Month: April 2013

Felted gemstone pendant

Felted pendant

A little experiment for a Tuesday afternoon – a felted pendant.

This nugget of purest green has been hanging around on my desk since January 2010. It sort of did what I wanted it to (the polymer clay encased the stone, took texture and paint well, and provided an anchor for a bail), but I was never quite happy with the finish of it.

Interestingly though, I’ve just found the piece of fimo that I added fragrance to at the same time, and it just about still smells. So now I know that the fragrance lasts roughly three years before it wears off. Not bad!

Given that this pendant had effectively become a waste product, in that I didn’t like it enough to either wear or sell, I decided that I had nothing to lose by seeing what would happen if I took my little rotary drill to it. The stone (aventurine) engraves quite nicely, though it’ll take a little more practice and experimentation with different shapes of diamond point to discover what works best.

Once that was done I thought I might as well carry on experimenting, so I rummaged about in my little bag of coloured wool. Less than an hour later I had this – an engraved gemstone encased in felt.

Now this I do like, very much.

The wool has shrunk nice and tightly around the stone so that it can’t fall out, and you can see the inner layer of dark green felt just poking out around the edges of the opening. The polymer clay that I didn’t like has been hidden away completely, and I love the soft edges of the new shape. I might do a little experiment with fragrance on this one as well, by adding a couple of drops of essential oil to the back of the pendant. I doubt that will last for three years, but I’ll let you know!

More Marvellous Mittens

Purple organic pointelle gloves

I had grand plans for making lots more pairs of gloves today. Above, you can see the total sum of my glove-making endeavours.

Admittedly I got rather sidetracked this morning by a hat, and didn’t start making the gloves until after lunch. Unfortunately, it turns out that making gloves from organic cotton pointelle is the most enormous pain in the backside. It’s very thick and very stretchy. It’s difficult to mark, and it’s difficult to cut and sew accurately. All of this makes working with it very slow going indeed.

I’ve prepared the backs and the bias tape for two more purple pairs, and cut the contrast stripes for three more pairs. Those will be teamed with more pointelle but in brown.

However frustrated I might be by the length of time it’s taking me to sew these, I have to admit that I rather like them! The bias trim (which is also around the thumbs) is a pleasing finishing touch, and I’m happy that all of the fabric is organic cotton. Now I just need to get a move on, and finish making them!

Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Marvellous Mittens

Floral and lace gloves

Ta-daa! A glove that actually fits onto my disembodied hand! I spent most of Saturday making the left glove, which involved a lot of fiddly seams, unpicking things, wonky elastic, and a certain amount of swearing. Once I’d got the left glove worked out though, the right one came out lovely! So this first pair will be mine, to wear and to display on the very shiny hand.

Three more pairs in the making

Once I was happy with the first pair, I cut out all the pieces for another three. (Pairs, not gloves.) I have plenty of this pretty floral jersey left over, but I’ve used up all of the lace edging, so future pairs will have a different trim. By the end of Saturday afternoon I’d managed to sew up six little thumbs, with the rest set aside for today.

Marvellous Mittens

And here they are, finished and packaged – three more pairs of fingerless gloves ready for the Frome Steampunk Extravaganza!

I have plans for some slightly more “masculine” (by which I simply mean “less frilly”) fingerless gloves to go alongside these. I have some gorgeous organic cotton pointelle fabrics in brown and purple, which should go perfectly with cuffs made from the remnants of the organic cotton stripes I used for the bow ties. I’m going to make a start on those tomorrow, so watch this space…

Harris Garden

Hellebore
Hellebore

Last weekend we went to an open day at the Harris Garden, part of the University of Reading.

Magnolia
Magnolia

For some reason I’d completely forgotten how to make my camera behave, so I managed to come home with a grand total of three in-focus photos.

Seed pods
Seed pods

Here they are!

Buttons and Bows

First bow tie, finished and boxed.

This was the first of Mr Magpie’s Adjustable Bow Ties to come off my mini production line. It’s a cotton hand-tied bow, on a grosgrain ribbon adjustable band. I love the look of a hand-tied bow but I find it impossible to tie one on front of a mirror, so this seemed like the ideal solution!

Organic cotton covered buttons, 15mm

While I was making the bow ties, I used all the offcuts of organic cotton to cover a little pile of 15mm buttons. They’ll be for sale alongside the ties and the vintage button stash that I’ve been sorting out.

Organic cotton bow ties

Here they are in glorious technicolour – all the striped fabrics are all from fat quarters of organic cotton designed by Kaffe Fassett for Rowan. I don’t think that particular fabric’s available any more, but I’ll definitely be making more bow ties with new organic cottons as I buy them.

I’ve got one more batch of fragranced tealights to make before the Frome Steampunk Extravaganza, and once they’re done, it’ll be a matter of what else I can make in the time I’ve got available in between my shifts at work. Hopefully I’ll end up with a stall that shows a good variety of the things I enjoy making, and that people will actually want to buy!

Prototype Gloves

Prototype fingerless gloves

Well, they fit, but only because I happen to have very small hands!

They’re made from polar fleece which, it turns out, isn’t really stretchy enough for gloves – not ones as fitted as these, anyway. I’m very pleased with the shape at the top (tall over the fingers and cut away underneath), although the placement of the curve needs a little alteration so that the little finger doesn’t disappear. The decoration on the cuffs also needs re-thinking. On auto-pilot I put the centre of the braid in the centre of the cuff piece, without thinking that this would cause it to end up hidden on the inside of the wrists. Oops.

I’ve never made gloves before, and it turns out that they’re very fiddly, especially parts like the thumb which obviously can’t fit over the free arm of the sewing machine. I am pleased with the way the thumbs have come out though – they’re the right height, and they fit really nicely around the base. Next time I think I’d change the order of the construction and attach the cuffs before sewing up the side seams. That would have made the top stitching in particular a lot easier!

My disembodied hand has arrived! Yay!

Perhaps most frustratingly of all – my disembodied hand arrived last week, and I was so looking forward to displaying my first glove on it… but they’re so tight that they won’t stretch far enough to fit. Damn!

Prototype hat

Prototype fleece cloche hat

If you follow me on Facebook (hint, hint!), you’ll have already seen that I spent Sunday making a prototype hat. I used Simplicity 1736 as a starting point, because I thought the cloche-like style and piped details made it an interesting Steampunk-Casual (if such a thing exists) type of hat.

I learned a few things while I was making it, not least how to make my own piping and then insert it into the seams – two things that I’d somehow managed to avoid in all my years of sewing. Turns out it’s much easier if you coincidentally manage to make the flange on the piping 15mm wide, then you can use it as a guide for sewing the seams.

I also learned that you need to trim the piping cord out of the way of the seam allowances, that three piped seams coming together in one place is extremely awkward, and that my machine won’t sew through three layers of fleece without skipping stitches.

Next time round I’ll be altering the pattern so that the crown pieces don’t come together into one point at the sides. You can’t see that detail anyway, it’s hidden under the brim, so why not make the whole thing easier to sew? I also want to alter the brim itself, as I’m not very fond of the way it stops half way round. I’d also like it to be more curved, and much larger at the front. Taking the brim all the way around the hat will also mean that I can attach it in a different way, eliminating the need to sew through so many layers of fleece in one go. In fact I might face the brim with something lighter, and get rid of one layer of fleece altogether.

Having said all of that, I am actually very pleased with this hat! It’s going to be my daywear hat for the Steampunk Extravaganza, hence the red and black colour scheme, and the combination of spots and stripes. It’s extremely comfortable and warm, and fits beautifully over my very short hair. I might try out the next iteration in black and pink, so that it goes with my spotty coat. Or maybe a brown and blue version to go with my long winter coat… yes, I can see myself making quite a few of these!

Lavender Bags

Lavender bags - the insides

Much of my time over the Easter break was spent sewing a dress, and getting out of the house with Paul, which made a nice change! (Photos to follow.) Yesterday and today however, have been mostly spent working on lavender bags for the EMPORIUM.

In the box above are 65 little pouches made from recycled sheeting, each containing about 10g of dried Yorkshire lavender. The little pile on the floor was intended to be the filling for the 66th. Oops…

Lavender bags

Having made up the outer pouches yesterday, all from my ridiculously large box of scraps, I spent today stuffing the insides into the outsides, and ladder-stitching them closed. I’ve still got just less than half to do, but I have now printed out all the labels and packaged up all of the completed bags.

These are most of the fabric choices, there are a couple more that I only had enough of to make one or two. As you can see, there are quite a lot of skulls left over from the old GothStuff days!

I reckon I need one more long afternoon (on a day when my hands are inclined to cooperate) to finish the rest. For now they’ll be sealed in a couple of layers of plastic bags so that they don’t make everything else smell of lavender, until they come out again at the Steampunk Extravaganza next month. I’m currently trying not to worry about how soon that is and how few days off work I have in the meantime. The list of things I need to make is definitely getting smaller, and I WILL get it all done!

Tumblr: March Archive

Here’s my Tumblr archive for March…

You can see the archive in more detail, here.