Month: June 2013

Charity Swap

Fenn Wright & Manson dress

Look! We have a garden now! An almost-completed deck, and an almost-completed lawn! By the end of the weekend it should all be done. We just need to remember to keep watering the lawn every day, especially if it’s going to stay sunny. We should probably buy a lawn mower at some point too…

So, we took two more boxes of stuff down to one of our local charity shops, and I managed to come home with this lovely summer dress. It’s a little bit too big, but that’s nothing a sewing machine can’t fix! It’s a bit lower at the neck than I’d normally wear, but I’ll give it a try with a t-shirt underneath before I set about putting in a modesty panel of some description.

Fenn Wright & Manson dress

The dress is by Fenn Wright Manson, a brand that’s usually well outside of my budget, so I was very pleased to bring this home for the bargain price of twelve quid! It’s a cotton and silk blend, with an acetate lining. The label says “dry clean only”, but it smells as though it’s been through a washing machine recently and doesn’t seem any the worse for that. I think it’ll survive a cool wash well enough.

I am tempted to grab a bunch of fabric paints to colour it in, but I do think those aqua splashes are lovely!

Pinterest-ready?

Apparently this is what my kitchen looks like now.

Moving house is a funny business. Paul and I (well, okay, mostly Paul) have spent the past two weeks scrubbing our house and tidying it to within an inch of our lives, as well as redistributing a good chunk of our belongings amongst kind people’s spare bedrooms and garages across the county.

This is the dining end of our kitchen. Doesn’t it look lovely? Apart from the grainy photo, it’s almost Pinterest-ready, I’d say! Sadly, when I look at this, after “ooh, those flowers smell lovely”, all I can think is “where am I supposed to dry the laundry now?”. Usually this area is full of clothes airers, and the chairs normally live in different rooms. The cushions were pinched from the sofa, when I suddenly realised that the red-and-gold upholstered chairs matched the kitchen before Paul decorated it. And please note the beautiful pale duck-egg blue on the wall… that we nearly didn’t have, because Paul thought it might be “too bright”. Suffice it to say that we do not have the same taste in colours, not even slightly!

The tablecloth (twice the size of this table) has been carefully ironed and folded to hide the old red wine stain that won’t wash out. Those are Emma Bridgewater egg cups, but they’ve never been used because I don’t much like boiled eggs, and I’m not very good at cooking them anyway. The lovely blue glass jug was my Mum’s – a wedding gift that now neither of us have ever used!

Even the artwork isn’t ours. Paul bought the frames at some point around Christmas, but we couldn’t be bothered to move the laundry out of the way to put them on the wall. They even came with these prints included – sufficiently abstract that it doesn’t even matter which way up you hang them. We’ll probably replace them with our own photographs at some point… but we’ve got so many to choose from that it could take us years to decide which ones!

The house will go on the market early next week, so hopefully all this cleaning and clearing and staging will make itself worthwhile. I’m just not certain how we’re supposed to live in such a tidy house until we move out! I’m such an untidy person that all these empty rooms are making me very uncomfortable indeed. Thankfully the Shed is still a complete mess… I suppose I’d better tackle that next!

Tea Dresses

Tea dyed fabrics

It’s a long while since I’ve done any experimenting with natural dyes, but I was thinking about tea dyeing again this morning. This came about because I’ve been saving all of my used tea bags (ordinary black tea and lots of different herbal varieties) and stashing them in the freezer. They’re all in bags, a month’s worth at a time. It turns out that I drink rather a lot of tea, so six months’ tea bags are now taking up rather a lot of space.

The reason I’ve been saving them this way is that I’ve been thinking about a (currently imaginary) project of making “tea dresses”. The dresses would be made from organic cotton, or vintage nightdresses, or maybe old doilies and table linens of various descriptions. Each one would be dyed after its construction, in a month’s worth of tea bags. Theoretically each one would be a different colour, as no two months’ tea combinations would be the same. (Actually, they’ll almost certainly all be beige, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

However, something suddenly occurred to me, after watching a detergent advert on the telly.

How do you wash a dress that’s been dyed with tea, when modern detergents are specifically designed to remove precisely this kind of stain?

The Internets provided me with answers ranging from “add salt to the dye bath” to “rinse with a vinegar solution”, and people also suggested washing at various temperatures and with different kinds of detergents.

Conveniently, a friend’s husband is something of a detergent expert (how useful!), and he had this helpful advice:

“Effectively you’re using a tea as a direct dye so it will be prone to fading. But there are a couple of things you can do to help. After you’ve stained the cotton, let it dry and leave it for a few days. The air will help to set the colour a bit. You could also experiment with a hand wash in bicarbonate of soda which will darken the colour somewhat (alkali does that to tea for the same reason that it gets lighter when you put lemon juice in it). From a detergent point of view, we rely strongly on bleach to get rid of tea so avoid powder detergents and detergent additives such as Vanish. Then wash on a cool short cycle and you will create unfavourable conditions for tea removal. Just don’t spill coffee down yourself ;)”

Fantastic! So another friend’s suggestion of using a rubbish detergent (as she never manages to get stains out of anything, apparently) is a good one, as is only washing in cool water. The bicarb/alkali information is very interesting, and I happen to have some litmus paper in the Shed that I can use to find out what sort of pH produces good results in terms of both colour and fastness.

I know that these dresses will fade over time, and to me that’s going to be part of their charm. I plan to make them fairly plain, and then embellish them as I go along, so they’ll effectively remain a constant work in progress. I might even keep collecting my tea bags, and re-dye them once a year.

You all know what I’m like for getting all excited about a project and then wandering off before it ever gets past the imaginary stage, but I should probably actually try to make a start on this one soon. Not least because I don’t really want to have to explain to the removal men why I’m moving six months’ worth of frozen teabags from one house to another!

Simplicity 3968 – complete!

Simplicity 3968 (1952)

Please excuse the state of my garden. We’re in the process of moving house, so we finally had to do something about the terrible mess. The move has come about a little bit suddenly, so our plans for the garden have changed, but it’s all coming along very quickly which is nice.

Simplicity 3968 (1952)

So, you saw the toile of Simplicity 3968 the other day, and since then I’ve been hunting in my fabric stash to find something appropriate. This is a linen blend – I thought it was blended with wool, but the more I’ve handled it, the more I think it might be polyester. I obviously bought it before my self-imposed ban on man-made fibres. It makes a pretty nice dress though!

Simplicity 3968 (1952)

I’m pleased with the v-neck. It’s nice and neat, if you ignore the little wiggle on the right – that’ll press out with a bit of steam. I think it shows off the collar of the shirt underneath very nicely. I was a bit concerned that the neck would be so high that you would barely see the shirt at all.

Simplicity 3968 (1952)

The back, however, was nowhere near as cut away as I’d expected from a dress described as a “halter”. Once I had the neckline finished and the bodice and lining basted together, I decided to make an alteration to the armscye to make it much deeper at the back. I took the plunge and drew this freehand. I then used the piece I’d cut away to make the identical alteration on the other side.

Simplicity 3968 (1952)

The change was then translated to the pattern, so I can make the next one the same.

Simplicity 3968 (1952)

Much better! I like the waistcoat effect, which shows off more of the shirt fabric underneath, and allows for a greater range of arm movement without pulling across the back of the dress.

Simplicity 3968 (1952)

My absolute favourite part of this pattern though – in fact the entire reason I bought it – is the pockets. Look at them! They’re absolutely ENORMOUS. Despite that, I don’t think they draw an unnecessary amount of attention to themselves. They do stand slightly away from the skirt, which was an oversight on my part. I made the four panels of the skirt slightly narrower (to make the pattern pieces fit more easily on my sewing table!), but forgot to change the placement of the markings for the pockets. Next time I’ll try and remember to sew them on flat!


HEPZIBAH image © Fairysteps

The belt, for anyone who’s wondering, is the fabulous Hepzibah, courtesy of Fairysteps. I might have accidentally bought a turquoise one as well.

I plan to wear this dress to work tomorrow, so I’ll be able to see straight away whether it’s the right length, and is easy to wear. There’ll be the usual amount of sitting on the floor, rummaging about in cupboards and generally making a mess, so anything I wear to work has to be able to cope with a lot of abuse! I’m hoping this will turn out to be the dress equivalent of jeans – comfortable, but hard-wearing and practical.

Tumblr: May archive

Here’s my Tumblr archive for May…

You can see the archive in more detail, here.

They’ve changed the archive layout, which I hadn’t noticed until I went into it to paste this image together. I do tend to look at my own archive page quite a lot, it helps me to see trends and themes that I happen to have been collecting lately. Apparently it doesn’t always help me to spot duplicates though – oops!

I tend to collect images and store them in the queue, so that they can be doled out at regular intervals rather than flooding the dashboard all in one go. Having said that, my queue has almost run dry because I really haven’t been feeling terribly inspired lately. I also worry about the lack of attribution for the vast majority of the images I’ve collected here – which is the main reason I stopped using Pinterest. Between that and Instagram‘s decision to just use people’s photos in any way they liked, I cancelled both accounts because I wasn’t comfortable with having content used in that way.

However, looking at my blog stats today, it seems there’s an increasing trend of links coming through directly from Pinterest – so it looks as though they’ve improved the way that attribution is carried from pin-to-pin. I’ve resurrected my Eternal Magpie account, but haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to switch away from Tumblr, or use both for different things. I guess I’ll play around with both for a while, time permitting, and see how it goes.

Simplicity 3968 – Toile

This is Simplicity 3968, a pinafore (jumper) dress pattern from 1952. You may guess that I bought it solely because of the hilariously large pockets, and of course you’d be absolutely right!

I plan to wear it for work, over the top of my smart TM Lewin shirts. I needed the fit to be right, so I pulled out some plain polycotton fabric and made a test version. The added complication was that this pattern doesn’t actually exist in a size that’s quite big enough for me (a 1952 size 18 being significantly smaller than a modern one), so I had to make some alterations as I was going along.

Simplicity 3968 - toile

I’m very pleased to say that it’s come out really well! All the pieces fitted back together once I’d finished fiddling about with them, which is always a good start. The main change I need to make is to balance the front of the bodice, between the darts, so that the waist seam sits flat instead of curving upwards. The next challenge will come when I have to put in the zip at the side. The skirt panels are on the bias at the side seams, so there’s potential for it all pulling out of shape and going horribly wrong. I think a little bit of seam binding at that point, or perhaps a small facing, might help everything to stay in place.

Now I just need to decide on the perfect fabric. I have a few lightweight options in the stash, but nothing heavier. I know it’s supposed to be nearly summer, but somehow this lovely Harris Tweed from Merchant & Mills, or an organic cotton corduroy, seem much more appropriate than a shirt weight cotton right now.

Shiny New Conkers!

Conker Boots

I don’t think I told you, back in January, about my glorious pink Conker boots? Here they are, having been worn for the past six months, and they really are the most comfortable pair of boots I’ve ever owned!

I ordered them in November, having seen a photo of a pair of magenta ripley (a very soft leather) boots on Conker’s Facebook page. Being in love with my Conker brogue shoes, I asked whether I could have brogue toecaps added to a pair of boots. The answer turned out to be yes… but not in the ripley leather, as it’s too thick. So the lovely team at Conker sent me three little circles of pink leather in the post, so I could choose which one I wanted for the toe cap. I went for a slightly waxy leather, but one that I’d be able to polish when they inevitably got a bit scuffed. Although I have to say that, six months in, they’re looking pretty good!

I knew I wanted a plain black pair pretty much the same as the pink ones, it was just a question of saving up enough pennies to pay for them. Just as I was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of spending such a lot of money on a pair of plain black boots, and half contemplating a return to Doc Martens, I spotted a gorgeous pair of black shoes with white stitching (again on Conker’s Facebook page) which gave me an idea.

Conker Boots

Dear lovely people at Conker, please don’t cry when you see this picture!

You see, I didn’t really want white stitching at all. I wanted pink. So the moment my boots arrived, even before I’d tried them on, I set about colouring in the white stitching with a pink Sharpie. As you do.

Conker Boots

I know that the stitching will eventually get dirty, and as I polish the boots it will eventually turn black. But for now, while they’re new, I have the simple pleasure of knowing that nobody else has a pair of boots exactly like these.

Perfect!

I’m also really pleased that all of my shoes (with the exception of trainers and waterproofs) are now made by hand, in the UK. So much better than all those mass-produced uncomfortable shoes I used to collect!

Test Vest

Kwik Sew 3524

This is Kwik Sew 3524, a simple-looking strappy vest top. It’s made from two of Paul’s old t-shirts. It looks okay, but there are a couple of things I’d change. The join of the straps to the body is a bit bulky, I’m sure there’s a better way of putting that togther. And the neck is just a little bit wonky, which a line of top stitching would fix, no problem.

Kwik Sew 3524

This is the inside, which is lined with a shelf bra. Again, it’s okay, but I don’t like having that inch of nylon elastic directly against the skin, when it could be hidden between the two layers of nice soft cotton. And I need to join the two layers together at the side seam, otherwise it takes a certain amount of faffing about to make the two layers line up neatly. And who has time for faffing when they’re trying to put their vest on in the morning?

Anyway, thanks to our impending house move (have I mentioned that yet? I’m not really on top of what’s going on around here lately), Paul has pulled a big pile of surplus-to-requirements t-shirts out of his wardrobe. His clear-out is my gain, because I now have plenty of nice soft jersey to have a couple more test runs at this.

Hopefully the eventual result will be a nice soft, comfortable vest!