Unfinished business

It seems I have even more unfinished business than I thought. (see The Hutch)  While going through my closet for candidates for donation to the White Elephant Sale, I found three sewing projects I had started and never finished. Well, to be honest, one was passed on to me by someone else, but still it was a project to be finished. Aha! I thought. The White Elephant Sale takes unfinished sewing projects - I've seen the rack of them in the sewing section. I bagged them up and happily carried them to the Sale the next time we went.

Alas. The guardian at the donation door said they had enough unfinished sewing projects, thank you very much. And I had to bring them back home.

What to do with them? I hate to throw good fabric and hard work out, but I was never going to wear any of these. Well, the Sale would take them if they were finished, of course, and two of these projects had minimum work left to do on them. It's just that I had lost interest. So why not finish them and then donate them?

I told myself: I will finish one and then reward myself by sewing something "real" that I like and will wear. Then I will do the next unfinished one, and so on until I'm done with the three.

The first was a corduroy jumper I started maybe 40 years ago. Maybe even before that. I did a really nice job on it, lining the top with plaid flannel and finishing it nicely. The only thing left to do was the buttons and all but three of the buttonholes ... all the way down the front. I think the buttonholes discouraged me. So many dratted buttonholes. I hate to make buttonholes.

So I left it forever, moving it from closet to closet and home to home. The matching buttons, all 12 of them, lived in the pocket of the jumper. Until today.

Yay!!! I just finished the jumper and I did it without having to do 9 more buttonholes, or even sewing on 12 buttons.

I sewed on the 3 buttons that I already had buttonholes for, and added a fourth to make an even march of buttons down the front of the bodice to the waistline. At the waistline, I used a large heavy snap behind and under the button.

Then I used 3 more heavy snaps down the front of the skirt and left the front open beyond that point. Styles are less conservative today than when I started this jumper - well, in some ways. That would have been soon after hippie times, and that wasn't really what you'd call conservative, was it?

Anyway. No more buttonholes, no more buttons, and the jumper is finally finished. Yes, it still fits, but it is no longer my style. I have outgrown corduroy jumpers, but someone much younger will probably love it. I'm going to send it out into the world.

One more step toward finishing all that unfinished business!