Painted Shoes.

For health reasons which are far too boring to go into, I am currently selling twenty-one pairs of shoes. I am saving up to buy a pair of custom-fitted orthotic insoles, which basically restricts me to flat, boring, sensible shoes for evermore.

Of course, I am now seeing nothing but fabulous shoes, everywhere I turn! This month's Elle magazine arrived with a "shoes & handbags" supplement. The newest issue of Simply Knitting (where I thought I would be safe!) has a picture of some amazingly-decorated mosaic shoes. And now Hannah has been painting on her shoes.

Hannah also links to more painted shoes and clogs:

Åsa Westlund has a range of beautifully painted high-heeled Swedish clogs. Even if you're not keen on the style, there's no denying that the artwork is absolutely beautiful.

I used to have a little collection of swedish clogs (the flat kind), until an attack of mould in the hideous basement where I was living infiltrated the wooden soles, and rendered them all wet and irreparable. Now, of course, I wish I hadn't looked for pictures of clogs. I miss my patent purple pair (which all my friends kindly referred to as "those sawn-off wellies"), and I didn't know they were now available printed with dinosaurs, cartoons and skulls!

I'm not allowed to wear clogs any more, so clearly I need to be looking at painted shoes instead. Etsy has some beautiful work, from two sellers in particular.

Hippy of Doom has the most beautiful ballet pumps painted with a Hokusai wave design. She also has an adorable pair featuring the tree spirits from Princess Mononoke.

Miss Bunny's hand-painted shoes often have an Alice in Wonderland theme. My absolute favourites were these "Eat Me, Drink Me" shoes, which some lucky buyer must now be wearing with great joy.

Friends keep telling me that I should paint my own shoes, to make my disappointing orthopaedic future a little less dull. (Somebody in the USA has had this idea already!) I have painted Doc Martens, baseball boots and leather jackets in the past, but taking a paintbrush to a pair of extremely expensive shoes seems a bit scary. Mind you, it can't be more intimidating than reproducing an album cover or a photograph on the back of someone else's expensive leather jacket.

Maybe I should grab an old pair of shoes and a paintbrush, and give it a go.

The Bishopston fabrics are here!

The fabrics that I ordered from Bishopston Trading back in October have now arrived!

The enormous parcel was delivered on Friday, but I needed a bit of help to lift and unwrap it, so I had to wait a full twenty-four hours before I could look inside...

Aren't they beautiful?

You can see all of the fabrics in more details in their own Flickr set, here.

I had ordered 130 metres of fabric altogether! It came in nine pieces, each a different colour. Some of these were pre-ordered by friends who also like to make their own clothes, so I now have just less than eighty metres left, in seven different colours.

I've also ordered some new patterns to work with. As soon as they arrive, I'll be making a couple of outfits for myself, and then adding four new garments to the shop.

I'm really excited about all of this lovely fabric! All of the colours go together so beautifully, and it feels so soft and luxurious. I can't wait to make into clothes.

McCalls M5444

This is the project that I'm working on at the moment - it's the second dress for Faerierhona.

It's a "Renaissance" style empire-line dress, with a faux underskirt and panelled sleeves. It laces at the centre back.

The fabrics are purple and silver satin, and all of the satin parts will be overlaid with silver organza.

The dress itself is a really simple one, but the sleeves are going to be complicated. Each of those puffy sections is comprised of three layers, to make sure that they sit nicely.

Given that the previous dress I made for Faerierhona was also a very simple construction except for the sleeves, I am beginning to sense a theme...

I'm really looking forward to seeing this one finished though. The colour scheme is lovely, and I think it's going to be another stunner.

Doing My Homework.

Last week I received an email from Kirsty, who's studying Fashion and Textile Technology. She asked whether I would mind answering some questions about using recycled textiles, for a project that she's doing.

Here are her questions, and my answers...

1. Where do you source your fabrics from?

For recycled fabrics I usually go to Ebay, and to my local charity shops. I look for any large piece of fabric with a nice print, that I could imagine being worn as clothing.


2. What kind of fabrics do you use?

I use cottons and poly-cotton blends, almost exclusively. Usually I buy these in the form of bedlinen, such as sheets and duvet covers. Sometimes I will choose old curtains, if I think that the fabric can be washed, and will stand up well to being worn as an item of clothing.


3. What methods do you use to:
a. clean

I always wash any used fabrics before I start to work with them. I do this by simply washing them in my own washing machine. Whoever buys the resulting garments is probably going to wash them in this way, so I need to know that the fabric can survive, and isn't going to fray, shrink or fade.

b. prepare

Once the fabric is clean and dry, I inspect it thoroughly for any worn parts, and any holes or marks. Sometimes small holes can be mended, or covered with embroidery or other decorative work. Any dirty marks which can't be removed must be worked around. I don't use any area of the fabric which I feel is too distressed to stand up to being worn as clothing.

c. plan

Usually the type of fabric and the print will dictate what sort of item it will be reconstructed into. A small print, for example, could be used for a skirt or a top. A larger print might be better for a bag, or the back of a jacket. Plain fabrics can make more subtle garments, or be used as linings.

d. construct your designs ?

Everything I make is designed, cut out and sewn together by hand. I make everything myself, nothing is outsourced. I use new sewing threads, zips and other fasteners, as I then feel that I can guarantee that the garment will last a long time.


4. Why have you chosen to use recycled fabrics over new fabrics?

I have chosen to use recycled fabrics because I think it is a resource which is often overlooked. The textile industry is enormous, and we are being encouraged as consumers to buy cheap garments, change our trends every few months, and to treat fashion as something transient. As a result there is a great deal of waste fabric generated, which can easily be used in different ways.

I do use some new fabrics, but I am trying very hard to buy responsibly, and to only buy new fabrics which are organically produced or fairly traded – preferably both.


5. What has the public reaction been and how commercially viable do you think recycled production is?

The public reaction so far (from my personal experience) has been somewhat confused!
An enormous number of people don't see the point of spending money on a recycled garment, which they perceive as "used", when they could go down to their local high street shops and pick up something brand new for a very low price. So much of modern fashion is cheap and disposable that It seems difficult for people to understand that recycled garments can be of good quality, and long-lasting. Even if the original fabric used to be something else, what could be more luxurious than having a garment hand-made especially for you?

I think that recycled production can only ever be commercially viable on a small scale. To produce recycled garments industrially, there would need to be an enormously large availability of recycled fabrics. The raw materials would still have to be collected, cleaned, inspected and deconstructed before any new production could begin. These processes can be very time consuming and labour-intensive, and so it becomes more commercially viable to produce your fabrics from scratch. This is why I believe that it is very important to encourage the textile industry to manufacture in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner.

Having said that, there are ways in which technology and recycling can work together to create new fabrics. Polar fleece, for example, is made by recycling plastic drinking bottles. New cotton yarns can also be made from industrial waste such as fabric offcuts and used clothing, and then woven into new fabrics. Worn out cotton fabric is often recycled into paper products. With a bit of lateral thinking, I believe that a lot more could be made from products which are currently treated as waste. The success of this approach from an environmental point of view will at least partly depend on whether the energy required to recycle a product is going to be greater than that consumed by making it from raw materials.

Maybe I should think about adding something like this to the website. I found it really interesting to be forced to think about why I've made some of my decisions regarding my fabric choices, and explaining things to someone else really helped to clarify things in my own mind.

Raglan coats and jackets.

Today I am feeling both inspired and frustrated by coats and jackets.

I'm frustrated by the two patterns below, as I've attempted to make both of them (in one case, twice) and I dislike them so much now they're half-finished that I have no desire whatsoever to complete them, much less to wear them. This is doubly frustrating, because I was going to cut up the left hand jacket, in order to make the second incarnation of the right hand one! Now I have one lining without a coat, and one coat without a lining, which isn't much use to anybody.

(Left - Butterick 4928, right - Vogue 8299)

There's nothing wrong with either of those patterns, by the way. They just turned out not to be very flattering to me. This is the difficulty of not being able to try something on until after you've done the sewing!


I've been really enjoying making a succession of dresses with raglan sleeves, so I thought it was about time that I looked for a jacket which is made in the same way. After all, if I'm going to be wearing it over the top of these dresses, that seems to make some sort of sense.


This one comes with a longer coat version, and an option where the sleeves are not threatening to take over the world. (I like the giant sleeves, of course.)


This pattern also has jacket and coat versions. I do like the sleeves which are gathered at the cuff, but I suspect they will date extremely quickly, so I'd probably change them to straight sleeves.


This little swing jacket is adorable, and it would be really easy to make a cute reversible version, perhaps in two different colours of fleece. However, I must be getting old. All I can think of when I look at that pattern is how much of a draught will get up and under that jacket!


My current favourite of the day though, is this retro raglan jacket by Indygo Junction. it comes in two lengths, is a classic style, can easily be made reversible, and there's plenty of room inside the open collar for a beautiful hand-knitted scarf. Perfect.

I can just imagine this one in the Loop fabrics - linens for the summer, and heavier twills for the winter. I could line it with the Bishopston cottons in beautiful contrasting colours. A reversible cotton version would e nice for the summer. I could also make a fleecy version, which much be extremely snuggly, and a lot cheaper! I can just imagine that little collar in beautiful offcuts of heavily beaded fabrics - something really luxurious.

That's my plan for next week sorted out then - try to draft a raglan coat pattern!

I'm on BBC Four!

Many thanks to Phil and Pat, who have kindly left me a comment to let me know that I am on the BBC Four home page!

I don't know how long the link will be there, but in the "Overheard on the Web" section (bottom right), next to a youthful picture of Cliff Richard, is a link to the blog entry I wrote about Pop Britannia.

Now I am sort of embarrassed, and wishing I'd edited the post into a more concise review, instead of waffling on about all sorts of nonsense. But hey! I'm on BBC Four!

We stayed up past our bedtime on Friday evening watching the third installment (which you can watch again here), and thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, we spent much of the weekend talking about our own experiences of pop music during the seventies, eighties and nineties, and discovered that a five-year age gap can make an enormous difference to your musical experience.

We also talked about writing to BBC Four, to let them know how much we'd enjoyed the programmes, and to say that we would very much like to see them expanded into a longer series. I appreciate that they have a lot of ground to cover in a very limited time, but the last programme particularly was notable to us for the sheer number of bands who had been left out. This is inevitable when you're trying to cover the best part of three decades in only an hour, but it left us feeling as though we could have happily watched two more episodes.

If you missed the Pop Britannia programmes, all three are being repeated tonight, back to back, from 9pm on BBC Four.

Magic Roundabout and the Pink Panther

I'm currently stalled on all of my customer sewing projects (waiting for mock-ups, measurements and returns from Foreign Climes), so I decided I could afford to take a second day to do a bit of sewing for myself. I've hemmed three pairs of trousers which have been trailing on the floor since September, and I've made some alterations to the Magic Roundabout tunic. I've also made a new one, from the Pink Panther fabric that I bought on Ebay last year.

You've seen the Magic Roundabout tunic before - it started life as Simplicity 3835. Since then it's had the neckband replaced with piping, but that was still too tight. Today I removed the piping, took out the back zip which wasn't really needed, and changed the neckline. I didn't want to make the neck lower, as that would have cut into the roundabout print. Instead I changed the gathering, to make the neckline wider. It's edged with white bias binding.

I've been looking forward to making the Pink Panther tunic for ages, and I'm really pleased with the way it's turned out. I think it will look fabulous with my black silk trousers and fluorescent pink Doc Martens! Unfortunately there are some problems with the fabric, so I'm not certain that I'll be able to wear it more than once.

When I bought the fabric on Ebay, it was described as "100% cotton". I was expecting a woven fabric, but it turned out instead to be a jersey, and definitely not 100% cotton. This wasn't a problem - this style of dress works well in a jersey fabric, and I simply adapted the pattern so that both the front and back were cut on a fold.

Unfortunately, when I came to iron the fabric, I discovered two problems. One - it smells! It's definitely come from a house where somebody smokes. I wasn't too worried, as I knew that the smell would come out when the fabric was washed. That was until I sprayed the fabric with water as I ironed it, and discovered that parts of the fabric aren't colourfast! The black background doesn't seem to have been fixed properly, and the colour has already started to bleed very slightly into some of the pink spots.

I'm planning on running it through the washing machine with some kind of colour-run-removing product, and keeping my fingers crossed that the whole thing doesn't come out grey. It would be a real shame if this dress was ruined in its first wash - I really love the Pink Panther print!

Would you like chips with that?

Today I have been mostly making a fish skirt!

I've been hoarding this fabric for ages, I wanted to make an elasticated gathered skirt, and the two just seemed to go together. A fish skirt needs to be floaty, obviously.

The fabric is palest blue, with little fishies swimming all over it!
The print is by Heather Ross, and I bought it from Cia's Palette.

It's a calf-length (27" plus waistband) gathered skirt, with an elasticated waistband. The hem of the skirt is 88" around, so it's pretty full.

The skirt is lined - the lining is edged with horsehair braid for extra stiffness. Not enough to make the skirt stand up on its own, but enough to make it nice and full without needing a petticoat underneath!

For those of you who might assume that elasticated skirts are somehow "lumpy", you can see here that the top gives you a perfectly smooth waistline!



I plan to add this skirt to the web shop, and offer it in four lengths - 21" (knee length), 27" (calf length), 36" (ankle length) and 39" (floor length). The two shorter lengths will cost £40. The longer lengths will cost £60, as they're also more full.


I can't wait to wear this one. I might even put a petticoat underneath it, for extra fluffiness.

New Dress Forms Are Great, continued...

A little while ago, I made a lovely bolero for Bloomeenee, out of a piece of barkcloth fabric that she sent to me.

On my old dress form, it looked like this:

On Bloomeenee, it looked like this:





Bloomeenee has now ordered a new bolero, and would like it to be a slightly different shape from the first one. My usual bolero jackets are cut away very high at the front, so that they emphasise your bust and draw attention to your waist. (They look great with a corset, by the way!) Bloomeenee has asked for her new bolero to provide a little more coverage at the front. This, of course, is the advantage of having things custom made for you - I can make the new bolero any shape that Bloomeenee wants!

However, getting the right shape using my old dress form would have been tricky, to say the least. I would have made a mock-up, sent it to Bloomeenee to try on, and it probably would have taken at least three incarnations to get the new shape exactly right. Now that I have a new dress form which I can simply dial to Bloomeenee's size, I can show her what I plan to do:



The left hand ribbon shows the shape of the original bolero. The right hand ribbon shows the proposed new shape. Bloomeenee can now ask me to make adjustments before I make the mock-up, which increases the chance that when I send it over to her, it might actually fit first time! Obviously I'll still be going through the mock-up stage, to make sure that the new shape fits nicely on Bloomeenee herself, but having this new dress form makes the whole process a lot more accurate.

That's more like it!

Here I present Part One of an occasional series: Everything Looks Better On The Right Size Dress Form.

The top two dresses are actually for sale, but I've never managed to get a decent photograph of them. (I'm still not certain that I've managed it, but at least I have a dress form to practice on now!)

The star dress measures bust 34", waist 30".
It's made from a top layer of iridescent mesh with a metallic star print, and it's lined with plain black poly cotton. The under layer is knee length, and the longest points of the outer layer are ankle length. The top layer of the skirt is a full circle.
£50.

The pink taffeta dress measures bust 34", waist 32", hips 42".
It's made from pink embroidered taffeta, and lined with poly cotton. It has a matching embroidered organza drape at the front, and a gathered detachable bustle at the back.
£75.

The teal dress is from Simplicity pattern 3673, view C. I made it to take to my sister's wedding, as I had a last minute crisis of confidence about whether I would fit into my bridesmaid's dress or not! Thankfully I didn't need to wear it, so I saved it for Christmas instead. It's made from a heavy polyester crepe suiting, and lined with poly cotton again. I only made one minor adjustment to the pattern, and that was to let out the six darts at the front. They fit beautifully at the back, but as my waist is slightly larger than this style of dress dictates, it turned out to be a very simple solution to change the front darts into pleats, to allow myself a bit of extra breathing room. Oh, I also eliminated the centre front seam by cutting the piece on a fold instead. This is my new favourite dress, I think. You can wear it alone, or with a t-shirt underneath, and it takes less than three metres of fabric. Perfect!

The elasticated skirt is made from an Alexander Henry print, featuring birds in a "paint by numbers" design! My camera wasn't too happy about the bright red colour, but if you click through to Flickr you can see a couple of views. this is simply the long version of my regular elasticated skirts, and I will be adding this to the shop very soon. The price will be £40. What you can't see from these photographs is how full the skirt is. It hangs nice and closely to the body when it's worn, but the hem measures approximately 85" around, so it's beautifully flowy when you move. It's 33" long excluding the waistband and trim; 36" long in total.


That's better!

The weather's been so wet and miserable here lately that I haven't been able to go out and have Paul take photographs of me, and the teal dress and elasticated skirt looked absolutely terrible on my old dress form. I'm delighted about the new ones!

The girls are here!

My two new dress forms arrived on Friday while I was at work - many thanks to my poor neighbour, who kindly kept the two giant parcels for me all afternoon!

The measurements are in centimetres which is a bit of a culture shock - I'm going to have to re-measure myself now, as I have absolutely no idea what my dimensions are in metric!

The ladies are now fully assembled, and show below at their absolute minimum and maximum sizes.

The size range that I can now accommodate on my dress forms is as follows:

Bust 84-116cm (33-45½")
Waist 65-95cm (25½-37½")
Hips 91-120cm (36-47")

This represents (very roughly) UK dress sizes 10 to 24.

Obviously, if your measurements fall outside of these size ranges, I can still accommodate your needs, just as I could before I had two shiny new dress forms to play with!

Four new bags on Etsy...

Did I mention the part where I have four new tote bags up for sale on Etsy?

There are two with Alexander Henry surf-style flowers, and two with adorably cute little marching robots!

There are two bags in each fabric - one with two shorter handles, and one with a single long handle.

These fabrics are not repeatable - I've used up everything I had to make these bags, and I will not be ordering any more. If you like either of these fabrics, I suggest you snap them up, before they disappear!


(ROBOTS! You know you want to.)

Jeans & T-shirt Tote

This tote bag is a one-off design that I made for my sister.

She originally presented me with a pair of her husband's old jeans and asked me to make them into a skirt. Unfortunately the reason that her husband was throwing out these jeans was a huge rip across the behind, and it was strategically placed so that I didn't have quite enough fabric for a skirt.

So, instead, I made a tote bag, for carrying around all of life's essentials on a casual weekend.

The bag is my standard tote size, 10 x 12 inches. It will comfortably hold A4 paper, or your favourite magazine. The handles are 25" long, and fit nicely over the shoulder. You can also carry the bag in your hand without it dragging on the floor.

There is a pocket on each side of the bag - the one on the front still has the original "Levi's" tag!

The bag is lined with a pretty blue t-shirt from my mountainous collection of "things to cut up".



Now to parcel it up and send it off in the post - along with my Dad's second Christmas glove. They took slightly longer to knit than I'd expected... sorry Dad!

Pop Britannia

Last night I watched Pop Britannia on BBC Four, and my brain has been feeling a little bit wobbly ever since.

I have found a thing that I've been missing for almost fifteen years, and now I need to work out the best way to get it back into my life again.

Watching that programme was like sitting in front of my parents' record collection, and putting on singles at random. I learned to play the clarinet because I was fascinated by Acker Bilk and traditional jazz. My parents had records by Cliff Richard, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde... all sorts of people. In fact this compilation, which I gave to my Mum for Christmas, is pretty representative! A copy is now on my own Wish List.

I've always been a huge Beatles fan, my personal favourite album being Rubber Soul. That's the point at which they changed from being just like all of the other groups of the time, singing mostly songs which other people had written for them, and started releasing records comprised mostly of their own music. But one of the things that I particularly liked about music during the late 1950s and early 1960s was that it was all about the songs. Singers weren't expected to be songwriters - the writing was already done, and you would choose the songs you wanted to sing. (Or more likely, your management would choose them for you.) I would have loved to have been a singer during that period, and I still love singing the songs of that era.

Distressingly, I have none of this music whatsoever in my iTunes, and I don't even have anything on CD, as everything I owned was on cassette, copied from my parents' records before I left home. I do own the Beatles' "1" compilation on CD, but I can't find it! It must be around here somewhere.

I have always been fascinated by the way that the art, music and culture overlapped so much with one another during this period, in a way that I don't think had been seen since the Pre-Raphaelites. However, the Pre-Raphaelites manufactured their own culture in many ways, and what happened in the 1950s seemd to grow organically as a result of a new generation of children growing up after the war, appropriating parts of a very much desired culture seen in American movies and imported music, and creating their own version because they could. I've been leafing through my books on Pop Art, and reading poetry by Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. I'd really like to see Pop Art Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery but it's only on for another couple of weeks, so I don't know whether I'll make it.

I've also added more books to my Wish List, from the bibliography of an essay that I wrote in 1993. It's called "Peter Blake and his links between Fine Art and Graphic Design", and it was the culmination of the Art History section of my art foundation course. It's 4,000 words long, and reading it back, even fifteen years later, I'm still quite proud of it. The conclusion's a bit rushed, but I was already well over the allowed word count, so I suppose I thought I'd better stop! The whole thing is hand written, on square sheets of blue paper, with postcards and photocopies of the relevant images glued into place. The pages are bound into a Chinese zig-zag style of book, so theoretically you could unfold the entire thing into one enormously long sheet. I've just started the process of typing it up, so that I have an electronic copy. I'll probably turn it into a web page eventually, if I can source all of the relevant images online.

I sent Paul up into the loft earlier, to find the box containing this essay, and all of my old sketch books from my A-levels and my art foundation course. I've been thinking of getting back into sketching again, but when I looked through those books I discovered that I'd barely done any sketching at all! All of them are filled with little bits of ephemera, cut out and glued in. I like cutting out and glueing in. :)

I have been doing some sketches over the past few weeks, of ideas for new clothes to make from the Bishopston fabrics, which should be arriving in the next couple of weeks. Last night I may have accidentally designed what I hope is going to be the perfect dress - for me, at least. I'm still looking at a number of reproduction 1950s dress patterns, and trying to work out which of them I could adapt to fit me, and whether they would actually be practical to wear every day. For anything I'm going to wear to work, i definitely need to add pockets! I'm thinking that I could make a pair of these capri pants in the black and silver bee brocade though, to be worn with a black polo neck.

I do wish that I'd bought the Swinging Sixties book from the V&A exhibition, although I do have plenty of photographs, which are currently uploading to Flickr.

I know that all of this is vague and rambly, but I enjoyed the programme last night so much that I'm still a bit over-excited!

If you missed Pop Britannia, you can watch it online for a week, and it's repeated tonight/tomorrow morning, at ten past midnight, and again at 02:40.

I don't suppose anybody has any means of recording it for me?

A dress form bargain!

Today I have bought not one, but two dress forms, for the bargain price of £176!

This week I have gone back to work part time at my local fabric store. The staff discount is already good (and therefore dangerous - I still have fabric that I bought the last time I worked there!), but for this week only it was increased as a special offer, so I took the opportunity to grab myself a genuine bargain.

They are both "Diana" dress forms, as shown below, which normally cost around £115-£130 each. They come with hem markers, and have an eight-part adjustable body. I particularly like the way that the waist height is adjustable, as I'm very short-waisted, so that's important if I want to make anything which fits me!

I've bought two sizes, so that I can show a larger range of the clothing that I make.

Size A covers UK dress sizes 10-16, and size B covers sizes 16-22. The majority of the custom work that I've done this year has fallen somewhere within the size B range, so it will be really nice to be able to display dresses properly, without them hanging off my wonky old mannequin.