Category: design

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!

Birthday Dress – In Progress

Overdress - in progress

This is the back view of the prototype version of my 40th Birthday Dress. So far, I’m very glad that I made a prototype, and didn’t take the scissors straight to the gorgeous shot silk dupion that I’ve got waiting!

The style of the dress is exactly spot on. The open back designed to give a glimpse of the layer underneath, the ridiculous bow inspired by a 1971 Style pattern (more on this later), and a high round neck at the front, deliberately kept very plain, to show off a big necklace or a pretty scarf.

Overdress - in progress

Unfortunately, I forgot something important. (No, not the ironing. Shush.) You see those drag lines at the sides, underneath the bust? I forgot the all important part where fabric is flat but bodies are curved, and I didn’t leave quite enough breathing room at the top. Fortunately my dress form is somewhat more generously endowed than I am, so the dress does fit. But it is a bit tight, so I’ll need to re-draft the front pattern piece before I make another. (I blame the fact that my pattern drafting books are already packed for the move, so I had to make the pattern up as I went along.)

I’ve been adding a lot of “Lagenlook” inspired outfits to Pinterest lately (you can see the board here), and the point is to wear a lot of loose layers, often with plenty of frills and asymmetry thrown in for good measure. The basic silhouette of a Lagenlook outfit is fundamentally triangular. As I am also fundamentally triangular, this seems like a great look for me!

Overdress - in progress

The annoying thing is, I’m so utterly conditioned to the “right” shape for a woman being an hourglass, or at least having some semblance of waist definition, that my immediate thought on adding this belt to the dress form was, “that’s better”.

Except that it’s not better. It’s not better at all. It pretty much guarantees that I’ll have indigestion after an hour, be uncomfortable all day, and generally be distracted by my clothes instead of focussing on whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. None of which, however you look at it, can possibly be defined as “better”.

I think what I need to do now is take the belt away, make the next version of the dress much more wide and floaty, and try to step away from any and all forms of media that try to tell me that my body shape is fundamentally wrong.

(And work out how best to add the most ENORMOUS pockets to the front of the dress. Obviously.)

Diary Time Again.

It’s that time of year again. It’s September, there’s a faint hint of autumn in the morning air, children are going back to school, students coming back to campus, and it’s nearly my birthday. (40 this year. How did that come around so quickly?) That can only mean one thing – time for a new diary.

This, as you can see, is last year’s photo. For 2013 I bought a Llewellyn Witches’ Datebook and a Spell A Day Almanac… both of which have remained almost entirely unopened, and definitely unwritten. A lot of the information was the same across the two books, so I could have easily picked just one. Next year I’m quite tempted by the Herbal Almanac, but whether I’ll actually use it or not is another matter.

This year I have been mostly using my phone as a calendar, but I have to confess that it hasn’t been going that well. I don’t synchronise my phone with my computer very often, and I add appointments into both, so when I do eventually get around to making the phone and the computer try to speak to one another, the poor things end up very confused. (As do I, of course.) This has resulted in family members not receiving birthday cards, my work rota being on my phone twice over,  and lots of bits of paper with appointments scribbled on them, which is what I was trying to avoid by keeping everything on the phone in the first place!

We’ve got the birthday thing sorted out now – or at least we will have when we move house. There’s a handy space on the side of the new fridge, so I’m going to print out one giant list of everybody’s birthdays, and pop them inside a picture frame. With the aid of a whiteboard pen, we can then write on the glass and tick off each birthday as we buy a gift or send a card. Perfect.

Despite years of rigorous searching, I still haven’t managed to find the diary that works exactly as I need it to. One day I’ll get around to designing my own, but neither Blurb nor Lulu offer the format and size that I really want, which is spiral bound A6, or thereabouts.

Photobox, on the other hand, now offer this:

It’s a standard photo diary, roughly 6×4″, which is spiral bound. It doesn’t squash the two weekend days into one space, which is a pet peeve of mine given that I work on some weekends and need a bit of room to write down what I’m up to. I like that it has appointments, and that you can start it on any month you prefer. You don’t seem to be able to change the layout for the smallest size, and I don’t know that I actually want a photo for every single week… but I could very easily drop in some jpgs of pretty frames or speech bubbles, which would give me a space for writing notes.

I’m balking slightly at the cost… £11.99 plus another £3.99 for shipping seems like quite a lot of money for a very little diary. But then if you consider the cost of all the diaries I’ve bought and simply never used, £16 suddenly seems not too bad. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.

And then, of course, there’s the other kind of diary. I’ve been reading The New Diary by Tristine Rainer (albeit an out-dated edition) as part of Susannah Conway‘s Unravelling course, which has a lot of writing exercises and prompts for different ways of using your diary as a resource for creativity as well as personal clarity. Although I’ve been keeping an online journal since 2002 and a public blog since about 2006, I haven’t kept a paper diary just for myself since I was a teenager. (I stopped being a teenager in 1993. Ouch.) My favourite Barbara Sher book, What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything?, recommends keeping some kind of planner which you can use to write down everything except for daily appointments. Thoughts, feelings, plans for the future, that brilliant idea that’s bound to be an overnight success… all the stuff I usually keep on bits of paper and discarded envelopes that later turn up all over the house. Now that we’re moving I think I have at least managed to corral them all into one box, but what I’ll do with them next, who knows.


Image © British Library

I don’t think I can quite aspire to the levels of creativity displayed in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (which is what many diary-writing aficionados will recommend as inspiration), but I can certainly aim for variety in subject matter. Scattered across various folders and envelopes I currently have ideas for aromatherapy products, herbalism studies, the conservation of Natural History collections in museums, dyeing textiles with plant material, making shoes… sewing plans of many different kinds… the list seems endless. However, I have now bought a simple spiral bound A4 sketchpad, that I can write and draw in with a nice ink pen. Perhaps if I have one central place for writing down ALL THE THINGS, it’ll be easier to make sense of it all as I go along. Chances of me actually writing in it on any kind of regular basis? Who knows. I haven’t even finished the writing exercises for Unravelling yet, and the course ended yesterday! I’m full of good intentions at the moment though, as I always am at the beginning of the academic year. So many possibilities, so much to learn! We’ll see how long it lasts…

Inexplicable Emporium

Remember the picture that was propped up against the wall in my Shed? Here it is outside, in the last of the snow, looking rather smart on its nice new easel.

We’re getting ready for a stall at an event in May, which I’ll tell you a bit more about once we’ve received confirmation that we can go ahead! Hopefully we’ll be launching the INEXPLICABLE EMPORIUM there, and this is the sign that we’ll be taking with us!

I’ve been ordering lots of materials and packaging, and doing a bit of product design while I wait for them to arrive.

Hopefully some of the things that I’ve been showing you recently are starting to make a bit more sense now!

I also have all of the ingredients necessary to make some scented candles, to which we’ll be giving thoroughly silly names and descriptions.

The idea is to give the impression of a Victorian-style shop, with a wide range of different products. Obviously the things I’m making are thoroughly anachronistic, but that’s all part of the fun! I’ve been really enjoying writing the copy and designing the labels. I knew my degree in Typography & Graphic Communication would come in useful one day…

Spoonflower Scarf

Portwrinkle

This is a photo that I took in Portwrinkle, Cornwall, in June 2010.

Spoonflower scarf

This is how a part of it looks printed onto silk crepe, by Spoonflower.

Not as saturated as I would have liked, but given that the original image wasn’t quite at a high enough resolution for me to be able to mess with it too much, I’m really pleased with the way it’s come out!

Next time (and there will be one), I’ll have the image printed onto Spoonflower’s silk cotton blend. It’s much lighter, with a higher sheen, and I think it’ll show the colours better than the crepe which has a matt finish.

The image is 36″ (96cm) square, which is about the smallest size that works as a neck scarf once it’s folded in half. I think this will be better in the silk cotton too, as it’ll drape better around the neck. The silk crepe’s a bit bouncy! If I was a sensible, patient person (stop laughing at the back!) I’d have sent off for swatches first, but then I wouldn’t have had the finished scarf back before Christmas.

Now I just need to decide on the best way to hem it, and then I’ll take some photos of the finished scarf!

Inexplicable Emporium

Inexplicable Emporium Poster

So, Paul and I came back from Waltz on the Wye with an idea…

Beautiful Buttons

…that seems to be turning into a reality!

Spare Batteries

Spare Batteries for Owen's Wig

Happy 2012, everyone!

I’ve done a little bit of goal-setting and resolution-writing, but my personal New Year is going to have to wait. We’re eighteen days away (not that I’m counting!) from the first night of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere at Progress Theatre, and there’s still so much left to do on the costumes!

You can see some sneaky peeks of what we’ve all been up to over on Tumblr, and I’ve uploaded some costumes-in-progress photos on Flickr. The costume team are going to a rehearsal tomorrow, to spend the afternoon doing fittings and making a massive list of all the things we need to get finished in the next couple of weeks.

I’m mostly ploughing on with my to-do list, ticking off each little thing as soon as it’s done, and trying not to panic about it all. Most of the big things are now sorted out (with the exception of one complete costume, eek!), so my list is mainly comprised of odd little things like “bring sandpaper” or “buy brown boot polish”. Oh, and “don’t forget the batteries for Owen’s wig”.

Obviously.

Silver and Labradorite Ring

Silver and Labradorite ring

Well, it will be once I’ve soldered the bezel to the ring and set the stone!

Last August I did a short silver jewellery course as part of a week of courses at my local high school. They also run silver jewellery classes during term-time, but they’re so popular that they’re always over-subscribed. I asked to be kept on the waiting list, but I was rather taken by surprise when an email arrived letting me know that a place was available!

These are the results of two evenings’ work. In the first session I made the ring, which I’m really pleased with. Much better than my first two, although I can see from this larger-than-life photo that it’s not quite flat. In the second session I made the bezel for the stone, which still needs a little filing and polishing before it’s finished. Once that’s done I can solder it to the ring, and set the stone into place.

We were advised to go for a larger stone rather than a smaller one, so I went for a lovely 18x13mm labradorite cabochon from Kernowcraft. I thought the rose cut matched nicely with the hammered ring. Everything needs a thorough clean and polish, but I hope it’ll be lovely when it’s finished.

I’ve also bought a little pile of rose quartz cabochons in different sizes (hoorah for gift vouchers!), thinking that I’d like to use the classes to practice making different types of settings for the stones. But I bought a couple of smart shirts recently, and now I’m thinking that I might like to make some cufflinks. I can feel some experiments with textures coming on, I think.

Black Fleece Hoody

Black fleece hoody

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 I drafted and printed out was a simple dress… which would have been lovely if it hadn’t turned out to be at least six inches too big! I hadn’t checked the design ease in the pattern, and it was rather more generous than I’d expected. Oops.

Black fleece hoody

This little fleece hoody is my second attempt, and I’m really pleased with it! Isn’t it adorable? I particularly like the slim bell sleeves and the edge-to-edge fastening at the front. It’s trimmed with bias binding because they’s my current obsession. I think it makes for a lovely neat edge, and it would be great in a contrasting colour too.

Unfortunately I went a little bit too far the other way with the design ease on this one, and it’s come out a little bit too small for me. I’ve popped it into my Big Cartel store, alongside the organic fabrics, so if you’re a size 34-36″ chest it might be just right for you.

This pattern’s definitely a keeper though, unlike my first attempt. And now I’ve made one pattern that’s much too big, and a second one that’s much too small… it stands to reason that the third pattern I make should be just right!

Now Panic and Freak Out.

Now Panic and Freak Out

My sister bought us a couple of mugs as a kitchen-warming present.

Paul’s said “Keep Calm and Carry On”, and the one above is mine.

She knows us well.