Without wishing to put anyone off the idea of buying my organic cotton fabric, this is what it looks like when it comes out of the washing machine. In these days of synthetic fibres and “easy-iron” fabrics, this might come as a bit of a shock. Thankfully, a few minutes with a nice hot iron can [...]
Category Archive for 'sewing'
I know you’ve seen this one before, but I just wanted to show you Simplicity 2172 in its completed state. After the Wild Boy’s Ball I removed the feather collar, and added the sleeves. I decided to leave off the shoulder flanges and the ruffly bits because they’re not to my taste and I wanted [...]
I seem to be developing quite a collection of bow ties now. I’ve made a purple & green shot silk one, a skull & crossbones one, a sewing print one, and one with silver bees. I also have a readymade burgundy and black one with a matching cummerbund, that I used to wear for orchestra [...]
I’ve been saving my pennies for ages, and last week my copy of the Cochenille Garment Designer software arrived. I haven’t said too much about it yet because I’m still on the steep part of the learning curve. This means that anything I might have wanted to say was probably unprintable anyway. The first pattern [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]