Pojagi from secondhand shirts

You remember that pile of shirts I showed off a while back, right? Here's what happened next.



Disassembled.



Scraps.



So many buttons! What should I do with them?

 

Rough layout.
 


Planning how to turn that rough layout into a grid. I love my new colored pencils!
 

All pressed and trimmed.
 

And, voila! Pojagi! This is the front side above.



And this is the back. Traditionally, pojagi--a Korean patchwork method--is made out of leftover cloth, so I think using old shirts was a pretty appropriate choice.

I used this tutorial for the seams, choosing the more traditional option (#2). (And believe me, the irony of cutting apart shirts constructed with flat-felled seams and then sewing the pieces back together using flat-felled seams is not lost on me.)

I have to admit, I was pretty intimidated to try this method. But Victoria's tutorial is extremely lucid and easy to follow, and by the third seam I was pretty much doing it from memory.
 

The one thing I wasn't sure of was how to make sure that the front side of all the seams ended up on the same side of my patchwork. Lining up fabric, sewing it, flipping it over, flipping it again....oy. I was sure I was going to make a mistake somewhere along the line, and had pretty much decided that I was going to be okay with that. But, somewhat miraculously, everything came out right in the end. So here is what I think I figured out:

-When working from left to right in a fabric layout, place your left-hand piece of patchwork on the bottom. ("Bottom" in the sense that Victoria uses the term--the first piece of fabric that you lay down on the table when you are aligning a seam.)

-When working from top to bottom, put the bottom piece of fabric on the bottom.

One additional tip I'll give is that if you are sewing a long seam--the longest seams on my piece are about 36 inches--it would be helpful to pin when sewing the second row of stitching (rather than just the first). I didn't do that, relying just on pressing, and one of my long seams suffered for it. (Albeit mildly, but, you know. It bugs.)

 

So there you have it! I sort of don't want to post this, because it means admitting how very behind I am on this project. The festival is in less than two weeks! But there will be lots and lots of hand-stitching between now and then, because, well, there simply has to be, hasn't there? And there's a strange sort of comfort in that.

At times like these I really feel grateful for British period dramas.