Tag: Shed

Leaving somebody behind

Chrysalis in the Shed

As I was taking down the curtains in the Shed, I discovered this little butterfly chrysalis – it’s about an inch long. (The grey and black fuzzy bits are dust and sewing fluff. How embarrassing. I do not keep a tidy Shed.)

The internet suggests that it’s probably a Large White, which seems likely, as we had plenty of them fluttering across the garden this year. Sadly, I won’t be around to see it emerge.

I hope Gemma, who will be taking over the Shed (and the house!) on Friday, will allow it to stay put.

Velvet coat – almost finished…

Butterick 5266

Not the greatest photo ever – the combination of black velvet and a dark Shed is not the best – but I think you can see the progress on this coat! It has a body now, which is a big improvement on last week’s cape and sleeves. It’s still not quite finished – the hem needs, well, hemming, and it needs front fastenings of some kind. It also needs overlocking around the sleeves, and a jolly good pressing around the collar.

(Before anybody says anything, yes, I know the purple lining doesn’t go with the red outfit underneath. I wasn’t about to go out and buy another five metres of lining when I already had this purple in the stash.)

The saving grace of this project has been its simplicity. If it had been more complicated, there would probably be a lot more swear words in this post. As it is, I simply left out most of the tricky parts to make my life easier. The sleeves will be overlocked to the body instead of slip stitched. The fronts and neck and sleeve hems are topstitched rather than understitched. Where the lining came out a quarter of an inch bigger than the coat (at the sleeve heads and the hem, don’t ask me why!), I simply chopped off the difference and stopped worrying about it. I haven’t bothered with the fourteen metres of braided trim, or the openings in the front panels. Oh, and I left out the side seam vents too. Simple!

Having moaned on about the frustrating parts, I will concede that the sleeve heads eased into place beautifully, as did the collar. I’m now deciding how I want the front to fasten, and whether I’m going to add any kind of trimmings at all. I think I might need at least a little bit of detail on the ends of the collar, to make them stand out against the front a bit more. Paul’s suggested black frog fasteners and sequin trims, and I think he might be right.

Oh, and the poster in the frame, behind the dressform? That’s a little idea we had, that we’re hoping to turn into a reality!

Pinstriped velvet coat and cape

The tidy side

Remember when I bought this fantastic Ikea unit for the Shed, and tidied everything into neat little cubby holes?

Today I had every intention of making a hat. I had everything I needed laid out on the sewing table. Instructions, fabric, buckram, wire, lining, curved sewing needles… but no pattern. I knew it was in the Shed somewhere – most likely in the ever increasing pile of stuff I haven’t put away yet.

THE PILE

This is my (technically Paul’s) big comfy chair – where I can sit to do hand sewing. Except I can’t, because on the chair lives THE PILE. Anything that doesn’t have a tidy home yet, or anything that I’m going to “put away in a minute” tends to be dumped in the pile. I knew the hat pattern was in there somewhere, and I found it almost at the bottom – alongside the missing pattern for my niece’s dress. The last time I’d looked at either of those patterns was May. Eight months ago. Oops.

What you can also see overflowing from THE PILE is a mountain of pinstriped fabric. That’s about ten metres of cotton velvet, which I bought way back in the mists of time when I worked in a fabric shop. Scrunched up underneath it was the pattern for Butterick 5266, a pattern for a Victorian-ish coat with a cape. (Now out of print.) In my infinite wisdom, I decided that the best way to tidy this fabric and get it out of the Shed was to finally sew the dratted coat.

Cape and sleeves

So, I now have the cape part, and a pair of sleeves. Unfortunately I have also remembered how much I absolutely loathe sewing with cotton velvet. And the pinstripes aren’t helping either. They look great, but they’re printed onto the fabric rather than woven in, and they’re not printed on the straight grain. Which means that I have to choose either to follow the pinstripes or follow the grain. Not an ideal situation, particularly with velvet.

Pinstriped velvet

Isn’t this lovely though? That glorious moment when the pinstripes actually match at the seams as though I meant it, makes up for a lot. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make up for the frustrating way that velvet moves around when you sew it, even with the usually fantastic differential feed on my machine. So the pinstripes only match beautifully on one of the sleeves, and of course that’s the one where the fabric kept slipping as I was sewing in the lining, because the velvet was off the grain. And the sleeve that isn’t puckered around the cuff? The pinstripes don’t match up at all. Of course.

And that’s the easy bit.

The front and back panels are so big that they each have to be cut twice from a single layer of fabric. And then lined. I think from now on I’m going to ignore the instructions, and just leave out all the fiddly bits that could go wrong. No braid trimming, no side vents, no slits to put your hands through (what are they for anyway? the thing has sleeves!), no loops for the buttons – nothing. I’ll bag out the lining so it can’t slip around, and I’ll sew on enormous poppers with buttons over the top. Or buy frog fasteners.

It’ll be a few days before I can get back in the Shed to finish this off (my Real Job calls), but hopefully I can get this finished very soon. Then I can gleefully THROW AWAY* whatever’s left of the velvet, and rejoice in my decision to NEVER SEW WITH IT AGAIN.

 

*No, of course I won’t actually throw it away. I’ll give it to a charity shop, or donate it to anyone daft enough to take it off my hands after they’ve read this.

[edit] Well, Lisa of Off With Her Head has admitted to being daft enough – so when I’ve finished the cape, I’ll be sending her a big parcel. Look out for pinstriped velvet millinery, coming soon!

State of the Shed

State of the Shed

Today I have been mostly playing Fabric Stash Tetris.

Most of my stuff was stored in a set of Argos canvas and pine furniture. Sadly it hasn’t been able to take the weight of all my fabric, and over the years it’s been gradually getting more and more wonky. Today I bit the bullet and offered it all on Freegle, so I had to get my act together and empty everything out of the wardrobe and off the shelves.

The wardrobe, small shelves and bedside table are now rather inconveniently shoved in my kitchen, while I move everything else around in the Shed. All of the furniture in here (except for my lovely sewing table) is either a hand-me-down, or something I’ve had for a very long time.

All of my cardboard haberdashery boxes (from Muji, about 10 years ago) are kept in place by a shoe holder, hanging from a clothing rail with shelves. That had been stashed in the loft since the days I used to take a t-shirt stall to Infest and Whitby. It took absolutely ages to put together, so I hereby apologise to all those people who helped me to put it up and take it down again over the years!

The last thing I need to clear is the shelf unit on the right hand side. That’s an Argos canvas-and-pine piece too, but it’s been dismantled and reassembled a couple of times, and is now very wobbly indeed. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to replace it with, but I’ll cross that bridge when I’ve sorted out its contents and figured out how much storage space I need.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get all of this stuff into some vague semblance of order by the end of the day – I really want to be able to spend tomorrow actually making things!

Painting the Shed

Painting the Shed

This is going to take ages.

And it’ll need two coats.

The colour is Cuprinol Garden Shades, in Lavender.

I was going to paint the window frames and the doors in Pale Jasmine (cream), but I’m not so sure now. Perhaps it would look better if it was all the same colour.

It’s going to look lovely when it’s finished though – much nicer than having a GIANT ORANGE SHED staring at us and at all the neighbours.

I wonder what the chances are of me being able to finish the front before it rains? Perhaps I shouldn’t have started it on a day when I have to go out in the evening for an extra choir rehearsal, but I had to take advantage of the sun!

Spring Cleaning.

Haberdashery tidy-up

I started clearing out my sewing Shed this time last year, by organising all of my unruly haberdashery into these handy cardboard boxes. (I bought them from Muji, years ago.)

Then the roof blew off the garden shed, so a few things moved in to my Shed for safe keeping. And then we had the kitchen replaced, so lots more things moved in here while we didn’t have any cupboards. The end result is that not everything has been moved back out again, and my sewing space is not only full of my own stuff, but also with all these things that don’t belong here at all.

Once again it’s time to have a bit of a clear-out and try and get everything back to its rightful home. After that I can rearrange the furniture, and try to get a bit more organised.

The upshot of this is that I won’t be able to do any sewing for a little while. So I’m going to forward-date a bunch of posts, showing you all the things I’ve made over the past few months but haven’t had time to write about. Hopefully that’ll tide me over until I’ve got everything sorted and made something new!