Ta-daa! This pair isn’t wearable outside, mostly because I made an error in the construction (I am clumsy, and accidentally snipped a little hole in the outer fabric), so I sewed felt slipper-soles onto the bottom. Annoyingly, this took longer than it would have done to glue the rubber soles on, but it meant that [...]
Category Archive for 'sewing'
I made another little boot prototype, sort of idly based on the construction of Converse, but developed from my existing shoe pattern. The black stitching lines are the seam allowances, so they’ll be a little more cut-away than they appear. I need to make the curves more shallow, as they’ve come out a bit right-angled [...]
Wild Boy’s Ball
Posted in costume, culture, exhibitions, inspiration, museums on Oct 1st, 2011
So, at long last, here is the completed stripy/steampunk outfit! Paul and I went to the Wild Boy’s Ball at Kensington Palace, and had an absolutely magical evening. You can see all the photos that Paul took, over on Flickr. We started off by going inside the palace itself, which was actually quite different from [...]
Paul decided the day before the event that he would come with me after all. Thankfully I managed to get him a ticket, and I had just enough striped fabric left over to make him a tie to match my outfit. The diagonal stripe is because I didn’t have a big enough scrap of fabric [...]
I haven’t been able to settle to anything for the past couple of days (I’ve been unwell again) so I made a very simple little dress. It’s McCalls 5924, which I’ve made before. The first incarnation came out a little on the generous side, so this time I trimmed the pattern down a size. This [...]
Yes, this is exactly what it looks like. An evening dress, in wet-look lycra. Another one for the “it seemed like a good idea at the time” pile, I suspect! This is Butterick 4731. It looks a bit odd (relatively speaking) on my dress form because I’m in between sizes. The bust on my larger [...]
I thought I might persevere with Vogue 1202, so I started to cut out the pattern for the skirt. And then I realised that there is no space in my house large enough to lay out the pattern. And that if the giant pattern piece has to be laid on the fabric sideways, the stretch [...]
This is Vogue 1202, a designer Donna Karan pattern. I’ve had it in my stash for about a year. I kept unfolding it, looking at the size of the pattern pieces, folding it up and putting it away again. The piece above is the front, and it measures 140cm wide by 160cm long. Which is [...]
I’d been thinking about making myself a floaty black skirt for a while. My seersucker skirt‘s been worn almost to death, so I thought I ought to have a backup plan for the day it comes out of the washing machine in pieces. I’ve been waiting for this to happen for months, thankfully the fabric’s [...]
Feathers and sequins
Posted in costume, crafty things on Aug 26th, 2011
Oh my goodness, the feathers. Fluff everywhere. My Shed will never be the same again. Once the glue’s dry, I’ll be getting out the hot glue gun to attach these feathery extravagances to the sides of a mask. The black feathers and the sparkly bits were originally attached to the mask in the first place, but [...]