This is one of those patterns I bought forever ago, but never got around to making anything out of it. I had bought a gorgeous piece of material with the intentions of making a dress, but after much debate as to which pattern to use, I decided to do a skirt and blouse instead.

The skirt portion of the pattern turned out great, but the top not so much. I didn't realize until I started to put the band around the neck of the blouse that my material really didn't have enough stretch to it to make this type of top. So I'll go back to the drawing board on making a blouse in the future, but for now I'll pair it with a white top.

To begin with I had to cut the pattern pieces out, which for this was cutting two sides for the front and back on the fold.

Then it was just a matter of sewing up the side seams, leaving a slit on the left side about half way up.

This was the first time I have installed elastic by attaching it to the fabric as opposed to making a casing and inserting elastic. By attaching the elastic to the fabric and then stitching around the skirt I have avoided having my elastic roll up, which is an amazing discovery.  I used this same technique in a pair of lounge pants last week, which is why I used it on this skirt. This will be my go to technique for elastic from here on out.

One of the things I keep seeing on my Cricut group boards is people doing reverse canvas projects. At first, I wasn’t sure how to do them, but everything people kept posting looked beautiful,  which made me want to do it even more.  My thoughts were, how hard could it be? Well that depends on who you ask.

There are a couple steps involved in this process. First you need to decide how big of a project you want to do, then you need to purchase the size canvas you need in order to accommodate your project. I had found a gorgeous sewing machine representative of the old days, which I have always wanted to have in my home.

Once I knew the design I was going to use, I decided on how big I wanted it to be and bought the canvas. After that, I had to remove the canvas material from the frame. By the time I wrote this post, I had already done several of these and I found that the bigger the frame the better I like the look of them. Removing the canvas is fairly simple. You can either cut around the staples or remove them. I chose to remove them. Once you have the canvas off the frame, then you need to decide if you want to leave the frame the natural color that it comes in, stain it or paint it. I have done stain and paint and prefer to paint mine. On this particular project, I painted the frame black as that would make it match the picture frames I use in my home. To me doing the frame is the easy part.

Now on to the design work. I printed my project onto heat transfer vinyl using my Cricut and then I spent hours upon hours weeding the design. At times I was ready to throw my hands up and quit because it was such a tedious process, but once it was completed, I was in awe of how beautiful the design was.

At this point it was time to put it all back together. First you need to iron the weeded design onto the canvas that was originally attached to the frame. Then you need to attach the canvas to the frame. You do that by attaching the canvas to the back of the frame, so that it looks like you have a framed picture, which essentially that is what you have. I used a staple gun to attach the canvas to the frame and stretched the canvas fabric as I worked starting in the middle of each side and working around from there. After doing a few of these, you will figure out which method works best for you in completing your project. Like several other projects, I found YouTube to be a very big help in getting this accomplished. Another design I completed in reverse canvas was of a camera as my love for photography goes back many years. This one was more tedious than the sewing machine.