Simple Scarves

I am done with summer. This one hasn’t been the best.

And fall is by far my favorite season—the leaves, the holidays, the food, harvest time, and the clothes.
I love the layers, jackets, sweaters, boots, jeans come back to cover my nasty legs, etc.
So I’m moving on and the last few years have always had the most sewing inspiration in fall.
So I’m brewing up some fun ideas for clothing (mainly for Ellie and I), but in the mean time I needed a quick, easy project to help me get back into sewing.

So I made three scarves, each out of a single yard of gauze.

Cotton gauze is a lightweight, 100% cotton, crinkled textured, slightly stretchy fabric.
It’s nice it’s 100% cotton if you have a color you’d like to dye it. 

(My orange was a little too tangerine, so I dyed it in tea to make it more of a burnt orange)
I thought it would do well as a scarf because you can easily squish it tight for a skinny look, or it will fluff full if you want more volume.
It’s also pretty affordable. I bought mine online from fabric.com for 3.98/ yard. So each scarf was $4.00 which is pretty good.
UPDATE: Gauze on sale for only $3.38/yard. You can get some cheap scarves!
So a pretty cheap way to add accessories to your wardrobe and have a quick satisfying project you can finish in less than an hour.

It’s so simple I didn’t take photos of the process, but here’s a diagram to show how I cut the fabric and attached the halves together.
The finished scarves measure 25” wide and 76” long. The diagram below lies, it is only 25” wide.

A little more explanation to accompany the diagram:
1. So first, you’ll fold your 1 yard in half, lining up the selvage edges together.
Then you just cut along that fold. This makes the 36” yard cut the length, so with two halves it will give you the 7” long.
This guaze was 52” wide, so in half that results in the 26” raw scarf width, but after you hem it the finished scarf is 25” wide.
2. A French seam is really easy, you just have to sew it twice. Here’s a video if it’s a new method.
basically you sew wrong sides together, trim seam allowance to 1/8” to reduce bulk, fold scarf right sides together around seam allowances and sew another 1/4” seam that traps the first one in a channel. Then top stitch the seam flat to one side.
3. After that you can just do a quick hem around the remaining four sides that have raw edges. I don’t worry about doing mitered corners or anything.
I chose to hem the two short sides, then the long ones. You could even just serge the edges to make the project even quicker!

Then you wear them…which is probably the hardest part for me.
I like the idea of scarves, and I’ve watched this helpful fancy video on 25 ways to tie or wear a scarf.
But I still feel like a dork trying to pull off something I’m not sure looks right. Kind of funny.
Maybe I just need to go for it and the newness will wear off and I won’t feel like a little girl playing dress up or something.

On to fall and cooler weather!