This is my fourth Clapotis, in Rowan Silky Tweed. It’s taken me more than a year to knit it, because I kept getting sidetracked by more interesting projects along the way. I wore my Rowan Tapestry clapotis ever such a lot over the winter, but it doesn’t quite go with all my clothes. This nice neutral grey should hopefully fill in the gaps. Although it’s a bit heavier than the Tapestry, the silk gives it a lovely drape.

I knitted this one back-and-forth on a circular needle, and that helped to alleviate the terrible wrist pain I’d had from the previous one. Because you can keep the weight of the weight of the knitting in your lap rather than on the needles, it’s a lot easier to manage.

I was spurred on to finish this one by the fact that I’m going on holiday soon, and I’m going to be spending quite a lot of time outdoors. I’d rather hoped that in the middle of May I might need to be taking sandals with me, rather than an enormous scarf, but this is England, and the weather’s nothing if not unpredictable. I should probably thankful that I’ve also knitted a matching hat.

It was my niece’s first birthday last week, so of course I wanted to make her a little party dress! I was very tempted to make something very floofy and over the top, but given that her primary means of locomotion is crawling at high speed, I decided it made more sense to sew something that she could move about in.

This is Butterick 3772, in the smallest size. The fabric is half a metre of Alexander Henry, which I bought because I fell in love with it a couple of years ago. I’m glad it’s finally made its way out of the stash and been put to a good use.

As you can see, the dress saw a lot of action at the party!

I have lots of little pieces of interesting and unusual fabric in the stash, so I can feel a few more of these simple little dresses coming on. I’ll wait until she’s a bit bigger before I go for the full-on floofy party dresses, I think.

My parents have been clearing out the loft before they move house, and my Mum had vaguely mentioned a box of embroidery transfers. Turns out that the box is about the size of a ream of paper, and crammed absolutely full!

Most of the transfers are from the 1930s and 1940s, with a few from the early 50s including a lovely set of Coronation designs for brooches. The earliest dated one I found was from 1915! Most of the transfers aren’t dated, but the majority of them have a company name and a number. Others have the name of a magazine and an issue number, so it should be relatively easy to track them down and date them properly.

There are lots of different crinoline ladies, as you might expect, ranging from the delightfully simple to the impressively large and complicated!

There are also patterns for cross stitch, broderie anglaise and cutwork. Plenty of floral designs, mostly for dressing table sets or chair backs. Lots of designs for brooches too, which surprised me. I hadn’t seen those in any of my 1930s & 40s sewing books, so I wasn’t expecting them. I quite fancy making some now though.

At first I thought the kiwi (the bird, not the fruit) was the most unexpected design, but on reflection I think that award might have to go to the chicken with the soda syphon…

Who knew that chickens could have so much fun at a cocktail party?!

I have some vague plans for using the transfers to actually embroider things, and I also have plans to scan them so that I can use the designs without destroying the originals. A couple of people have suggested that I sell the copies, but I’d need to double check the copyright situation. I do want to research them first though, to date them properly, and to put all the matching transfers together. Once I have a bit of Spare Time, I can feel a lovely project coming on.

Internet, meet R2D2. He’s 35 years old, which in fact makes him one year older than my husband, who found him in the attic.

I used to have this very model of R2D2, many years ago. Sadly, the original R2 was lost when a friend’s neighbour’s Jack Russell chewed him beyond repair. I’d complained about his sad demise so often that when Paul uncovered this little fellow stashed away in a box, he decided to give him to me.

Altogether now: Awwwwwww!

(Seriously. You know it’s true love when a man in his thirties gives you a gift of one of his own original Star Wars figures.)

So here he is, on my desk, guarding my TARDIS. Which is a USB hub. It makes the sound of the TARDIS when you plug in a USB drive. (Yes, you can turn the sound off.) Admittedly I stole that from Paul when I got tired of having to grovel about behind the computer to plug things in, I didn’t go looking specifically for the geekiest USB hub I could possibly find. (And I’m fairly certain somebody out there can tell me that this isn’t it!)

But while I don’t tend to display my geekiness as much as some of my friends, I’ll admit it here and now:

I’m a Star Wars fan.
(Episodes IV to VI, obviously, plus the surprisingly good Clone Wars cartoons.)

And a Doctor Who fan.
(Tom Baker, plus everything that Steven Moffat wrote for Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant. Oh, and The Doctor’s Wife, of course.)

I’m a Pratchett fan, and a Gaiman fan, and a Sherlock fan, and a Prisoner fan, and a Lost Boys, Labyrinth, Bladerunner fan.

When I was little, I used to go round to a schoolfriend’s house. Not to play with her, but to hang out with her younger brother who had an AT-AT. Awesome. When I was at art college, my boyfriend at the time also had an enormous collection of Star Wars stuff, including a cardboard Death Star set. We used to spend hours lying on the floor in the dining room, making the trash compactor work, or making stormtroopers walk into doors. As you do. When you’re nineteen. It turns out that when you’re late getting home because you lost track of the time, it’s incredibly difficult to get your parents to believe that’s what you were doing! He also took me to see Bladerunner when the Director’s Cut came out. We came home from the cinema and immediately watched the original version on video, which confused the living daylights out of me.

Labyrinth is definitely my comfort film, and no, not just because of David Bowie’s remarkable trousers. It’s because of the details. Most notably the bottles of milk that I spotted when my Dad took my sister and I to see the film at the cinema, and which Paul insists that I’ve imagined! (You see them when Sarah enters Jareth’s castle. They’re to the left of the door, although they’re probably cut off unless you’re watching the widescreen version.)

Good Omens and Wyrd Sisters are my comfort books, the ones I’ll always take with me if I’m going on holiday or into hospital, and the only two that I’ve read so many times that I’ve had to buy new copies because the original paperbacks dropped to bits. Oh, I tell a lie. I read my Dad’s copy of Hitchhikers until that fell apart. Sorry Dad…

I don’t buy (much) merchandise, or write fan fiction, or make clever gifs for tumblr, or spend time analysing plots and possibilities. So perhaps I’m not a geek at all, and my liking of these things is simply to do with my age, in that these films, books and television shows were the primary cultural phenomena when I was growing up. Although I know that my sister’s never seen Star Wars, hasn’t read Pratchett, and almost certainly doesn’t have an R2D2 and a TARDIS on her desk.

So yes. Perhaps it’s time to admit that I am just a little bit of a geek after all. Although I’m guessing that doesn’t really come as a surprise!

This is everything I uploaded to Tumblr in April.

You can see the archive in more detail, here.

Sometimes Tumblr takes me by surprise. I use the queue functionality to collect images that I like, and then allow the site to automatically post a certain number of images each day. This means that I never quite know exactly what I’m going to find there, and sometimes images pop up that I’d forgotten about.

I like to think of it as a kind of endless digital scrapbook. I used to collect pictures from magazines and stick them into a book. Sometimes I wouldn’t look at them again for months, and I’d be taken by surprise at the images I’d chosen. Sometimes themes would become apparent, sometimes there’d be duplicates. Sometimes I’d wonder what on earth I’d been thinking of, when I’d collected certain images that somehow no longer appealed.

There’s something very satisfying about collecting what appear to be very disparate images, and then looking at them in a large group like this. It becomes very easy to spot trends in colours, or shapes, or textures, and I find that very useful when I’m stuck for inspiration.

I used to cross-post every image from Tumblr to Twitter, but quickly found that my “proper” tweets were being lost amongst the noise. If you have a tumblr account yourself and would like to follow me, you can find me here. If you follow blogs via an RSS feeder, there’s an RSS link too. Otherwise, I’ll keep posting archive pictures like this, as often as I remember!

Yay, my shiny new Conker shoes have arrived!

They were delivered on Friday, while I was out at work. Paul very kindly went to pick them up from the sorting office for me while I was out at work on Saturday. He was somewhat startled to find that the postman knew me, and was not at all surprised to discover that the parcel contained shoes! He used to drive the delivery van for our area, so he got to know me very well in the days when I was collecting unusual Dr Martens from Ebay. Sometimes he used to wait on the doorstep while I opened my parcels, so he could see my unusual choice of shoes. I think he’d have been impressed by these!

I wore the shoes to work on Sunday, and they’re lovely! Not quite enough room for orthotics and handknit socks both at once, which tells me I should probably have ordered a 6F rather than a 6E. Conker offer amazing customer service and I could have sent them back to be stretched a little bit, but being the impatient sort I couldn’t resist wearing them straight away.

The lovely people at Conker are probably going to cry when they see this picture. I don’t think they’d take them back in this state! Yes, I knew it had been raining, and I should have put on a big pair of boots. But, new shoes!
(I know, I know. And yes, I have cleaned them now that the mud’s dry.)

Photo © Sarah Wainwright

I went for a walk with Sarah (Skycarrots), and we sketched and made rubbings and nibbled leaves and took pictures. Sarah took a picture of me, taking a picture of my shoes. She also took some lovely ones of a meadow full of cowslips, glowing as the light faded. We’re planning on making these walks a regular occurrence, so hopefully we’ll have full sketchbooks and photo albums to show you soon. It was lovely to go out with a friend, and find a bit of creative inspiration in our local area.

After years of buying only sample pieces from organiccotton.biz, I finally got around to ordering some yardage. The skirt above is a blend of organic cotton and bamboo, and it’s beautifully soft and drapey.

I don’t believe most of the claims about bamboo fabric having practically magical anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties. The plant material (which does have those qualities) needs to go through so many processes before it can be spun, it’s doubtful whether any of its beneficial aspects would survive. However, it’s a very good fibre to use for fabric. It needs no pesticides to grow, uses far less water than cotton, and it grows so rapidly that it’s quick to replenish, which means you don’t need acres of space to plant it. Even better, the fabric it produces is unbelievably soft.

This is my usual ruffled skirt – take one calf length a-line skirt pattern, and stick a ten-inch ruffle on the bottom. Simple! It has pockets in the side seams, and the edges of the ruffle are overlocked with a satin stitch.

The waistband I pretty much made up as I went along. It’s based on an old favourite skirt that wore out long ago. The centre channel has a bias tape drawstring threaded through two eyelets. The channels above and below have narrow elastic threaded through.

Things I learnt as I was making it?

1. Thread the drawstring through before the elastic.
2. Make absolutely certain that the elastic isn’t twisted.
3. Whilst the bias tape foot for my sewing machine is a marvellous invention, I need to learn how to make the joins in the bias strip go through it more smoothly.

The finishing detail is this pair of little leaves on the ends of the drawstring. They each have an offcut of batting inside, making them a little bit textured and squishy. I was torn between overlocking the edges or leaving them raw so that they’d fray a little in the wash. I do like the satin stitch edge, not least because they make the leaves stand out against the skirt, but it isn’t as tidy as I’d have liked. A little more practice needed, perhaps.

I keep going on about the softness of the fabric, but that really is its stand-out quality for me. It’s like the softest sheets you’ve ever slept on, or that favourite shirt you’ve been wearing for years.

I’m working on a set of costumes at the moment, all of which seem to be made with synthetic fabrics and have lots of fiddly little details. It’s been really nice to take a break and sew something simple, that feels like a little bit of luxury.

Do you know about Kiva? They work with microfinance institutions to provide loans to people without access to traditional banking systems. One hundred percent of your loan is sent to these partners, who administer them for you. All you need to do is decide who to support – which turns out to be the trickiest part.

The lady pictured above is Maritza, and she works as a dressmaker in Ecuador. She makes and repairs clothes, and when she doesn’t have enough sewing work coming in she sells juices. Her loan is to help her with the costs of buying haberdashery and tools.

Kiva are currently offering the opportunity to lend $25 for free, so it seemed like a perfect time to get involved. One of the aims for my mythical business (I’ll start it one day…) is to make enough money to be able to give some of it to Kiva. I have no idea when or if that might ever happen, so I figured I might as well start now. You can do the same, if you like.

(That’s an affiliate link, so don’t feel obliged to use it. I don’t think anything exciting happens to me if you do, but I will be able to see who’s signed up by means of following it.)

Yuk.

I think it might be time to clean the iron, and fit the new ironing board cover.

This is what happens when you use a lot of synthetic fabrics and iron-on interfacing. Things melt and stick, and you’re left with a mess.

That’s why I usually buy the cheapest iron I can possibly find, and then use it until it’s either beyond cleaning, or the heating element burns out. Domestic irons aren’t designed to be used for hours and days at a time, so this tends to work out to a buying a new one every eighteen months or so.

I know that a lot of dressmakers swear by heavy-duty steam-generating irons. I’ve used them before, but find them too heavy for my bad wrist. I also find that the water tanks get full of limescale and the steam eventually leaves dirty marks on your fabric. I use a simple plant sprayer, using it to dampen either the fabric, the ironing board cover, or a separate pressing cloth. A nice hot iron on top creates plenty of steam.

When I (eventually) finish work on my current costume project and switch to my lovely organic cottons, I’d like to give up using iron-on interfacing altogether. Hopefully that should help my irons to last a bit longer – and make a lot less mess!