to her chosen quilting cotton, she ended up using some pleather. The final product looks much more sophisticated than the original, in my opinion.

If you look inside, you’ll see the fabric bowl, which I believe is a little freebie that comes with the pattern.

I’ve also tried a pattern from RipStitcher, the Bionic Needle Organizer. I wrote about it here. Sylvia and I both like our final products very much, but found the instructions to be a bit too chatty and certainly almost too long to print out. Sylvia found the printed instructions confusing in parts and ended up consulting the tutorial here to get her through the tough parts. In the end, she finished the edges without consulting the instructions and it turned out just fine. Overall, she loved the pattern and now she’s ready for her next challenge: a new wallet!