Month: March 2010

Corduroy and Velvet

Corduroy and velvet

This weekend I’ve been sewing the waistcoat to go with the Dorset buttons I made last Sunday. The pattern is McCalls 8285, and the fabric is a sage green cotton velvet. It’s almost finished – I just need to make the buttonholes, and sew a little silver buckle onto one of the straps at the back.

The trousers I actually made a few weeks ago. I didn’t photograph them because as soon as they were finished I put them on, and I’ve been wearing them (or washing them) ever since! They’re another pair of Vogue 1034, this time in black needlecord with a bit of a stretch to it. The pockets and waistband are lined with the remnants of the Sea of Holes fabric – just so I could feel amused by having pockets full of holes. (Yes yes, groan, I know.)

The trouble with wearing both cord and velvet is that they both act a bit like velcro when it comes to fluff. The cords accidentally went through the washing machine with a stray tissue which left them all white and fuzzy, and now they’re covered in green dandruff from cutting the velvet.

This outfit is two-thirds of what I’ll be wearing when I go out playing the recorder with the clog dancers. I now have just less than three weeks to either make or buy a shirt with long sleeves and no collar. I’ve got miles of white polycotton that’s suitable for shirting, and two patterns that would be fine. One is Folkwear 117 that I’ve made before, and the other is McCalls 5976. It just remains to be seen whether I’ll have time to make one of them, or whether I’ll need to dash down to the shops. Thankfully pintucked shirts seem to be in fashion at the moment, so hopefully I won’t have too much trouble finding one that’s suitable.

Three weeks until my first recorder-playing performance in about eighteen years. Gosh.

Little Big Planet

Sackboy!

Last weekend, during a thrilling bout of insomnia, I finished off the Sackboy that I’ve been knitting over the past month. To be fair, about three weeks of that was spent avoiding sewing all the fiddly little bits together. I could easily have finished him in a weekend if I’d been more enthusiastic.

The pattern is from Simply Knitting Issue 49 (January 2009), and is designed by Alan Dart. The character is Sackboy, from the Playstation game Little Big Planet. I played the demo of the game with my sister when I went over to see her last month, and thought it would be funny to knit a Sackboy of her very own.

What you can’t see is that he has a little plaited donkey tail attached to his bottom! In the game, there’s a part where you have to pin a tail on a rocking horse, and you can also stick things on each other’s characters. My sister’s Sackboy ended up with a dozen donkey tails all over him at one point! (Maybe you had to be there to see the funny side. We were practically crying with laughter at the time. There may have been wine.)

Sackboy was fiddly to make, fiddly to sew up, and fiddly to finish. Knitting chunky yarn on 4mm needles was really painful on my hands. But oh my goodness, look at him! He’s so cute! I’m thrilled to bits with how he’s come out.

I’m fairly certain that Sackboy will be pretty much destroyed by Chestnut the cat, within moments of his arrival at my sister’s house. I just wish I could be there to see the look on her face when she opens the box.

Dorset Buttons

Dorset Buttons

Slightly larger than actual size (they’re about an inch across), here are three Dorset Buttons that I made at the weekend. I was too tired to make the waistcoat that these will eventually be sewn onto, so I figured that making the buttons was at least a start.

I followed a tutorial in a 1935 sewing book that I picked up in Oxfam a few weeks ago, but because Everything Exists on the Internet (even if you’d rather it didn’t), I can offer you a link to some instructions from the British Button Society. Mine’s a rather measly “Blandford Cartwheel” with only eight spokes. There’s also a rather lovely picture tutorial at Craft Stylish.

Speaking of tutorials, it’s nice to see that people are actually using some of mine! Becca at Pink Toad Designs made some flower brooches. The buttons she’s used for the centres are gorgeous!

These three buttons are all the sewing I’ve had time for in the past few weeks. A combination of starting a new job in the mornings and helping out at Paul’s office in the afternoons has left me with the time and energy for nothing but working and sleeping.

McCalls 9456

McCalls 9456

New job, new dress! I imagine this theme will continue for quite a while, until I’ve got a wardrobe full of clothes that I’m happy to wear to my new job.

This one is McCalls 9456. I’ve had the pattern for years – so long, in fact, that it’s now gone out of print. It’s just a basic princess-seamed dress, designed for knit fabrics.

There’s plenty of ease in this pattern, so I made a size 14, and it’s still a little on the generous side. Next time I might trim the pattern down a size. It’s supposed to have an integral tie belt, but I left that out so I could layer it without the belt getting in the way. I also left off the sleeves, and finished it off with a lettuce hem.

The fabric is supposed to be a cotton lycra, but I picked it up in rather a hurry, and it isn’t quite what I was expecting. I thought it would be like a heavyweight t-shirting with more stretch (which is what I came home with the last time I bought cotton lycra), but this feels more like a pair of extremely thick cotton tights. Thankfully you can’t see through it, and the fabric drapes very nicely. I’m disappointed that it’s so flimsy though.

At the same time I also bought several metres of a bright printed cotton jersey that was apparently made for Monsoon. It has shades of lemon, lilac and pink, so it’ll go beautifully over the top of my three new shirts – or make a pretty summer dress in its own right. I also have a few fabrics which would be perfect to make a shorter version for layering, including a burnout stretch velvet and a grey mesh with a butterfly print.

The pattern went together very easily, and the dress is wonderfully comfortable to wear. I think I’ll be making quite a few of these!

Always Make A Toile.

Work Outft?

Yesterday’s lesson turned out to be “Always Make A Toile”. The waistcoat didn’t fit. Not even slightly.

So, this morning I went on a mammoth wardrobe clear-out, and took out everything that doesn’t fit me any more. I then sorted the remaining clothes into “suitable for work” and “not suitable for work”. This led to the discovery that I own approximately one million really nice tops, but nothing to wear with them apart from jeans. And one ankle length black skirt. And my grey suit trousers.

So, this week, I will be wearing my grey suit trousers and my ankle length black skirt, with an assortment of tops.

However, I can’t alternate between one skirt and one pair of trousers indefinitely, so my next mission was to go through my wardrobe again, and try on combinations of clothes that I hadn’t thought of before. That led to the outfit above, which I really like!

  • The pale pink shirt is a men’s one from Marks & Spencer.
  • The dress over the top is this black jersey one.
  • The long skirt is this seersucker one, that I made last year and have almost worn out already. The dress is long enough that the outfit would be fine without the extra skirt underneath, but I do prefer to go for ankle length these days. It looks much better with my new shoes.
  • The belt is one with a teacup print, but I don’t think it’s quite the right colour. It does work to break up the black though, which I like.
  • The necklace is this rose quartz and amethyst one, that I made at the beginning of the year. I like the way that the three strands work with the neckline of the dress.

I think for my first day I’m going to play it safe and wear my grey Marks & Spencer suit with a plain black top. Once I’ve seen what everyone else is wearing, and established whether there’s an official dress code, I can work out what I need to sew next.