Thrifty

I was talking to my 83 year old drinking buddy the other day about sunglasses. I told him about how I wear Dad’s old shades from the late 80s and laughingly added that it was because I was too cheap to buy new ones. My friend informed me that in years gone by, folk would have called me thrifty and that said thriftiness would have been an attractive quality.

Funny how the world changes, isn’t it?

Somewhat inspired by the thought of my Yorkshire blood and Scottish upbringing yeilding something other than an obscure accent, I began to apply serious thought to the two weddings I’ll be attending in June. The bridesmaid dress for one has already been delivered – a gorgeous chocolate brown offering from Styleshake, designed by myself and M-’s sister – however the other is something of a challenge.

M-'s bridesmaid dress

This wedding – in which I am best man – takes place on Skye, with highland greens and purples as the colour theme. I bought some fabric a while back for a sash, with the intention of slinging it around a store bought grey dress. Since then, however, it has become apparent that Charlie Micra will need a service and MOT, and has just been road taxed. The Groom – one of my many J-s – would understand my sacrificing clothes and neatness on his big day for the sake of my car, but I still don’t want to let his lovely bride down.

So I decided to take drastic action. I raided my sewing box.

I have two half-finished dresses to choose from. One is grey and was made from pre-cut sections of wool.  It is also 10 inches too big for my waist.

The second dress is one I drew free-hand on some cheap green cloth from John Lewis. I reckon with a little work, and absolutely no change in weight, this one might be perfect. Still, when I put it away last time, it was because I couldn’t decide how to fashion the straps and I’m still at a bit of a loss. The waist is incredibly tight fitting – and looks gorgeous – so I need something I can pull on over my head. I’m thinking pinafore, but with thin ribbons in heather purple instead of buttons. I’m not trying to be clever and arty by suggesting this, I might add. Button holes are the devil.

This is the closest I could get to the shape of the dress I've made - it's done in 4 full length panels though, not as a top and skirt

I’ve already got some of this fabric to use for a sash:

so I could, hypothetically, either cover some buttons with it, or snip some into ribbons…

I plan on wearing both dresses with white tights and a pair of brown Mary-Jane shoes – only one set of accessories to carry! I’ll get some gold-coloured costume jewellery from a charity shop to go with the greeny purple frock, and some pretty pink beads to go with the bridesmaids dress. The brown dress also needs a sash and an underskirt, but I’m tempted to just get some nice cotton, some netting and some pink dye and go to town….

Thrifty? I hope so… Not counting the money I spent initially on the shoes:

Brown Mary-Janes

and the fabric for the green dress, I reckon I only need to spend just over a tenner on some opaque white tights…

Now it’s out with the sewing machine to see what can be done about those straps…

Another Quilt

So I finished the playmat and thought I’d share pictures of the finished mat and the steps I took to get there. In case anyone is interested.

This was, in a lot of ways, easier than the first patchwork I did because it used much larger squares and wasn’t hand quilted. That said, figuring out how best to sew everything together and deciding how I should quilt something so chaotic was much harder. I’ve learned a lot from doing this so hopefully the next blanket I do – which I hope will make it to ebay – will be as near to perfect as I can get on my machine from 1895.

Laying out the design

I needed to design this quilt to be both baby-friendly and quick to make. Big, primary-colour patchwork panels seemed like the natural choice. I tried to used fun, girlie prints without making the whole thing too pink or too cutesy – hopefully I’ve succeeded.

This quilt was much harder to piece together than the last due to its irregular shapes and the fact that I had to manually fish the bottom thread up from out of the machine every time I wound the bobbin. My lovely machine needs a great deal of TLC following 3 patchwork quilts, 3 handbags, 2 skirts, 1 pair of shorts and a dress!

I layered the last two quilts by placing the sections in order, right side up, before folding the bottom section around the top to create what looks like a frame on completion. I didn’t think the squares of the backing fabric looked quite right next to any of my top fabrics though, despite their similar colours, so on this quilt I decided to try a different approach. Placing the ‘right sides’ of the front and back together, then the middle layer on top, I stitched three edges of the blanket and turned the whole thing inside out…

… which meant the final edge had to be hand stitched. Not ideal, but I think the overall finish was well worth it.

Quilting something as irregular as this blanket turned out to be quite a challenge. The first patchwork piece I did was quilted by sewing diagonal lines through the squares, radiating from the centre. The second was never properly quilted as I decided to sew buttons haphazardly across the whole thing instead. For the playmat though, I wanted to echo the big squares and simple shapes that I’d used and so decided to simply sew squares within the squares.

So the quilt was finished, and all that remained was slipping the toys into their respective pockets…

Due to time restraints, I only made two toys for the quilt – a simple ‘rustic’ looking teddy and the pretty rabbit lady I showed before.

And here’s the finished article… With a fuzzy duck and bear (that I had intended to use on a set of overalls re. Kaylee from Firefly) to add to the texture. The duck’s bottom is slightly below the lip of the pocket for the rabbit, so hopefully it looks as though he’s sailing on water…

And so comes the aftermath which Artemis – who is not as cooperative a model as Saffron – thinks is the world’s best bed.

I hope I haven’t bored you senseless with talk of quilting. If I have, very sorry.

Seamstress

A few weeks ago I bought the parts for a dress.

A woman in the state of New York had purchased an old, Victorian house and moved in. On arrival though, she found her new home to be packed to the rafters with the former resident’s things. A mammoth cleaning operation ensued and the goods were listed on ebay, including pre-cut pieces of a 1950s dress patern, made from a lovely grey wool-weave fabric. And at the princely sum of $1.99, I figured, ‘what the hell.’

So yesterday, the dress arrived and I set to figuring out how the parts fitted together. There were some instructions about constructing a skirt, but on closer inspection, I found that they were for a different skirt altogether…

I haven’t ever made a dress before – unless you count stitching straps and a sash to an old gypsy skirt so I could wear it as a little knee-length frock whilst at the beach – so my knowledge of which-bit-goes-where is rather limited. Still, I love a challenge, especially one I’m not qualified to undertake, and before too long I was faced with something dress shaped. And three extra parts.

I’m telling myself that they’re just suspiciously pattern-shaped off-cuts and leaving it at that. The real problem isn’t my excess of parts though – it’s that the dress is ten inches too big for my waist. I’m not sure what to do now, though. With my limited skill and my 115 year-old sewing machine, I’m a little unsure on how to best proceed in taking the dress in? Am I best to unpick the whole thing and recut the patten shapes, or simply sew something akin to a dart along the waist line to nip it in?

Dilema, dilema.

Aside from making antique dresses on ancient sewing machines, I’ve been entering a lot of writing competitions lately in a bid to make lots of money and have publishers falling over one another for my novels. Alas, I did not win the Bridport, nor the Fish Publisher poetry and flash fiction prizes… or the Sid Chaplin short story contest. Still, things can only get better from here. I did get runner up in a poetry competition for Forward Press and hopefully I’ll do well in the Fish short story prize and Glass woman prize. We shall see. At present I’m writing for these guys, though as my tale is a woeful one of teenage angst, I find myself in the mood to listen to dire power ballads and wear black.

The trials of being an artist, eh? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some 3 Doors Down to listen to at ridiculous volumes in my darkened bedroom…