Summer Salvage of Worn Winter Clothes

If your family is like ours, come spring, you have a whole bunch of winter clothes that won't be serviceable for the next season.  The old wardrobes are riddled with ruined sleeves and holey knees, along with the usual assortment of items that'll be outgrown by fall.

Most of the time I fill bags to donate, but this year it just so happens that about a dozen of the girl's things can be saved with the help of scissors and a trusty twin needle.

These dresses, for example.  The one with the cat motif used to have sleeves.

And so did the striped one :o).

It was a rough winter for leggings in my household.  The girls burned through about six pairs of them.  I'm slowly cutting them off above the holey knees to turn them into summer shorts to wear under dresses and such.

I've been using the regular presser foot for this process, but I think I might need to switch to the walking foot to see if it will minimize stretch in the stitch line.

The stretch doesn't matter for this type of thing but I have a three-quarter-length sleeve dress of my own that I want alter into a short sleeved dress and I'd prefer to have that one smooth.

If you haven't used a twin needle before, it's easy enough.  Make up a second bobbin with your top stitching color so that you have two "spools" of thread to use with the twin needle.

And whatever you do, DO NOT SEW OVER ANY PINS!!!!!  Is there anything more useless than a broken twin needle?  There certainly isn't anything more frustrating.  Except maybe trying to follow the vet's orders to keep a German shepherd puppy from running for a month.  But that's another story altogether!