Stuff I have been doing!

I’ve been really super busy with the whole sewing thing lately….well ok, a bit with the sewing…quite a bit with shopping, but its all sewing stuff so it counts!

Firstly…the top I’ve made….

It is the v–necked version of the Renfrew Top from Sewaholic…Took the body in by a dress size and used 3/4 length sleeves on this one, which looks a lot better.

Slightly messed up the v-neck, the tension of the neck band either side of the v ended up being different, and I slightly, slightly missed the centre of the v with the centre seam of the top band. Fixed the slightly wonky centre by whacking a bow over the top, but there isn’t a lot I can do in this round about the tension…next time I will measure a bit more carefully, tack the centre in place before I sew it and follow some advice I saw on a blog to cut an inch off the neck band before I sew it in order to stretch it all out as I sew it in place , so it all has high tension and hopefully doesn’t end up uneven, and it looks tidier when its finished.

It is still totally wearable though, so that is ok!

I think it looks ok anyway.

After that I decided I wanted to keep sewing a load of jersey tops as they are great for this kind of transitional weather and I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing with my sunmmer sewing yet. However I hit the massive barrier that I’d run out of jersey, and  all the stuff I’ve seen online that I like was about £20 meter.

So I decided to go on a couple of reconnaissance missions up Berwick Street and Goldhawke Road to see what is actually available in the shops and for what prices as I have never really done jersey before so had no clue.

Started with Berwick Street, as I had a load of haberdashery stuff to buy and it was convenient. Total no goer on the jersey front. Very few shops stocked it, those that did were like £30 a meter for plain stuff and I couldn’t really see that that was value for money.

Just as I was beginning to be slightly relieved that Berwick Street was a total waste of space as far as being too expensive and not really my kind of thing went, I went into Biddle Sawyer silk, which is totally the last shop before you get to the end of the fabric bit and end up in the remnants of what used to be the red light district.

Oops. First thing I spotted was this….

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in the bargain bin for £10 a meter.it is pure silk, and on closer inspection has little art deco naked ladies all over it!

I have bought 4 meters of it, and hope to use it to line a cape or a coat at some point in the future when I get hold of some cheapish coating I like.

Then I turned round and on the table saw multiple shiny metallic shades of what I assumed was some kind of lamé, but on closer inspection was actually leather!! It was rather expensive, totally bad for the environment, but one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

So I went home and talked it over with Jon and thought about it..and ended up dreaming about it..and so I am now the proud owner of a sparkly champing pink cowhide …

it looks gold in that picture, but it is actually pinker. I have decided I am going to make a simple A-line or straight skirt out out it, as it is sooo trashy looking anyway I need to keep it classy. I am going to wait a while to make it though, as I am chronically loosing weight at the moment and the smaller I am the more skirt I can make from the cowhide. Also I haven’t selected a pattern yet, and whatever I get I want to mock up in denim first to make sure it is totally perfect before attacking something that expensive! (I also could do with a denim skirt.)

Then yesterday I went down Goldehawke  Road with a shopping list of stuff I needed….black denim, lavender lining, black t-shirt jersey and any patterned jersey I could get my hands on…

And remarkably got it all, for far less than I had anticipated…..

purple/lavender taffeta (its a lot less pink in real life), black denim and black t-shirt fabric

patterned jersey – the range at Goldehawke Road was pretty damn awful as well, however this one shop had these in, for what ended up being £3 a meter, which will do nicely, and there was a shop which has ultra fashionable nautical stuff for £8 a meter, which I didn’t like enough to pay that much for.

Think Goldehawke Road is mainly best for basics actually and I’ll buy anything patterned off the internet in future or from Ditto in Brighton, they have some nice looking stuff at the moment, but experience tells me to look at their stuff in real life first, and we are going to Brighton for two nights next month, so I will look properly then.

Now I bought all this, I am totally not going to get the chance to use it for the next 5 weeks. Jon is on Sabatical for a month, and we are going away for two and a half weeks to various places, and even when we are at home I doubt I will get anything done as our flat is super tiny and its very difficult for me to sew without taking over the entire living room/kitchen which really won’t be possible when Jon is home.

I will also be sharing this computer for the duration, so doubt I’ll be blogging much.

Looking forwards to it so much though!

t-shirts and posters

After several months being slightly under the weather and rearranging my fabric collection in increasingly elaborate ways…..I finally perked up and have actually sewn something.

Behold my attempt at the Renfrew Top by Sewaholic..an independent pattern designer.

I’ve seen a lot of pictures of these on the internet and I hadn’t seen a bad/massively unflattering one, so I was hoping it would work out alright. And for a wearable muslin I don’t think its that bad. the fabric was from Rolls and Rems in Lewisham, which is my local fabric store, and I use it fairly often for basics and emergencies, so I shouldn’t slag it off too much…but the quality is apauling, as is all the jersey they have in at the moment. For £4 a meter I’m not that impressed. I mean I know really good quality jersey can be ruinously expensive, but when a fabric shop is selling something that is basically primark quality for a price where the finished garment will cost as much as/more than it would cost at primark…one does wonder whom the target market is exactly. Hence it is clingy and stiff and see-through, so you can see the top of my trousers through it…which is not a great look.

However I will probably wear it again, as its a fairly attractive print (little black bows – if you can’t see from the photo) and I constructed it, so it should last a while longer than something actually from primark.

As far as the instructions and the fit goes, it was fairly straightforward, though I did have to look up how to sew with jersey on the internet first (was my first attempt). I will take it down a size on the main body for my next go, as its actually a bit loose (that makes me so happy  ). The only thing I’ve seriously had to alter is the bottom of the sleeves. I have quite small wrists anyway, but I had to take the cuffs and the sleeve bottoms in massively to fit/look normal . The lady who designs the patterns and all the people doing early attempts of this one I saw are all a lot thinner than me. When one puts on loads of weight, unless one gets massive water retention, your ankles and wrists do grow a bit, but at nowhere near the rate the rest of you does. Thus when scaling up a pattern from a (Uk) 10 or so to a (uk) 18 or so, although you need to scale up the wrists a bit, you don’t need to do it by as much as you do the tops of the arms. Otherwise it gets a bit 1970′s looking.

But it was easy (albeit a bit untidy) to fix on this one, and will be easy to fix properly on the next one…which is using proper expensive jersey (eek!) and is already cut out!

In other creative stuff I’ve been doing this week… I can’t remember whether I mentioned last time, but I sent one of those pictures I made last time as a test print.

The resolution was workable with, so the printing company were obviously talking rubbish! However I was a bit annoyed because what was referred to on the website as a ‘poster’ was actually a giant photo..on thick glossy photo paper. I know its not much of a distinction but I was a bit pissed off, cuz I wanted them to look like cool posters I’d picked up somewhere, not artworks of some kind, which is what photo paper made them seem.

I asked around for a few days and did some research on the internet, but I couldn’t find anybody who would print 6 actual posters on poster paper as one offs, not a large print run, for anything approaching a realistic price.

Whist I was procrastinating, the company I used in the first place for the test print, sent me an email with a one day only sale code, which got you 50% off for any prints you had done that day.

So I bit the bullet and went for it with them. I’m still not too happy about the excessively shiny (when I took the photo I couldn’t stop the end one having a massive reflection mark on it ).. but I don’t think it looks too bad…

Only 4 of them worked well enough as that size image for me to be happy putting them up, but at the price I ended up paying for them, having two rejects doesn’t matter at all really.

They’ve properly brightened up the bedroom, though I might shop around for a better printing company before I attempt any more.

the art of putting up posters.

So we bought our flat two years ago, and found rather quickly that the walls, which are made of two layers of very dense 70′s brick, really didn’t like having holes drilled into them.

We got the builder when we moved in to put some hooks up for pictures and mirrors and things, but as we settled in we tried to put some up ourselves using our black and decker drill and couldn’t get more than a couple of centimetres into the wall.

So we spent the past two years, firstly waiting for a friend to lend us her masonry drill, which never happened, and then saving up to buy one ourselves, until it was pointed out by my dad that , given we don’t intend to stay here forever anyway, and given the sort of drill we’d need to make any kind of dent in the walls would cost over £200, and given we don’t have that many framed pictures to go up at the moment, it really is bad value for money to buy one. And apparently blue tack doesn’t damage the wall if you take the residue off using nail varnish remover, so its a far better idea to use posters.

This has been a bit of a poser. Somewhere in my parents attic, waiting to be rescued next time I go to see them, are all my posters from when I was a teenager, a few of them are still cool, a lot of them just scream 18 year old. And I think thats the problem with posters in general. We haven’t had any on the walls in 8 years, everywhere we’ve lived, be it rental or bought we’ve used framed pictures. And thats what I was planning for this place, I was on the lookout for gold baroque looking picture frames from local charity shops, ready to fill with incongruous images of pop culture figures and photographs of twisted tangled branches, preferably both at once. I’m not really in the headspace for posters anymore.

We had a good look on the internet anyway, I think if I’d been buying/stealing posters regularly for the past 8 years, and had loads to collage everywhere all over the walls, I’d be a bit more up for band or film posters. I mean we really like music, but if you just buy two or three, thats kind of defining your taste in music and your taste in art publicly a bit more than I feel comfortable with. I always over think things, but to me for example, a lone Manics Street Preachers or Suede poster says ‘I was 17 in the 90′s’ whilst a Lady Gaga poster kind of says ‘I’m not 17 now, but I’m going to pretend I am’.

Hopefully over time, we will organically get posters of things we are into and build them up into a mass of images, and then maybe we can fill our walls and still look cool.

However for the moment, we decided, after several hours of browsing that the immediate problem of filling our walls wasn’t going to be solved by buying a personality off the internet. But we still really need something, every time I take a picture of our flat, I am totally struck by how plain it looks and slightly dingy with endless ikea book shelves and then nothing. So I decided to make some.

Coincidentally I have a couple of new iPhone photo apps that needed playing with.

So I created these photos……

  

   

  

yeah, ok they are of our toy collection, but they are for our bedroom, which has a lot of wooden furniture and a fairly old fashioned, and matching(!) bedspread and curtains, and desperately needs glamming up.

I am hoping to get them all on the walls as A3 posters, with one A2 sized one to fit a particular space, however the online printing company I am using thinks they are too low resolution, so I have sent one off for a test print to see what happens.

If they don’t work I will make some more along a similar line.

I can’t wait. Its a so much cooler, and cheaper, way of decorating the walls than buying loads of commercial posters I wasn’t massively happy with anyway.

BTW Photos are copyright to me and anyone attempting to use them without my permission will be in trouble!

sewing meet up, Jons new bass, and one for the music geeks!

So on Saturday, Jon and I got up ridiculously early and went to Brighton, where I took part in a sewing meet up, with a load of lovely people I’d never met before, as shown in the photo above, taken by a lady called Claire.

I’m really sorry to any of the ladies from the meet up that finds this, I’m not able to tag everyone in the photo, as I find the tagging function on wordpress fairly baffling, and I am rather run down today, so I’m concentrating on getting something published rather than it being particularly something good!

Anyways,we went to a restaurant,and swapped sewing stuff, I got rid of loads of  stuff I didn’t need to very good new homes and acquired some stuff for myself….

this flowery and leopard print and black silky fabric is absolutely gorgeous. I had a few ideas what to do with it, but as soon as Jon saw it, he was all ‘sexy nighty’, so that was that! Luckily I have a 1930′s vintage slip pattern that will do perfectly already in my collection. Its far too nice of course to just wear in bed and not show off in public, when I was a teenager I used to do the whole Courtney Love, wear a nightie as a dress with a skinny t-shirt underneath thing, so I may have to revisit that look!

I got this sewing magazine, with how to make a sock monkey in it! I like sock monkeys, so I am glad to get hold of a pattern for one.

I also acquired this gorgeous vogue pattern from the 60′s for an amazing looking suit.

After lunch, I shot off early as we were aiming to go to Jon’s brother’s birthday in the evening and it was already 3pm. Popped into Ditto Fabrics, partly just to have a browse, but mainly to check out a couple of things I’d seen online and rather liked the look of. I am never going to make the mistake of buying stuff that isn’t cotton online without getting a sample or checking it out in person ever again!

First on the list was this jersey…

which was as nice as I’d hoped it would be. If you look really closely it has naked ladies all over it! It also has writing saying ‘Black Tomorrow, recorded on Parlephone’  Having googled Black Tomorrow, there are a couple of bands called that, but they are all really small and modern, certainly not important enough to have their own psychedelic t-shirt fabric. Was wondering if any of the music experts I know would be able to shed any more light?

Anyway, I am waiting for my sewaholic renfrew top pattern to turn up, and it will go nicely with that.

I looked at Ditto’s supply of coating, cuz I have a cape pattern I’m looking to use at some point, and I am so glad I didn’t buy online, as non of it was at all to my taste, the  duck egg blue I thought I liked was all hairy in real life. But then I spotted this in the sale for £8 a meter……

it is wool fabric, and I thought it would be perfect for either my new suit pattern, or given that I think, having looked at the back of the packet, that  that one may be for a sewist who’s a bit more expert than me, the new simplicity mad men suit pattern.

I ended up buying 5 meters instead of 4 because that was what was left on the roll, and it was in two separate pieces so I wanted to be sure I had the right amount, hopefully that will give me a bit left over at the end for something else.

On the whole I think I was rather restrained!

Then before we went home, Jon, who had been trying out bass guitars at various shops whilst I was fabric shopping, took me to see one he really liked, that was massively reduced in price as it had a tiny chip in it, and generally a total bargain. So he bought it, which is a real relief as his old bass has a broken neck that has been repaired so many times, its just waiting for someone to drop it for there to be a disaster.

So this is it..

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a bit of a crappy photo, but I was having massive problems with lighting. It is a black Ibanez Soundgear. Personally I think it is totally outshone by my Daisy Rock next to it, but I suppose its not bad looking for a bass, and it has a pretty dragon on the fretboard!

In front is Jons new leopard print pedal bag, nicely decorated with the larger part of our badge collection. So rock and roll!

Anyway..we got back from Brighton according to schedule, the plan was to dump stuff at home and then go straight out again, but Jon had come down with a bit of a temperature, so we thought we’d better not go to his brothers party, which was just as well really as it started snowing and didn’t stop, and it would have been a nightmare getting back from Highgate in that sort of weather.

I was feeling quite smug cuz I’d paced myself all day so I was well enough to go out again, and Jon wasn’t, but then I’ve been mostly in bed yesterday and today, so meh!

I did get my tartan fabric washed and ironed over the weekend though, it is a total dream! I am now thinking it might not be wool, and may be the sort of cotton grunge style lumber shirts are made of or something. But it doesn’t really matter, it means the dress I make will be easy to care for anyway.

Hopefully I’ll be well enough in the next few days to get on with it!

fabric organisation

Haven’t posted on here for rather a while, before christmas I was insanely busy, and since christmas I’ve been rather ill, so haven’t really done anything of note.

I’ve been somewhat recovered over the last week or so, and needed to sort out my fabric collection anyway, due to hoping to attend zoe’s  fabric swap in Brighton on the 4th Feb. And to be honest it was getting a bit of  a nightmare, it hasn’t been that I didn’t know what I had, more that I had no idea how much of it I had, which has lead to inappropriate pattern buying..

So anyway, after tidying into a box all the patterns that are not in my current dress size, and tidying into a drawer all the pieces of fabric less than 2m in length, I’m left with this little lot!……..

tartan, probably wool,4m  that I bought from ditto fabrics last year. I know what I am going to do with this, I have a dress planned, but i am a bit scared of washing it, given I was a complete idiot and forgot to ask the care instructions when I bought it!

this one is also from ditto fabrics, it is 3m of stretch jersey stuff. Its the pair to the green I posted about that I bought a few months back (which is going to the fabric swap). I thought it was also a mistake, but simplicity have just brought out a madmen style office outfit, complete with a little cardigan/jacket that this will do perfectly for. I totally need to find out the care instructions for this, as dispute being polyester the green version did not wash at all well, so I will be asking when I visit Brighton in 2 weeks.

The colour does not come out as vivid as I had hoped, but this is 3m of fluorescent yellow twill from McCulloch and Wallace, that will be turned into a cycling jacket of some sort for jon. He has yet to decide whether he wants a 40′s, 60′s 70′s or denim/cowboy style jacket, but when he has I’ll start looking for a pattern.

these two are Liberty fabrics from their latest collection, I only got 2m of each as they were bloody expensive, which is not quite enough to make a long sleeved blouse. I am trialing a sleeveless blouse pattern at the moment, but if it doesn’t work I will go with the same pattern I used for my hellbunny style dress as that only takes 2m of the main decorative fabric.

this is actually mint green damask, 4m. Off Birmingham rag market. Not really sure what to do with this, mint green is terribly fashionable this year, so I ought to do something. This (and the next fabric I’m about to post) were bought to go with some 1940′s patterns I got my hands on. Unfortunately, the mockups of each pattern were such a disaster and I couldn’t work out exactly what had gone wrong, that I am ditching the patterns till I’ve lost a good bit of weight. However this does somewhat limit me to slightly more modern patterns for these dresses. For this one there is a 60′s repro pattern I have that might do the trick, but I haven’t tested it yet, so I’m not sure.

4m strawberries cotton from Goldhawke Road. As I said above, had the perfect 40′s pattern lined up for this one, fell through, really no idea what to do with it at all now!

Have about 3m of this, tattoo print cotton off the internet, already had a blouse out of the same piece. had a 80′s nightdress pattern lined up for this, but when I opened it, it was missing 2 pieces. The lady from etsy gave me my money back, but I am on the lookout for another in the same size then I can get on and make this.

this is the glittery shiny stretch fabric I used to pin to my walls at uni, theres about 2m of it, and it is very 2000 style! I want to make a t-shirt out of it, but I was looking for a good pattern, but now I have sewaholic’s Renfrew pattern on order, that should work somehow or other.

And lastly this, more liberty fabric 2m from their quilting collection. Yeah, ok, its technically quilting cotton. I got loads, and have already made a nightdress that doesn’t fit anymore but 2m is an awkward amount, so I have no idea what to do with it yet.

so yeah, thats probably awfully boring for anyone who isn’t me, but at least I’m organised now, and know what I’ve got. Hopefully I will be coming back from Brighton with a load more fabric, but this lot will take me the best part of the year to do the rate I’m going. Need to be less ill

Now I suppose I’d better go and get on with it!

bad taste pottery

I have a bit of a thing for novelty china that i pick up from charity shops. I used to collect the 1970′s green rustic looking stuff, but it has now got sufficiently expensive that charity shops rarely stock it anymore, so I decided to switch to novelty stuff instead.

Luckily I live in a part of London with really rather awful charity shops, so I don’t usually   find anything, however…two weeks ago we went to Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and I came back with this…

isn’t it fabulously ugly! It was £5 and now lives on our windowsill, scaring the blackbirds that live in the ivy behind our flat.

However if that wasn’t good enough, today I completely excelled myself…..

it is hard to tell from the picture, but it is actually quite huge! Isn’t it amazing? It doesn’t have any chips or anything on it, and the ladle is all in one piece!

It also doesn’t have any makers marks on it, so I will have to do a bit of research to find out what it actually is. It was only a tenner though, so it really doesn’t matter whether its valuable or not, though it will be fun to find to about it.

It is so big, that at the moment there is nowhere to put it, so it is going to have to live in a cupboard and only come out for special occasions…..like Christmas! We are doing Christmas at home this year, so it can sit on the table with my grannies china dinner service and hold the sprouts!  Can’t wait!

better late than never

So for the last week I’ve been ill, having ME this is a fairly frequent occurrence, but this time I had some kind of stomach bug as well, so far too sleepy and painful to post. All better now though.

However….

The weekend before last I went to my friends birthday party in Hitchin, a small town in Hertfordshire where we used to live!

As well as a load of unusual wool (my friend is a knitter) and a bottle of booze, I made the birthday girl a cushion I’d been promising her for ages, and finally got round to making….

the back….

and the front…..

I found the fabric panels on etsy from an american seller last year, and thought they were so kitch I just had to buy them. There were three sets, one went to my boyfriends brothers girlfriend, one is staying with us (which I haven’t made up yet)  and one went to my friend whose birthday it was…

It is exactly the same size picture as an actual face, as demonstrated by my friend..

I had no idea actually how many people would be up for drunkenly snogging a picture of the president of the U.S.A

In other sewing news, I have made a massive mistake!

I bought this fabric from Ditto fabrics, an amazing shop in Brighton I’ve had many happy purchases from in the past. This time however I decided to buy something that wasn’t printed cotton online, massive mistake!

Looking at the picture on the website I assumed it was the sort of thermal stretch knit you use to make thermal undies or nightwear, the cut out pattern looks very small, and I assumed it was quite soft and would be perfect to make a set of thermal pyjamas. I adored the last pair I had, only I’ve never seen any in colours that aren’t pale pink or baby blue since, which is not really for me, and I don’t count as terribly practical.

So I was so excited to find this and make nightwear in colours I really liked. I bought 3 meters of the green and three meters of the burgundy colour way .

they arrived…. and immediately I realised the scale of the fabric was completely different from what it looked like in the picture…

It is a lot bigger pattern repeat than I was expecting, and the knit although stretchy is much looser and courser, a bit more like the sort of thing you make hippy tops from than thermals.

I washed it, and it hasn’t helped..it is far too course for next to your skin and I wouldn’t feel comfortable having such big holes on something I was naked underneath.

It is entirely my own fault. Ditto fabrics offers samples of their fabrics before you buy if you are buying online, and I have a free rail ticket that I could have used to go to Brighton in person and see if I liked it, and I did neither of these things.

It is very frustrating though, I have two three meter parcels of these knits and I have no idea what to do with them. I don’t want to make a hippy top (zigzagged exposed seams and contrasting colours) and I am rather fat so I’m not sure 3 meters will make any of my dress patterns. Because the fabric is so course it has rather a vintage feel to it.

So can anyone suggest what I might do? Or a pattern I might use?

I really want to put it to good use now I’ve bought it!