Category Archives: craft

Desperate Seeking Susan Jacket Take Two

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Back when I did my Spring wardrobe cull, I included my costumes. I used to have an entire wardrobe’s worth of them, many hand made, but I’ve grown out and culled most of them. In my most recent cull I finally had to acknowledge that I was never going to fit into the Desperately Seeking Susan costume I put together for my 40th birthday.

But what to do with it? On a whim, I posted a picture on FB. A friend immediately asked it she could have it. I was delighted, but also embarrassed. You see, I’d forgotten how impermanent the adaption had been. The text was written with pen and I’d taken a jacket with no collar and tacked one on very loosely over the top in a way that didn’t even distantly resemble real clothing. Yet at the same time, I realised that I now had the skills to attach the collar properly. So when I next saw my friend, I got her to try it on to make sure I wasn’t wasting the effort, and I admit I was excited when it did because I really did want to fix it.

So I got to work – taking off the collar, adding some interfacing, reshaping the neckline and attaching the collar properly. It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than it was.

When I made it, I had only a very low resolution photo of the design on back to go from. Since then the original jacket has sold at auction there’s now a good photo of it online. I was amused to see that the text on the ribbon had been written with pen (and had blurred with time) just as I had done, so I left that as it was. The text on the pyramid was stitched as part of the quilting, and there was nothing I could do to match that. The writing I’d done had bled into the gold fabric. So I just embroidered over that and dabbed a bit of gold paint on in a few places.

The last big difference between the original and mine was the eye at the top of the pyramid. It had been very obscured in the original reference. I could now see both the design and what it was made from, and decided to completely remake it. I didn’t have any of the gold fabric any more, but I’d bought some for another project inspired by the DDS jacket, so I used that. I also didn’t have any bugle beads like those used for the radiating lines, but I did have the gold embroidery thread I’d used for the chain around the ribbon.

This was never going to be a close duplicate because the original jacket is made a gold and black fabric and the shape isn’t the same, but I’m happy with the update. And I’ve been inspired by it, and a few other decorated jackets I’ve noticed in craft and thrifting videos, to embellish one of my jackets with something entirely my own design.

Prostashtination & the Crinkle Shirt

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Recently I got to feeling quite poorly, and after a bit of gritting my teeth and pressing on, I had to admit I was getting worse and needed to stop and recuperate. So I decided to take a week off. A week of not going out (except one quick lunch with Dad) or attempting to get anything done. And since I was too tired and fog-brained to get anything done anyway, it wasn’t hard to enforce.

For the first four days I poked around in tubs of fabric and patterns and enjoyed refreshing my memory on their contents. I vaguely wished I felt well enough to turn some of it into a thing, but it was nice to not be under any pressure to do anything. Simple, quick things like pattern weights and pressing hams were made.

By the fifth day I’d rallied enough to spread out fabric and patterns to check if there was enough of the former to attempt the latter. I made a few new matches and felt a bit excited by that.

By the sixth day I felt like I could possibly start making a garment, but the push and pull between what I was now excited about making and what I needed to be making before Christmas/New Year was paralysing. Eventually I decided to it was better to do something than nothing, so I took some fabric and cut out the pattern pieces for a shirt.

The fabric is weird. It looks like a cotton crepe, but the back appears to have a looser second layer. While it looks like it should have drape, it doesn’t. I’d attempted to make wide-legged pants but they’d looked like two stiff columns so I’d cut them up in the hopes I’d make something else one day. It is organic cotton, which was rare back in the distant shadows of time that I’d bought it, so I resisted tossing it into the recycling.

Almost every idea I’ve had to use it has been abandoned because the offcuts were too small. But I’d stumbled on a shirt pattern during my prostashtination that fit. Just.

On the seventh day, I sewed it up.

It is kinda see through. Which is less of a problem for a shirt than pants.

DIY Sewing Tools

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Ok, so I know I said no more destash sales, but I was helping a friend run a stall at a hard rubbish pickers market. On one of the other stalls I found this for just a few dollars:

The stallholder didn’t know what it was, and was relieved that someone did and took it off their hands. It was, er, naked when I bought it, so I made it covers like it has on the maker’s website – though I’ve seen videos of people using sleeve presses with no covers so I probably didn’t need to.

I decided to use the six butterfly pattern pieces of cotton canvas to make pattern weights.

Then used those when cutting out fabric offcuts to make a pressing ham.

Instructions from Sustainable Style, which I got for my birthday.

I’ve been rewatching The Great British Sewing Bee from the start. I’ve picked up more sewing tips and methods second time around. I think I was more focussed on the results than the method on the first watch.

I couldn’t really comment on the book’s contents yet, because I’d need to try sewing something more complicated than a pressing ham to get a feel for how good it is. But it is nicely presented. While the title suggests it’s all about sustainable clothing or approaches to sewing, not all of the patterns have any obvious ‘eco’ focus. It’s more a collection of projects selected from a couple of seasons, with a few extra patterns and ideas.

I’ve Got to Stop Going to Destash Sales

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This time it was one at the Ashburton library. Along with some nice pieces of fabric and a thimble-cutter-pusher doovy, I bought a mystery bag of fabric. Well, it wasn’t that big of a mystery because you could rifle through them to see what each contained, but I found a piece of quilting cotton with a cat print in the first one so I grabbed that and didn’t bother looking at the rest.

Turns out most of what was inside were canvas/duck cloth rectangles. I’ve only ever used this fabric to make carry bags for paintings, so the challenge to make something useful was quite stimulating for the brain.

I gave half to the friend who took me to the sale, who was going to make them into keyring loops to sell. Once home I washed everything then trimmed all the fraying threads, and boy did they fray even through I’d washed them in lingerie bags. Some of the rectangles had a mostly green leafy pattern that went well with the green dotty one. I had been thinking about making a harvest apron/bag, so I did a search for tutorials and then didn’t follow them. The bag came out well despite this.

The blue dotty fabric goes well with the alpaca one, but I haven’t yet decided what to make with that.

There’s enough of the black fabric with blue and pink flowers that if I patchwork it together it could be the front of a half and half skirt. I only recently culled one of those skirts from my wardrobe because I was tired of the front fabric, and I figured I could replace it with something new. So that’s one for the to-sew list.

I also intend to make some little three-sided pyramid pattern weights and maybe a sunhat from the red flowering gum fabric.

In unrelated news, I also did some refashioning.

And covered a hole I got in my only good black long-sleeve top when I took off a jacket and hadn’t realised the brooch I’d pinned on it had gone through two layers.

All this done over two rare free days. They felt like a luxury after months of working in the garden and chasing tradies. There’s just some wall painting to be done and then we can hibernate through summer. I’m already thinking about big projects to do during the last two weeks of December. Hopefully it won’t lead to anything as crazy as the Summer of Quilts!

Art Room Organisation

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Dad stayed over in the reinstated guest room recently and it all seemed to go well. I haven’t used the writing desk but it’s accessible. The textile room has had plenty of use since we put a table top on the loom. When I cut out fabric for clothing I do it on the drawing board in the art room or the dining table, but the loom table is good for pinning pattern pieces, and as a place to rest tubs and their contents when I’m looking through habby, patterns and materials (which I do a lot when planning projects).

That leaves the art room. Corners of it were getting used, like the computer desk and the drawing board for cutting out patterns, but when It comes to art I’ve done nothing but some tweaking of oil paintings, a little sketchbook work, and a bit of framing. No new paintings.

Why not? The truth is, I hadn’t properly started reorganising the contents since the big room reshuffle. My general idea was to store the crafts that require a nearby sink like dyeing and printing in the laundry cupboard, and everything else in the art room wardrobe, but other demands on my time left me feeling too physically tired to do all the moving of stuff too mentally tired for decision-making. But when those other matters started being delayed, art organisation turned out to be a good distraction from the frustration. They also forced me to do it in more manageable stages.

It made sense to tackle the laundry first since I knew what was going there. I moved all the relevant items in and did a ‘cull then organise’. After a few trips to buy storage tubs (it’s amazing how downsizing always requires more buying of stuff) almost everything was packed away neatly, and I was pleased to find I had freed up some space.

The art room wasn’t going to be as straightforward. For a start, I was dealing with three to four times as much stuff, including a ridiculous amount of paper and card and an overly optimistic collection of general stuff to repurpose. (I did wonder how I ended up with so much, but then remembered inheriting art materials, adopting other people’s stashes and that I truly believed, at the time, that thing would be useful one day. And at least it was all free.)

How much I culled would depend on how much space I had, so the opposite approach to the laundry would be better: organise then cull. After considering what there was in different categories, I guessed that I had enough ‘grounds’ to fill the left side of the wardrobe. That included canvasses, card, paper and sketchbooks. It turned out that I was wrong about the quantity so all the books stayed on that side, too, which my back was grateful for. The repurposing matter looked like it would all fit into the middle section of the wardrobe, which is a narrow vertical area of shelves and drawers, so I moved everything that didn’t quality into the right side of the wardrobe, which was mainly art mediums, small stationary, tools, framing supplies, packaging for paintings and finished sketchbooks.

A lot of shuffling and culling later, everything had found a new home but for the small amount I culled or threw away. An extra bonus to all this was that I had to tackle some filing I’d been putting off. Also, I didn’t wind up with a multitude of new projects as I normally do after a tidy up, just a small pile of old Daily Art I want to bind into a book.

So much more could have been culled, but with those other matters sucking up time and energy, I’m content with what I achieved. I did test and reorganise all my inks, and cull jewellery-making supplies, and can tackle other sub-categories more easily knowing how much space I have overall. And if another shift in our lives forces more downsizing any time soon, I won’t go into it expecting it’ll be terribly painful. Just… a little achey.

Pinstripe Pants

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A few weeks ago I took my Dad to a medical appointment and needed to fill in a couple of hours. Which wasn’t hard, because there was a fabric store two doors down. I hoped to buy some fabric to replicate a top Paul liked and wore literally to pieces. The owner showed me some options and I settled on one then, since I had the time, I browsed fabric and patterns. They had lots of Style Arc, and I found a long-sleeved top pattern, a t-shirt pattern with lots of options, and a wide-legged pants pattern.

There’s fabric for the first two in the stash, but I needed something suitable for the pants and once again the owner’s knowledge was invaluable. I settled on a black linen with light brown pinstripes. It also turned out that she’d made samples of the pants in a couple of fabrics, so I got to see some pairs ‘in the flesh’ and confirm I liked the shape and design.

A few days later I traced the pattern, then over the following weekend I made a test pair with old bed sheet fabric. Trying it on, they fit great. There was just one small detail I wasn’t 100% happy with (the gathering around the waistband makes the pockets gape a bit) but I decided could live with that. So I cut the pieces from the linen. I ran out of weekend, so on the following one I sewed them up.

The pattern had more directions than the usual Style Arc pattern, but was pretty straightforward. The waistband was fussy – not hard to understand but seems needlessly fiddly to sew. The band is sewn together lengthways with the elastic inside then sewn to the waist of the pants, which means two rounds of stretching it out while you sew and makes you wish you had a third hand. It seems like an approach that someone who hates threading elastic might take and, while I can see both pros as well as cons in the method used, if I make these pants again I’ll try a different way.

And since I like the pants, there’s a good chance I will make another pair.

Kawandi Done

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And I like it.

It’s been an interesting project. A good one for between other tasks, when simple running stitch is all I need.

Though thin compared to quilts with batting, it’s still warm enough to use as a lap blanket.

I found the greatest challenge was keeping the space between the rows of stitching consistent. There’s a bit of variation – the gap tended to widen, but I made myself narrow it again gradually. I ran out of the yellow cotton thrums and moved onto salmon pink, which looks good and helps to unite the shirt colours.

Maybe I’ll make another one day, but for now there are too many other interesting stitchy things I want to try.

Pencil Case

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This is the fourth of the little sewing projects I decided to try, and the first failure.

How is it a failure? Well, it’s supposed to have dividers. I gave up on them when I realised they weren’t going to attach at the bottom, so the contents of the case would get mixed up anyway. Why struggle through inserting it when there was no advantage to be had.

Also, the instructions were pretty dodgy. When you get to the dividers it says something like “from here you’ll have to watch the video”. Maybe if I had, I’d have noticed the non-attached dividers problem. But then I wouldn’t have made what turned out to be a nice little pencil case.

It might not have dividers, but it does open up fully to create two ‘trays’, making it easy to grab the contents with one hand, and not have to searching for the thing you want.

Would I make it again? Maybe. The bias binding around the inner seam is fiddly, and I wonder if it’d be easier to have a non-attached lining or no lining at all. It’s definitely not a ‘whip this up as a last minute gift’ kind of project. But it is useful and the cute potential with the right fabrics is high.

Kawandi-ish Progress

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It’s no surprise that this is quite a meditative project. And yet it can also be addictive. Adding new pieces of cloth is the exciting part, and the stitching is the relaxing bit. I find it’s better to add enough scraps that I can stitch uninterrupted for some time before I need to stop and add more.

On YouTube the vloggers sometimes use dressmaking pins to secure the fabric. I’m using quilting pins. Less chance of stabbing myself.

I’m using a long sashiko needle with a ring thimble, which took a little getting used to, and I really like it. The layers limit how many stitches I can do at once, but it’s much easier on the hands than a finger-end style thimble.

The scraps usually need a bit of tweaking to make the edges sit along one of the rows of stitching. This can be a bit harder to anticipate at the corners. A rectangle might be neatly stitched down a few rounds ago then not be quite aligned once a corner is turned. But having the edges folded under by a generous half inch gives lots of leeway.

I’m going to have plenty of shirt fabric left over, but I won’t be making another kawandi-style quilt from it. I’ve been thinking about ways I could vary aspects of the quilt. Maybe stitching individual patches in spirals instead of the whole quilt? Curved stitching instead of straight? Colourful/fancy fabric? Non-square fabric scraps? Borrow from Boro?

There are so many directions to go in, and they don’t have to be overly complicated. It could still be relaxing and exciting in the same way.

Bowl Cosies & Triangle Bags

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Lately I’ve been catching up on gardening with the help of a friendly and much-fitter-than-me gardener. My weeks seem to involve one day on which physical work happens, after which the rest of the days are spent recovering whilst also tackling the usual commitments. I am certainly not as young as I used to be.

Weekends are for resting. And craft. How complex that craft is depends on how many days into the recovery I am. My brain seems to be the last part of me to heal. Last Sunday I was energetic enough to try a few small sewing projects.

The first was two microwave bowl cosies. Pattern here.

The second was a triangle bag from the YouTuber “Pin Cut Sew”. Episode here.

The bowl cosies must be made from 100% cotton fibre, batting and thread to be microwavable. I know the thread and batting are, and the batik fabric should be, but the lining fabric is a bit of a guess. Fingers crossed it doesn’t melt!

The triangle bag is such a quick, easy project. Even so, I managed to cut the wrong size and got a wonky bag, but then it was easy to just resew one seam to correct that. Next time I’ll make a template.

There are two more sewing patterns I want to try, but first… more gardening. Sigh.