Month: June 2008

A tiny piece of history.

Inspired by Ruth Singer, I’ve spent this afternoon making a wall hanging organiser for all my reels of thread.

(Possibly not the cleverest thing to do when suffering with a bad wrist and a splitting headache, but hey.)

My new thread organiser

Take one enormous cork board, a hundred and eighteen panel pins, and a big hammer…

Grandma Rose's old sewing threads

I particularly like “Turkey Red Shade” and “Dk. Shrimp”. Giving all of the colours numbers instead of names just isn’t as much fun.

Vintage threads

I think these are my favourites. “Barbour’s Linen Thread” is perfect for sewing together my little shoes – I only wish I could buy some more!

The Glacé threads are very fine, but strong enough for sewing shoes, books and bags. The 40 weight is also good for quilting, apparently.

Less than forty of the threads on that board are mine – the rest came from my Grandma Rose and my Aunty Sue. My Grandma’s 87 now (I think), and I haven’t known her to do much sewing during the past 34 years, so some of those threads must be pretty old. I don’t know that I’d want to use some of the oldest cottons for sewing seams, but they’d be lovely for decorative work.

I’m extremely amused to notice that, with very few exceptions, these reels of thread represent three generations of loyalty to the same brand. Sylko, Drima and Coats have all become merged over the years, into the thread division of Coats Crafts.

Shame the packaging isn’t as beautiful as it used to be.

Summer jumper

I’m in the process of knitting a variation on Colinette’s Madelene pattern. It’s in the Parisienne book, but I’m knitting it with Banyan instead. I succumbed to a bargain lot of Banyan on Ebay, and I quite fancied a loosely-knitted cotton jumper for the summer. The colourway is Neptune.

 Colinette Banyan Madelene jumperColinette Banyan Madelene jumper

This is the back, and it feels as though it’s taken forever to knit. It’s actually worked up quite quickly, as every fourth row is knitted on a 10mm needle, but it’s garter stitch so it’s incredibly boring to work on. It’s also hurting my hands quite a bit, so I’m not spending as much time on it as I’d like to.

I don’t know why this particular project should be hurting my hands so much. Perhaps because the yarn doesn’t stretch and give. Perhaps because it’s heavy. Perhaps using the different sized needles is awkward – that certainly makes for slower knitting. Perhaps it’s because all I’m doing is knit, knit, knit, without the variation for my hands of purling every alternate row.

It’s a shame, as I really like the way this fabric is knitting up, and I’m really looking forward to wearing the jumper. I had been thinking of making some more, perhaps in some of the Cadenza colourways, but I don’t think that’s going to be a very clever idea.

Perhaps I’ll go back to my 1980s Patons “Odpins” book. All of the patterns in there are knitted with various combinations of large and small needles. I must be able to work out something similar which isn’t going to be so hard on my hands.

Preparing the badges…

The Reveal Showcase exhibition starts next weekend, and just for once I’m prepared well in advance!

I’ve spent today preparing all the badges for display. I’ve used mini cards and postcards from Moo for my packaging. I’m a big fan of Moo, and the mini cards are just the perfect size:

REVEAL Showcase preparation

I have forty individual badges, and twenty sets of four. I have no idea whether this is far too many, or nowhere near enough. I guess I’ll find out as the week of the exhibition goes on. I have plenty more materials, so I can always put together some more if I need to. (Or sell them at the next Art Market, if I end up bringing them all home again…)

My only concern now is how to display all of the postcards and mini cards at the exhibition itself. I don’t really want to spend money on a fancy stand that I’ll never use again, and I don’t really want to spend all of next week making something wonky out of cardboard.

What I really need is a pretty letter rack, or maybe a vintage toast rack of some kind…

Get Knitted!

I would like to take a moment to sing the praises of Get Knitted. I ordered some yarn and needles from them on Friday, and they’ve arrived today. (Tuesday.) Their postage rates were extremely reasonable, and they threw in a free pen and a sweetie!

I ordered from Get knitted because they’re a UK supplier of Addi Turbo knitting needles, something impossible to find in any of my local yarn shops. I needed a 2.5mm needle with a 100cm cable, and Addi are the only brand I’m aware of who make this size. I needed the needle to knit a pair of socks.

Regia silk and Addi needle

Yes, that’s the yarn for the socks!
The toes and heels are cabled in the plain red, and the rest is self-striping in the bright colours.

The pattern is in the current issue of Simply Knitting magazine (Issue 43), and thanks to the generosity of a friend I am actually using the exact yarn specified in the pattern. This is something of a rarity for me, as I usually like to make things up as I go along.

This will be the first time I’ve used the Magic Loop technique (although I did spend Friday evening learning it with a spare ball of cheap acrylic and a big needle), and the first time I’ve knitted anything in 4-ply yarn, I think. If I can properly get the hang of Magic Loop and it doesn’t drive me as crazy as DPNs, I’ll be thrilled to bits. Bring on the socks!

I also treated myself to a little something:

Rowan Cashsoft DK

The colours aren’t the greatest in this picture, but the ball of yarn that I’m holding is Rowan Cashsoft DK. 57% merino, 33% microfibre, 10% cashmere. Mmmmmm, soft. What I’m planning to do is unravel these Fetching mittens (also in Cashsoft), and combine these two colours to make something soft and stripey. Probably gloves or arm-warmers of some description, so I’ll probably save that project for a bit later in the year.

Now, do I wait until I’ve finished my Colinette Madelene jumper in Neptune Banyan, or start on the socks straight away…

Ta-Da! (Wearing the Fish Almost-Corset)

Fish Almost-Corset

Ta-Da!
Please excuse my silly grin.

Here are a bunch of photos of my corset mock-up from the pattern that I drafted last week.

Fish Almost-Corset

Looks pretty good from the front – nice and flat, which I am not! I should have posted a “without” photo, so you could see how much difference this is actually making to my shape. I realise it doesn’t look like much!

Fish Almost-Corset

The back – almost completely laced up.
This is because I made a classic newbie drafting error, and whilst I took out a 2″ reduction for my waist, I forgot to take out an extra 2″ to allow for a gap at the back. That’s an amendment I need to make to the pattern straight away!

Fish Almost-Corset

Fish Almost-Corset

Side views – as you can see, there’s a bit of wrinkling around the waist at the back. I’ve posted this to the Livejournal Corsetmakers community, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some advice on getting rid of the wrinkles.

I think that’s pretty damn good for a first attempt though!

Just so’s you know…

All of the entries prior to this one were imported from my two LiveJournals – Design By Claire and Eternal Magpie.

I’m keeping the Eternal Magpie Livejournal, as I’ll be using it to participate in a number of communities there, but I’ll try and keep duplication to a minimum.

I do like the Internet.

Yesterday, Mamfa popped by specifically to leave a comment that she’d seen a pair of Those Shoes in a size 5, in a shop in Leeds.

Mamfa doesn’t know me, she saw my post via the friends list of a community that we both visit. But she had some useful information, and took the time to leave a comment and pass it on. Wasn’t that kind?

Further investigation reveals that the shoes are now back on the Schuh website, and that my local branch apparently has a couple of pairs in stock.

Hopefully Liz and I will have our wedding shoes after all. 🙂

While I’m on the subject of awesome shoes (when am I not?), you could do worse than to check out Em & Sprout’s Etsy store.

Are they not the most adorable shoes you’ve ever seen? So cute!

The Devil’s In the Details.

Earlier this year, Paul and I got engaged. Presumably this means that at some point in the future there will be a wedding. So, of course, I did what any ridiculously addicted freshly engaged woman would do – I went shoe shopping.

I saw a pair of shoes, by Irregular Choice. I saw them on the Schuh website, and I went into my local branch to try them on. Two weeks later, after I’d been paid, I went back to buy the shoes. And they’d gone. No longer for sale in the shop, no longer online.

(I may have said a rude word. A nice man is trying to mail order a pair for me. He’ll let me know.)

This evening I was browsing on Amazon, when I remembered that they sell shoes too! I had a little look, and I found what I thought were the shoes I was coveting. Then I looked a little closer, and realised that whilst they looked a bit like my shoes, they weren’t my shoes at all.


(Click for larger)

The shoes at the top are the ones that I’m coveting. (I couldn’t find pictures of the cream and gold, so I’m showing you the red in both styles, for a more accurate comparison.)

See how the toes are extremely pointy, and the strap is quite low down?
See how the heels are higher, and more shapely, and self-covered?
See how the suede is different?

These are, quite emphatically, not the same shoes.

Yet they’re made by the same company, at the same price, and sold under the same name. How peculiar.

I’m sure that plenty of people will be looking at the picture and wondering what on earth I’m fussing about. Yes, the shoes are very similar. But to me (and I realise this is merely a matter of opinion), the top shoes look glamorous and elegant and sumptuous and lovely. The others look somehow mediocre and cheap.

If I hadn’t seen the top shoes first, would I be coveting the others? It’s impossible to say. But I know that if I can get a pair of the cream and gold ones by mail order, if they’re the same style as the bottom pair, I’m sending them back.

I appear to have (mostly) made a corset.

I spent all morning faffing around with my printer, trying to put together some packaging for my badges, and sadly failed miserably. As a result, I decided to spend the afternoon doing something a little more productive.

So, I made a corset.

This is the first mock-up from the pattern I drafted the other day:

Fish corset mock-up

It’s made from three layers – cotton fashion fabric, a heavy drill for strength, and the lining is some lightweight black poly/cotton I had lying around. The waist tape is enclosed between the layers and is made from grosgrain ribbon, and the binding’s black poly/cotton.

The bones are Rigilene (two on each seam, plus front and back), and the front fastening is hook and eye tape. I’m waiting for my steel bones and busk to arrive, and I had these on hand, so I thought they’d be okay to just test the pattern.

I know it doesn’t look very shapely, but that’s because I’m not a very curvy shape! I wanted my first draft to fit my body shape pretty closely (this gives a two-inch reduction at the waist) before I started messing around with different proportions.

Sadly I can’t try it on just yet, because the last thing I need to do is add the grommets!

As you can see, I didn’t bother too much about pattern-matching on this one, as I was just using up a small remnant of fabric. The binding’s also done on the sewing machine rather than by hand, just for speed.

I think it looks okay for a first attempt though – although it remains to be seen how it behaves once I put it on.

Scanning Things In.

Today I have been mostly Scanning Things In.
I promised Rob that I’d send him a pile of photographs of Things We Did Together. As he’s still very much paper-based and all of my recent photos are online, it made sense that I’d scan the photos in and send the originals to him.

I was a bit nervous about this at first. My photos! But as soon as I started to see the results of the scanning, I was more than happy to keep my old photographs in digital form. At 300 dpi, you can see a lot more detail than you can at 6 x 4″.

Exeter Cardiff

These two are from Exeter Cathedral (1998) and Cardiff Castle (2001), respectively.

I’ve scanned in almost 200 photos so far, and there are still more to go through. Most of them are set to “private” on Flickr at the moment, as I haven’t yet checked with Rob whether or not he’s happy for them to be shared.

If you fancy a bit of amusement though, there are two galleries full of beer-fuelled shennanigans over on Facebook, in the form of lots of parties at the Hobgoblin. My photos are from 1995 to 2001, although I’m sure I’m still missing a box somewhere. The galleries are here and here. I don’t think you need to be signed in to Facebook or me on my Friends list to see them. Let me know if that’s not the case?

What I’m wondering now is what on earth am I going to do with all my photos?! I’ve got absolutely hundreds of the damn things, all stored away in boxes, and I never look at them.

I think my first challenge is to get them all scanned in, and all backed up onto CDs. That way I have two digital versions of them, as well as the paper ones that I’m still keeping. I’d quite like to do more with the paper ones than just shove them back in a box though. I recently inherited lots of family photos from my two Grandmas, so it would be quite nice to put together some new albums with those pictures shuffled into the chronological order.

I took all my photos out of their albums many years ago, as I was using those self-adhesive ones, and was worried about the photos being damaged. I have some lovely new albums, old-fashioned ones with black pages, but I haven’t got around to doing anything with them.

As always, I think this is something I’m going to have to work on in my Spare Time. I have plenty of access to the scanner this week though, so at least I can get a move on with that part.