Blue Jean Bag Gets Blinged Up With Shiny Buttons

This is another blue jean bag I stitched out of old jeans but this time I blinged it up with some of the buttons I seem to have accumulated lately. I just hacked off the leg pieces from a pair of discarded blue jeans, and cut out the zipper placket part and stitched it together. I specifically made the side seams of the jeans the center line on each "front side of the bag so it would look less like the top of a pair of ole blue jeans!  I also lined the bag with a scrap of bright colored polyester material I'd been given when someone cleaned out their fabric stash. I then added a zipper across the top of the lining "bag" to make the blue jean bag more useful and secure.
The easiest way to put the zipper in was to stitch the zipper in the lining first and then stitch the lining itself together and then put the lining into the bag after the lining was sewn together. I just had to be sure I kept the right side of the lining facing inward!  And where I had difficulty sewing the lining "bag" into the top seam area where the fabric is thickest, such as where the handles were stitched on, I used the hot glue gun instead rather than busting my sewing machine!  I also used the hot glue gun to stick on all the shiny buttons I decorated this with.  It seemed I'd accumulated a lot of shiny buttons from my mother's house when we cleaned it out after she died, and also another seamstress (sewciopath!) had handed off to me her supply of extra buttons.  So I found sets of shiny buttons and arranged them on somewhat haphazardly but following the seam lines.  It's a great shoulder bag and I've been using it a lot and get a lot of compliments about it!

Woman in Plexiglass

This is not really "a woman" but a mannequin and in this case (hah!) it is the clothes on the dummy that make the difference.  In the Navy Yard Museum in S.W. Washington is an actual uniform and shoes from the Women's Army Corps. (WAC) in World War II. It's a very tailored dark grey-green dress with a big pleat, a belt and blouse type top with huge lapels and long sleeves cuffed and buttoned. In fact, there's a lot of buttons to the whole outfit and one wonders if the phrase "all buttoned up" originates with this one particular dress. You don't hear much about those ladies who broke that particular non-plexiglass ceiling, but their motto, or responsibility as spelled out in their training manual,  is pretty interesting:-- "Your Job: To Replace Men. Be Ready To Take Over." That must have been pretty scary for some fellas at the time to hear! In fact, I can practically hear my former father-in-law, who fought at Pearl Harbor and other Pacific sites, muttering something about how "the women are always wanting to take over" when my then mother-in-law shooed him out of the house while she was cooking.  From Wikipedia I have learned that there were 150,000 WACs and some of them landed at Normandy too!  Apparently, they were disbanded in 1978 when recruitment into the armed forces seems to have become de-linked from gender. It goes without saying but must always be said, that women have always been given parts to play in all of history.