Emery Pincushions

Finally done! I've only had the emery for a couple of ....... years, actually (yes, years). I bought half a cup of emery powder from Dottyral many years ago and finally I've made the pincushions I always intended to.

 

For those that don't know, emery is a fine black mineral that keeps your pins and needles sharp. The little chilli that comes attached to the tomato pincushions has emery in it.

I made a regular pincushion and a wrist pincushion. The regular pincushion I've always used is actually one my Grandmother made (quite possibly before I was born) - it's filled with lamb's fleece which stops pins and needles from rusting (instead they rust at the point they're touching the velour casing :-/). My wrist pincushion is on a hard plastic open 'bangle' thing that is exceedingly uncomfortable and easily gets pulled off. The new one has an elasticised wristband that slips over my hand, the pincushion's length goes along my arm, not across it like the other one (which got caught on stuff) and it fits on the upper part of my forearm so that I can wear it with a watch. 

I put a thin piece of stiff plastic on the bottom of each one to stop pins poking through to the surface of whatever they are sitting on (like my arm) and covered the calico bags in some scraps left over from making a boyfriend a bathrobe years ago.

Some advice from McCall's in 1969

I have a lot of old sewing books and sometimes the advice they give really cracks me up, here's an example:

"FOR SHOPPING. In the city, a simple dress or suit is most appropriate. Add a comfortable top coat when necessary. Pants are out.
For neighborhood shopping in the suburbs, follow the same formula using casual styles. However, if you look well in slacks, you can wear them here."(McCall's Step-By-Step Sewing Book, 1969)

Okey dokey ..... pants are OUT for the city, I've been quite the rebel without even realising it.


And completely unrelated, here's a pic from Quito - I did buy some of those scarves. The table runners I bought in Otavalo look similar to the lime & orange number at the bottom of the pic too.

Quito, Ecuador 2010

Self Drafted Sheath - Wearable Muslin

Update:

My self drafted sheath had one really buggy thing about it - there seemed to be a pouch under the tummy area. All I could think of was to lengthen the darts but really, contour darts nearly to the hem?? After consulting the fitting gurus at Pattern Review, the general consensus was that sometimes that's what you've got to do.


Well, I ended up making the darts about 3 inches longer and also taking them in (both front and back) which has given me more definition in the waist and removed that pouch under my tummy - excellent! (No pic yet)

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So, this dress started life as a single bed quilt cover. There it is on our lounge room floor, waiting to be cut up. 

The muslin was drafted over a period of several months, actually, it was drafted quickly ....... the fitting was a completely different story. I drafted it, made it up in calico and it was like a great big sack - ridiculous amounts of ease Winifred Aldrich! This is meant to be a 'close fitting' dress! So then began the long journey of fitting. I'd work on improving it for hours and hours, then give up and put it away for ages. A week/month later, out it would come again, it'd get some more improvements until frustration got the better of me (and it). At one point I found that I actually had a sheath dress pattern in my stash, I thought I'd give it a go ........... bad, bad move. It was worse than what I'd started with! I promptly tossed that and decided to stick with what I had.

Finally, this is what I've got. For some reason there's a diagonal drag line across the top chest in the photos - after seeing that, I checked the mirror, nope, not there - clearly I was standing strangely. There still seems to be too much room over the stomach area, maybe if I lengthen the darts it will improve it. One thing that didn't make sense to me was, as drafted, the front hip width was wider than the back hip width - this seems backwards to me, I know I stick out way more at the back! I think I ended up taking some width from the front but there's still a bit of pouching going on.

This was my first time using bias binding - I wanted to have at least 1cm of trim showing, so I used the wide binding. Unfortunately, I didn't think I'd be able to cajole that wide binding into a keyhole opening as I had planned. I thought about cutting it in half and reironing it so that the keyhole only had narrow binding but I thought that might look a bit stupid and to be honest, my patience was wearing thin, so bye bye keyhole, I'll see you in another piece of clothing.

Centre back zip (I've never done any other kind of zip - but I plan to), hook & eye closure (wouldn't you know it, I did two stitches and realised I had the hook on backwards!! It's still backwards :-\ )back vent, centre front & back darts, horizontal bust darts.

It's a very easy dress to wear, no problems sitting or running and, as this is cotton, it's really light and feels like you're wearing air - perfect for our summers. It's an 'around the house' dress at the moment.

So, there you go - what is the deal with that front part??

$10 quilt cover (still a lot left - machine covers?), $1.58 bias, hook & eye set
From the stash: zipper that had been pulled out of something else (probably from my Mother's stash and older than I am), thread

How to make a cape / capelet

This is from a book I just received - Successful Dressmaking The Complete Book of Dressmaking, fully illustrated with step by step instructions by Ellen & Marietta Resek

First the floods, now we've got a category 5 cyclone!

Dorothy (Dot to friends), the Sewing Stunt Double

So, here she is - my paper tape dress form. She was made using instructions by Connie Amaden-Crawford on www.sewnews.com -of course, the article is no longer there but there are plenty floating around on the web these days (here's one). According to the date on the bottom of my printout, I printed these in December 2006 - so it was a 4 year project to get her to this stage (yes, I'm completely on top of things).

She got made up a few years ago and hung around on a hanger for a few months getting in the way, then sat around on my studio floor for a few years getting covered in dust and becoming more and more misshapen. A couple of years ago I managed to snag a free torso mannequin from a store ....... that's what is inside her.

She's mounted on an old lamp stand that someone was throwing away which has a dowel inserted into it that goes up through the mannequin (had to drill a hole in the neck and base of the mannequin - the mannequin base sits on the top of the lamp stand). She's a little bit tilted but it's the best we could do at the time.

I remember this take took forever to dry, actually I'm pretty sure that we ended up cutting her off me before she was completely dry - there are only so many hours that I'm willing to stand around, barely moving in what feels like wet concrete. She was already quite stiff at that point, so we needed to cut in more than one place. Thus, she has ended up looking a bit like Frankenstein's wife after I finally got around to mending those cuts a few weeks ago.

To close up those cut lines (tape would not stick):

• cut out small tabs from the thin plastic that you buy necklaces on at the dollar store
• put a hole in each end of the tab with a hole punch
• make a hole in the dressform on one side of the cut line with the awl on my pocket knife
• attach one end of the tab to the dressform using a brass fastener
• pull the dressform together to the correct measurement (she's still a tad too big in some places though - it was harder than it sounds for me to be exact)
• make a mark on the dressform through the other hole in the tab (make sure it's at the outside edge of the hole, otherwise the dress form will pull apart a bit after it's inserted - I realised that a bit too late)
• make the other hole and insert the fastener
• continue

After all of that sitting around, she's a bit misshapen so I've had to pad her out a bit in some places to try to manipulate the shape. Also, my partner didn't realise the importance of necklines, armlines, waistlines, sideseams etc. so they're either non existent or dodgy city. Try explaining to someone that doesn't make clothes why it's important that a centre line is actually parallel to the floor.

Of course, I can't pin anything to her so I've been using blutack (the cheap version) to stick stuff to her - unfortunately, it tends to rip tissue paper if you're not careful. It'd be really useful to have the proper shoulders on her too ............. taking the previous timeline of this project into account, I'd say armholes, shoulders and a pinnable covering might be a few years off.

Now that I've got Dot, tigerboy is so confused that I still have some fitting problems - I can't seem to explain to him that she will have the same fitting problems I have, it's just easier to fix on her than me, after all, I'm not a contortionist.

Back from South America

So .......... I can't believe it's been so long since I posted. What can I say? I got busy, very busy. Work turned manic and then we went overseas (US, Panama & Ecuador).

We arrived home just in time for some serious flooding of practically our entire state. I volunteered, first for filling sand bags and then for the clean up - lots of stinky mud which of course I managed to get from head to foot.

We arrived home just in time for some serious flooding of practically our entire state. I volunteered, first for filling sand bags and then for the clean up - lots of stinky mud which of course I managed to get from head to foot.

Updated Google Maps - yes, most of my state was missing!

In other news, my drive to sort, refashion and toss continues. Due to the QLD weather, I've had oodles of shoes give out, unfortunately they were my 'must haves' and had to be replaced ........ I don't think the collection is dwindling too much :-(

I've also been sewing .......... stay tuned.