Month: January 2009

Colourscape jumper – finished?

Colourscape jumper

I sewed up the Colourscape jumper and wore it to Progress Theatre on Thursday, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s actually finished.

I have about three quarters of a ball of wool left over, which is tempting me to make a big cowl or polo neck in the same 2×2 rib as the hems and cuffs.

When I’ve decided for definite that it’s finished, I’ll write up the pattern. This would be a great jumper for beginners who want to try out cables. All four pieces are rectangles, with no shaping anywhere, so all you need to concentrate on is which way your cables are facing. Easy!

Nicola’s Wedding Dress

Nicola & Ian's Wedding

Nicola’s wedding dress started life as Vogue 2903, an original 1957 pattern. We made surprisingly few changes to accommodate the fact that the Nicola was six months pregnant!

I had to do a full bust adjustment, and let out the waist a tiny bit at all of the seams. The main change we made was to add lacing up the back, just in case of sudden growth.

We also decided at the last minute that sleeves were entirely over-rated, and left them off. I bound the armholes with matching bias tape.

The silk is a very fine and lightweight dupion from Fine Fabrics of Harrogate. (Hi Sandra!)
It’s made by James Brindley, and the colours are “Forest” and “Ocean”.

The silk was beautiful to work with. I had to keep replacing the needle in my machine, as the silk blunted it very quickly, but other than that I had no problems at all.

There was no matching ribbon on the face of the planet for lacing up the back of the dress, so I made about a mile of bias tape, and rolled the ends like shoelaces so it would be easy to thread through the eyelets.

Oh, and I also made shoelaces for the bride, five ties for the groom and groomsmen, and eight brooches for the ladies… and I did it all in just eight days!

Stash Management

Can you tell that I’m spring cleaning?

After we took down the Christmas tree, Paul asked very nicely whether the Knitting Avalanche could be brought under control. He had offered to buy me a piece of furniture to do the job but, while I was shuffling things around elsewhere in the house, I realised that we had the perfect storage arrangement already:

Stash Management

If you want to know what’s in all the drawers, click the image to go to Flickr, where I’ve annotated everything!

These are Paul’s old CD drawers, which have actually been storing my underwear for the past few years.

Now I just need to figure out what the heck I’m going to do with all my socks…

Amazing psychedelic twill!

A giant parcel arrived for me yesterday – look what was inside!

Psychedelic Twill

This fabric is a bit of a mystery… it was sent to me by a friend, but I have no idea how old it is, what it’s made from, or what it was originally designed to be used for.

It’s a heavy twill, and it feels as though it’s mostly cotton. The fabric is 53″ wide, with a printed area of 51″. The selvedge doesn’t give away any clues, it only shows the six different colours used in the print. No date, no designer, nothing.

I’m guessing 1970s, from the combination of the pattern and the colour.

This print is BIG – you’re looking at about 30″ x 21″ (77 x 53cm) in the photograph – so I suspect it was intended for curtains and upholstery.

Personally, I think it would be great for an unusual skirt or dress!

My perfect imaginary shoes – thanks to Chloe!

I received a little parcel in the post at the weekend, and discovered that Chloe had painted my perfect shoes!

Chloe's Shoe Painting

If you’d like to see more of Chloe’s paintings, you can look at them on Flickr, or you can buy them in her Etsy shop.

This one’s on a 20cm square box canvas, and I love the way that the painting carries on all the way round the edges.

(And that it’s of a big pink shoe, obviously!)

 

Still waiting for the photos to be processed before I can show you the wedding dress…

Home from my holidays in Harrogate!

We went to Harrogate for a friend’s wedding, and decided to stay for a week and make a little holiday out of it. All of the pictures of the wedding dress are on Paul’s new camera, but he needs to download a software update before he can get the camera to speak to his computer. I might have to wait a while before I can show you the wedding dress in all its glory!

As a result of Paul buying himself a new camera, I inherited his old one. It’s a Canon 350D, and this is the first time I’ve used a digital SLR. I hadn’t used my old film SLR for about eight years, so I was a bit out of practice.

20090114__MG_7280 20090114__MG_7277

On the Wednesday we walked around Harrogate’s Valley Gardens – recently named by Alan Titchmarsh as his favourite public gardens. I can see why – the gardens are huge, and beautifully looked after. Paul took some beautiful photos of a very friendly squirrel.

These are my pictures from the day.
I’ve just uploaded everything I took that wasn’t actively out of focus. This was the first time I’d used the 350D, and I was mostly fiddling about to see how the different lenses worked.

 

On Friday we walked all the way through the Valley Gardens, into the Pine Woods, and out the other side to RHS Harlow Carr. We followed their Winter Interest Trail, which took us all the way round the gardens and included the bird hide, where there were dozens of feeders set up. We saw lots of different types of tits and finches, and Paul managed to take some pictures of a greater spotted woodpecker, which was rather exciting!

The half hour we spent watching the birds was the most relaxing thing I’ve done in a very long time. It was beautiful to sit quietly and watch them fluttering about.

20090116__MG_7383 20090116__MG_7380

These are some of the photos I took on Friday.
They’re a bit more edited in the sense that I’ve left out a lot more pictures, but I’ve done almost no processing on these. Two (above) have been cropped, and only one’s been fiddled with. The rest are exactly as they came out of the camera.

Despite the fact that the weather was very grey and drizzly, I’m amazed at how bright the colours are in some of these.

I don’t think any of the pictures will be good enough to use for my 2010 calendar project, but I think they’re a pretty good start!

Wedding dress is done!

When I get back from the wedding, there will be more pictures – in colour, so you can see how beautiful the silk is – and everything you ever wanted to know about how the dress was made.

Another dress completed…

This one’s for a friend to wear to a wedding.

It was a bit of a sudden change of gears to switch from making the bride’s dress in a crisp silk dupion, to making this one in a slinky jersey!

Jenny's jersey dressJenny's jersey dress
Jenny's jersey dressJenny's jersey dress

The pattern is Simplicity 3503, view A.

I only made three alterations to this one, and they were all small adjustments to the fit.

First of all the skirt was taken up by about four inches from the length given on the pattern.

Second, the back was made narrower. I did this by reducing the width of the midriff band, and simply overlapping the back bodice pieces. This had the added bonus of raising the centre back, so it comes up higher than the bra strap.

The final alteration was to lengthen the front bodice by about an inch, to accommodate a larger bust. This makes ensures that the midriff panel doesn’t start half way up the bust – a very common fitting problem with any dress that has an underbust seam.

The combination of lengthening the front panels and narrowing the width of the back makes sure that a generous cleavage can be accommodated without the entire top of the dress becoming much too big. Because the neckline is very deep, there are ties across the back of the neck to stop the top from slipping off the shoulders.

I can’t wait to see this one being worn – it’s such a glamorous party dress!

“There’s always a certain irresponsibility about hats…”

I was browsing through the BBC iPlayer this afternoon, looking for something to watch in the background whilst doing a spot of hand sewing.

I hadn’t realised what a lot I was missing!

 

The title above is a quote from a wonderful 1950s programme about fashion history. The series is called Men, Women and Clothes, and this episode is Fashion in Faces and Figures. Look out for a fabulously moustachio’d Benny Hill, and some lovely shots of corsets. This one’s only fifteen minutes long, and well worth watching! Unfortunately it was broadcast yesterday, but it’ll be on the iPlayer for a week, and there’s another episode on January 15th.

There’s another series just started called Style On Trial. This is a seven-parter, looking at the fashion of various decades, beginning with the 1940s. The first episode is on the iPlayer now, and episode two airs on January 14th.

Another programme that I’m particularly interested to watch is Ozwald Boateng: Why Style Matters. This one’s repeated on BBC Four tomorrow (January 10th) at 9pm. I’m quite a fan of Boateng’s menswear, and given my current interest in men’s shoes and tailoring, I think this one will be brilliant!

Making progress on a wedding dress.

I hope this isn’t giving too much away – I just wanted to show a little snapshot of what I’m working on at the moment.