Month: February 2014

New hat, new options for a mannequin

Hand blocked wool felt baby pink cloche hat featuring a floral design with hand embroidery, felt flowers and vintage buttons

Here is today’s felt hat offering – now in the Etsy shop. I’m really pleased with how the flowers came out, although I learnt an important lesson about doing all the work in the right order. (Note to self: Yes, putting the flowers on first allowed you to check their placement. But it made for incredibly fiddly stitching of the stems!)

I had been vaguely planning to work on felt hats during my full days off work, and then do other kinds of sewing during my half days. Given how sore my fingers are from doing all of this hand sewing through machine-made felt, I think I might revise that plan. Ouch.

Excitingly, my previous hat (the bright pink one with the black guipure lace) sold out almost immediately, and was swiftly followed by an order for another one the same! So I’ve ordered some new felt hoods from Parkin Fabrics, and I’ll make a start on some more hats once they arrive. Perhaps without embroidery this time though.

Interestingly, after my earlier post contemplating the purchase of a new mannequin, I received a very helpful email from Equipashop.com, directing my attention to the existence of the lovely lady above. She’s perfect!

Okay, so she’s still out of my budget right now, but she’s much more affordable than the one I was looking at before, and she’ll be able to display hats, cowls, gloves and jackets. Brilliant! I’m now following Equipashop.com on Facebook, I’ve signed up to their mailing list, and I’ll be making a purchase as soon as funds allow. (And she’s SPARKLY. I mean really, how can I resist?)

Looking around the rest of the site (which turns out to be FULL of bargains!) I was also pleased to see that they offer a plus size mannequin, although she’s not in stock right now. Granted, at roughly a UK size 14/16 she’s at the smaller end of plus size, but that’s still several sizes bigger than most garment display options. Conveniently her measurements are almost exactly the same as mine (though she’s quite a bit taller), so she’d actually be perfect as a dressmaker’s dummy for my own sewing.

Hmmm.

Maybe it’s time to get on with having that pattern de-stash sale that I keep thinking about, to raise money for the newly instated Mannequin Fund…

Search for the perfect dress

McCalls M5924

 

Every now and then I get a bee in my bonnet about finding “the perfect dress”. Over the years it’s been vintage patterns that weren’t even remotely the same shape as my body, fiddly patterns that I hated to sew, or patterns that looked beautiful but turned out to be really uncomfortable to wear. I have dozens of these in my wardrobe, but it wasn’t until this morning that I realised the perfect dress is already amongst them.

McCalls 5924

This is McCalls 5924 (now out of print), and I’ve made two so far. The top one is a nice heavy cotton jersey, the one above is a lightweight drapey viscose knit, and the pattern works equally well in both. They’re empire line, which suits my shape, they have the all-important pockets, they layer well, and they’re really, really comfortable. I have enough fabric in the stash to make at least two more, and I don’t know what’s taken me so long!

While I was thinking about my wardrobe and the things I’d like to add to it, I added some more Gossypium yoga pants to my wish list. Then I realised that there’s almost certainly a yoga pants pattern out there somewhere, which is when I spotted New Look 6165. Not only yoga pants, but a skirt with the same fold-over waist! Ideal for wearing over leggings, and no elastic to dig in and give me a stomach ache. Perfect!

Of course, there’s always room for more than one “perfect dress” in any wardrobe. Which brings me to Vogue 8975. Another Marcy Tilton pattern (like the smocked silk dress), this time for knit fabrics and complete with a little jacket to wear over the top. Conveniently, my local fabric shop has a sale on both New Look and Vogue patterns at the moment, so I think a trip into town will be forthcoming early next week!

My next challenge will be to go through both my wardrobe and my pattern stash, and get rid of some things that I’m simply never going to wear or make. I’m the sort of person who will quite happily buy clothes in multiples if I find something that I like, so I have no problem at all with wearing the same few dresses over and over again. I’m trying not to think about how much money I must have spent over the years on patterns that didn’t suit me once they were made up, or fabric that turned out to be difficult to look after or uncomfortable to wear. All of that trial and error has brought me here – to the knowledge of which patterns I like to sew, and which clothes I like to wear. The photo above is an old one, but despite all the dressmaking I do, I basically live in a hoody, a stripy t-shirt, and a pair of ancient jeans that haven’t fit properly for a long time. Time for a bit of an overhaul, I think!

More Making

Untitled

At long last, a new cloche hat for the shop! I’ve been waiting for the lovely guipure lace to arrive, and also for a full day off work when I didn’t feel too ill to to anything. (Back to the dentist today for a face full of iodine. Yuck.) This one’s now up in the Etsy shop, at a bargain price because it’s not quite as perfect as I’d like. It was the first hat that I blocked, and my trimming of the edges wasn’t perfectly straight, which has resulted in a slightly uneven hem on the inside of the brim. It’s not at all noticeable when you’re wearing the hat, so this is a great opportunity to grab it for a silly price. The custom listing is also available, if you fancy a different colour.

Untitled

This cowl was a bit of an experiment, and it’s one that I’m quite pleased with! You can wear it with the buttons at the front or the back, to keep any stray draughts away from either your neck or your throat. (This one’s in the Etsy shop too.) I’m pleased with the lovely yellow vintage buttons, but rather than snap fasteners I think I might work hand-stitched buttonholes in the future.

Untitled

Unfortunately, it’s proved rather difficult to take photos of a large draped neckerchief on a mannequin that doesn’t have any shoulders! I don’t think the pictures do it justice, so I’m going to need to find another way. I’d love a torso mannequin, like this slightly abstract one from Morplan, but that’s definitely out of my budget until I’ve sold a lot more hats! (Any hats. Selling any hats would be nice.)

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and get an early night. It’s half term this week, which means I’ve got an extremely busy day ahead of me at work tomorrow!

Ups and downs

"My face hurts" First drawing with Sketches on the ipad, 17/02/14

So, last Friday was Valentine’s Day. In our continued tradition of unequal gift-giving, I gave my husband a card, and he gave me an iPad! Admittedly he was going to give me the iPad anyway – he’s just upgraded to a new one, and I’ve inherited his old one with a nice new case. But he certainly gained a great deal of brownie points by wrapping it up in lovely paper!

I’ve been downloading lots of exciting new apps, mostly ones for drawing and sketching with. I’ve chosen a few free ones that I can try out, before I decide which ones I like best and want to pay for. The drawing above was done with an app called Sketches, and it mirrors the theme of this past week. It’s titled “My Face Hurts”.

Fibromyalgia + toothache = unhappy face.

Also on Valentine’s Day, I had to go to the dentist. Luckily we didn’t have a romantic meal planned for the evening, because I ended up having a tooth taken out! Four days later it’s still really painful, and the fibromyalgia doesn’t like it at all. Much to my frustration my face now acts as a warning beacon when I’m in a lot of pain, and this is how I came home from work today. Lovely! Given that I have a public-facing job, and it’s half term this week, I can only hope that I’m not scaring too many children away from the museum!

Green Cardigan

This rather different picture of me, from all the way back in 2008, is the cover photo for the first knitting pattern I designed. After a comment left on the blog by someone trying to track down a copy, I was prompted to open my own Ravelry store, and this is currently the only pattern in it.

I do have three existing patterns that I can add (also available in the Tutorials section to the right there), but I need to work out how to do that without duplicating the original patterns, as I seem to have done with this cardigan. I also have two completely new patterns ready and waiting, but they’re both waiting for photographs. All of my test knits were given away as Christmas presents, so I need to sit down and knit some new ones so that I can have a photo shoot. The temptation to dye my hair pink for the occasion is now extremely high!

What I Did At The Weekend

Paul's Birthday Cupcakes

I know it’s Wednesday already, but I had a few days off work at the end of last week and the beginning of this one, so it all blurred into one lovely long weekend where I basically did nothing. Well, I was ill for a couple of days, which is what really prompted me to think that Doing Nothing for a while would be a really good idea. And it was.

During these days off, Paul had a birthday. While he was out I thought I’d try a little experiment, and I baked a batch of cupcakes! To be perfectly honest, they didn’t turn out that well. They didn’t really rise, and the chocolate didn’t really melt, so they looked a bit funny, and they weren’t light and fluffy so much as dense and a bit strange. But, they tasted nice, and several people have eaten them without complaining of a stomach ache, so perhaps they weren’t as bad as all that! Still, I think I’ll stick to sewing.

Poole Twintone Dinner Service

After a lovely birthday lunch with Paul’s parents, we brought back with us several boxes of crockery which used to belong to Paul’s Nan. She couldn’t take all of this with her when she moved into residential care, so we are now the very excited owners (well, let’s be honest, I’m a lot more excited than Paul is!) of a Poole Twintone dinner service! We must be missing a box though, as none of the coffee pots have their lids, and we have one rectangular lid with nothing to sit on. The set is so extensive because it was added to over many years, received as gifts, and picked up at antique shops and car boot sales. That explains the seventeen (seventeen!) tea cups…

yarma

While all of this nothing was going on, I managed to make myself a Very Bright hat. The picture above is from Yarma, a $0.99 app that allows you to upload photos to Ravelry straight from your phone. It does have filters built into it, but the hat really is that bright!

yarma

The yarns are all hand dyed. The pink background is a cochineal-dyed cashmere from Elisabeth Beverley at Plant Dyed Wool, and the stripes are hand-spun Blue-faced Leicester mini-skeins by The Outside. (I wrote about them over here.)

The hat was going really well, until I reached the very last decrease row. Somehow I managed to pull one of the circular needles out of the stitches, and because the row below was also full of decreases I couldn’t figure out how to get all of the stitches back onto the needles again in the right order. (Hence the mess you can see in the Yarma photo above.) Thankfully the stripes gave me an excellent place to rip back to, so I very carefully picked up the last row of orange stitches and worked the decrease section again. Phew! The pattern is Wurm, which I’ve knitted I think three times now.

I still don’t quite know how I ended up with a hat though. I’ve been spending weeks walking to the bus stop in the cold thinking, “I must knit myself a pair of gloves or mittens, these fingerless ones are too cold”. I had every intention of working up a pair of lovely rainbow-striped gloves that would keep my fingers warm on the way to the bus stop. But then I would have needed to divide all of the little skeins in half… and work out how many rows to knit in each colour, so that all the stripes were the same size… and the next thing I knew, there was a nice, simple hat flying off the needles.

I do have a little bit of yarn left over though, in all eight colours. Just enough to knit yet another pair of fingerless mittens, knowing my luck!

Cowls and snoods

Gold silk feather & fan snood

According to my definition (I don’t know whether it’s the same as anybody else’s), a cowl and a snood are both a tube of fabric that sits around your neck. The difference between them is that a cowl stays there, whereas a snood is long enough that it can be pulled up and over the top of your head. The snood above is one that I knitted for a Christmas present, and I have to admit I was quite sad to give it away. Thankfully there’s enough yarn left over (Fyberspates Scrumptious Laceweight) that I might one day get around to knitting another one for myself.

Grey & black snood

This one I made today, from a remnant of soft cotton/viscose blend jersey, and half an old t-shirt of Paul’s. It needs to be a smidge longer, so that it can cover the head without creating a chilly gap at the back of the neck, but its size was determined by the materials available. Next time I’ll start with yardage, and make it a little bit longer. I quite fancy a fleecy version of this as well, as long as it doesn’t bunch up too much under the chin.

Black & floral cowl

The main endeavour of the day has been drafting a pattern and making up a few cowls, which are now listed in the Etsy shop. I’ve been wondering for ages what on earth I could make from the remnants of jersey fabrics in the stash, and sitting with a very cold neck at work the other day prompted these cosy little neck warmers! They just pull on over the head, and you can either drape them in an artistic and casual fashion, or fold them down neatly like a turtleneck. The floral one is the same on both sides, and the spotty & stripy one is reversible. I’ve listed two of those on Etsy, though I’m extremely tempted to keep one for myself. (I’m keeping the stripy snood though, so perhaps two grey neck-warming things is a bit much.)

Grey & black spotty & stripy cowl

One of the things I really need to improve this year is the photos for my Etsy listings. Despite my endless wittering on Facebook, the vast majority of the visitors to my little shop are coming from within Etsy itself, so I need to upgrade my listings to attract as many views as I can. I like the white face with the white wig – I think it gives a context to the photos whilst keeping the emphasis firmly on the product. However, I am aware that the polystyrene lady looks a little… well… cheap. Sadly, having spent all my money on hat blocks, I can’t afford to upgrade her for a classier model any time soon, so I’ve been thinking about how I could get rid of the polystyrene texture. Papier maché, perhaps, with a layer of white paint over the top? I also need to improve my listing photos generally. They look fine on my Mac at home, but on any other computer they seem very grey and dull, which isn’t quite the look I want to go for! Perhaps a little re-calibration is in order.

I’m aware that everything I’ve posted here lately has been “Look, I made a thing!”. This must be especially dull if you’re already following The Eternal Magpie page on Facebook, as I tend to post all my Things over there as I go along. There is other stuff rumbling along in the background (I broke a tooth, my job is changing, the new house keeps throwing challenges our way, my health is still a mess), I’m just not quite sure what to say about it all just yet. I have a few days off work at the end of this week and the beginning of next, so I’m hoping to take some time to have a bit of a think. (Probably enforced by dental anaesthetic, yuck.) I’m really enjoying all of the Things I’m making at the moment though, and I hope you are too.