SNAP! My twin needle shattered as I sat sewing at my machine. The fear of little shards of metal flying in my eye always make events like this scary. I hate it when they break, and with great sadness I realized that was my last twin needle.
Fine. I’ll go to the store. My local quilting shop doesn’t carry the size I need so I’ll have to make a longer drive to the big box stores. Not my favorite type of trip since I’ll have to bring the kids along too and I really want to finish this project.
A couple big box stores and a tantrum or two later…. No luck. Which means I’m going to have to order them online, and wait for them to come in. Shipping always seems like it takes FOREVER! Especially when I’m so close to finishing my project.
Well, I can’t sit and wait a week before I do any more sewing. I think I might go insane if I tried to do that. 😉 So I decided to start a new project, but what could I make?
I thought for a few moments about things that could be done without a twin needle. “ I know, a Mama Bridgette!” Made for Mermaids’ gorgeous lingerie pattern was just the thing I could to work on while I waited for my twin needles. Besides, it’s not like I didn’t have a stack of lace just waiting to be made in to ‘Bridgettes’.
But which color should I make? Coral? Turquoise? Purple? Another black? The more I stared at the colors, 
the more the coral popped out at me. I suppose, in a way, it decided for me.
I started cutting my galloon lace with the ‘Mama Bridgette’ pattern. I made it right up to the end before I realized something terrible…. I was a few inches short on lace. I could have thrown it all at the wall for how frustrated I was! I could have sworn I made sure that there was enough lace. I was so sure of it when I ordered the lace. I sat there looking at it, all beautiful and cut up. I thought to myself, what in the world am I going to do with this lace now? I suppose I could see if the shop I ordered from had more of this color. But that would take longer to get in than the twin needles. Perhaps I should just scrap it and do a different lace?
After thinking about it for a few minutes it occurred to me that I already have a lot of scrap lace from previous lingerie. Could I maybe put some of that with my coral lace and do coordinating colors instead of one solid color. I grabbed my scrap lace bag and dug through it. I pulled out a cream, a white, and a black all with just enough lace to cut out the remaining pieces of my pattern. After laying them next to the coral and just staring at them for a minute, it was pretty obvious which one would be the coordinating color for my coral. This color really made it stand out and just, well, pop. Black. Black would be the lace I would use.
I cut out the remainder of the pattern using the black lace.
Even though the black made the coral pop, I couldn’t help being a little disappointed that I wasn’t going to get a solid coral lace bralette.
But sometimes you just have to make do with what you have so I pushed on. Now, normally I usually use a matching fold over elastic for the bralettes, but since I was doing a coordinating color, I chose to use black fold over elastic instead to tie it all together.
As everything started coming together, and I could actually see the pieces fitting together with each other (Half the reason I love to sew, it’s like a puzzle!) I started to appreciate the black with the coral! I’ve often wanted to combine colors for this pattern, but could never bring myself to actually do it because the colors usually captivate me with their beauty as they are!
I finished the back portion of the bralette and paused to appreciate it. It was coming together much better than I expected!
Just as it was coming together I realized I had another problem to deal with. Dinner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to make itself and I happen to be the meal maker in my household. One of the worst parts about sewing, is that at some point, you have to stop, and in this case the sewing was just going to have to wait until after dinner.
While I was cooking I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was going to tie the black into the front of the bralette. The front was completely coral and there didn’t seem to be a convenient way to incorporate the black. The only thing that I could come up with at the time, was to figure out a way to make my black fold over elastic show on the front.
Once dinner was finished, and my husband and I put our kiddos to bed, I was able to work on my piece again. I completed the rest of the steps but got a little held up on the elastic. It was really tricky making the elastic fold over in a space it wasn’t supposed to be able to fold over. Eventually I figured out how to sandwich the elastic in the seam allowance and leave half of it out (remember its fold over elastic.) so I could top stitch that half to the lower band. That was it! I tried on my new bralette and wouldn’t you know, I loved it! It may not have been to solid coral that I had originally intended it to be, but it had personality!
It was bold, yet dainty.
Sexy, yet elegant.
It was beautiful! Sometimes I’m really in awe of what my hands and my sewing machine can accomplish together! I suppose it goes to show that just because things don’t go the way you planned, doesn’t mean they can’t still go a good way. I imagine I would have regretted it if I had just thrown all that lace away, or just scrapped it. In the end, a scrap pile and a little ingenuity saved the bralette from the same scrap pile fate.
