The Lorax meets Simplicity 1755

This is Simplicity 1755, which I had every intention of beginning to sew this morning. I want to wear it to a wedding next month, and my extra hours at work are continuing, so I need to get a move on in any spare time that I do have. The illustration to the right shows roughly how it will look in the lovely organic cotton and bamboo fabrics that I bought a little while ago.

This morning I received a comment on my post about making a Dr Seuss dress, which sidetracked me a little bit into thinking how good Simplicity 1755 would look in a combination of novelty print fabrics. A little look on eQuilter revealed that lots of Dr Seuss prints are still available

…as are several Beatles prints – although Sea of Holes is sadly gone.

But I’m trying ever so hard to only buy organic or recycled or ethically produced fabric for the clothes that I make for myself, so I was just about to sigh wistfully and close my browser when I noticed something exciting.

The Lorax prints are all on organic cotton!

Wouldn’t this dress look absolutely amazing in a Lorax print?!

And by “absolutely amazing” you know, of course, that I mean “utterly ridiculous”. In a good way.

A further search reveals that eQuilter actually has hundreds of organic cotton fabrics, which is fantastic! Of course there’s then the issue of the airmiles involved in shipping them over from America, but at least there’s only one journey, from their country of origin to me, and the same applies to the (mostly) Indian fabrics I buy.

Uh-oh.

If Simplicity 1755 goes together easily, and it’s comfortable to wear, I can feel a fabric shopping spree coming on…

Natural History Museum: Animal Inside Out

Greyface Dartmoor Sheep at the Natural History Museum

This sheep is a Dartmoor Greyface. He is here to lull you into a false sense of security, because all the photos below this one are going to be of wobbly things in jars. If you don’t like wobbly things in jars, I suggest you just look at this lovely sheep for a bit. He lives at the Natural History Museum, in their Wildlife Garden. He had a couple of friends, and he seemed very happy there, grazing away on the meadow.

I went to the Natural History Museum to catch the Animal Inside Out exhibition before it closed. Paul declined to come with me on the grounds that he’s too squeamish, but given that it was full of excited three-year-olds yelling “look mummy, you can see all that squid’s insides!!”, I think he would have probably coped. Although some of you will no doubt be pleased to know that there was no photography allowed inside!

I felt that the exhibition was slightly on the small and under-explained side, although I don’t know what I would suggest to improve it. More detail on the actual plastination process, perhaps, which was described in just one paragraph. The exhibits themselves though were absolutely amazing. The delicacy of an entire animal comprised solely of its own blood vessels was stunning.

Many of the more robust pieces were on open display, so you could go right up to them and look really closely. Somehow the texture of the plastinated creatures gave them a somewhat “fake” quality, so you could easily believe that you were looking at very detailed models. I found that a tiny bit disappointing somehow, but then I’m the woman who likes a good old-fashioned spirit-and-taxidermy collection, so maybe it was simply all a bit too modern for my liking!

Spirit Collection at the Natural History Museum

After I’d had a good look around the exhibition a couple of times, I wandered over to the Darwin Centre to find out whether the Spirit Collection Tours were happening this week. Sadly they weren’t, so I contented myself with pointing my camera through the windows. Hence the fuzziness of the picture above. But look! Lizards!

Spirit Collection at the Natural History Museum

This is a fish, otherwise unlabelled. I don’t know what it’s been treated with to make it green, but it’s absolutely beautiful.

Spirit Collection at the Natural History Museum

This is a Lesser Vampire Bat. Isn’t he adorable? Preserving mammals in formalin or methylated spirits tends to cause them to lose their colour over time, so they often turn either orange or white.

Spirit Collection at the Natural History Museum

And this is an octopus. Please excuse the reflections on the glass, it’s hard to get rid of them when you’re taking a photo of an animal through a display case and a jar.

At this point I had to dash back to Paddington to catch the last off-peak fast train of the afternoon, so I didn’t really look at the rest of the museum. Next time I’ll get out of bed a bit earlier – there must still be corners of the place that I haven’t discovered yet!

Tumblr: August Archive

Here’s my Tumblr archive for August…

You can see the archive in more detail, here.