Looking for cake buttons...

Dear Internet,

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

...is to find me a set of ceramic buttons, in the shape of little cakes.

Pink, for preference.



I'm very bored of knitting my Cathay Shrug, so I've decided to unravel it, and to knit something else instead. There's a lovely pattern in the Winter 2007/08 issue of Vogue Knitting.

As I'm going to be knitting it in a pale pink colour, clearly it needs a set of amazing buttons. I plan to wear the cardigan with a brown dress which has cakes on it (once I've made the dress), so obviously the buttons need to be cake-shaped.

I've found some on Etsy and some on Ebay, but as the cardigan's going to be knitted in a cotton/viscose/silk blend, it would be nicer to have ceramic buttons than plastic ones.

Veronika Buttons are absolutely beautiful, but ever so slightly outside my budget. If I can't find any pretty cakes though, I might just have to stretch to these...

...but if anybody knows where I can buy cake-shaped buttons, I'd love to see them!

Plea for photographs!

I've just been sorting through my photographs in Flickr, and I've made a new set called Customer Gallery.

This contains all the photos I could find of you lot, wearing clothes that I've made for you.

Unfortunately, this gallery is not very full, and it certainly doesn't represent the amount of sewing that I've done over the past two or three years!

I would like to ask - if you have any photographs of yourself wearing a piece of clothing that I have made for you, please can you send it in to me, or let me know where I can link to it?

They don't have to be amazing professional photographs - you can see that several in the gallery are just snapshots.

You can email pictures to claire@designbyclaire.co.uk, or leave links to anything that's already online in the comments below.

I would really appreciate it if I could get hold of as many customer photos as possible!

Thank you very much.

Cardigan with Cabled Points - the left front.

My newest issue of Simply Knitting magazine has arrived!

The free gift this month is a pattern counting device, which is perfectly timed, as I keep losing track of my cables.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon knitting, and swearing. I don't know what it is about this particular cardigan, but swearing seems to have accompanied its entire construction so far.

(The back and sleeves are complete, and I'm working on the left front.)

First I was annoyed that the edge cable and the point cables don't twist on the same rows.

Then I was annoyed that my tension changed when the cabled points stopped, and now my edge cables are getting smaller and smaller! Either that or I've lost count, and am cabling on the wrong rows.

Either way, this cardigan is very annoying.

(Why would all the cables not twist on the same row? Why?!)

Looking at the photograph, you can see very clearly that it's definitely my tension that's mucking up the edge cabling. You can see that the knitting between the two short cables is much looser than the knitting immediately above them.

Do I unravel an afternoon's work and start again, or can I live with wonky cables that might even themselves out in the wash? I'm feeling quite inclined to live with it at the moment.

Speaking of cables, for weeks I walked past this jumper in my local Marks & Spencer.



Every time I saw it I thought, "I could knit one of those".

If I'm not heartily sick of cables when I'm finished with this cardigan, I might give it a go. The one change I would make is to mirror the cables on either side of the central section. It annoys me (another thing!) about the Nicky Epstein cardigan that all the cables face the same way, so I don't really want to knit a second annoying cabled garment!

I did learn something extremely useful while I was knitting this cardigan. I learned that if you expect all the cables to be twisting on the same row, and don't read the pattern properly, and then discover that you should have cabled the front band two rows ago... it is perfectly possible to carefully drop the six stitches you're working on for those two rows, twist them round to make the cable, and then pick those two rows back up again.

This is not something I'd like to make a habit of doing, but I'm pleased to find out that it works!

New patterns, and Kool Aid!

Hooray, my new patterns have arrived from America!

They're by Indygo Junction, and I'm really pleased with them.

I've ordered a jacket, a tunic, trousers and skirts. Pretty soon I should have a whole new wardrobe!

The first thing I want to make is the jacket. I have ten metres of heavy black and white toile du juoy fabric that's been sitting around in the Shed for years, and I think it will make a really nice coat. I also have lots of pink pvc with white polka dots, which should lend itself to a really nice raincoat version. I might make a matching hat.

The other pattern which arrived recently from America was a discontinued Simplicity one. The seller included a free gift with the pattern - a little packet of Kool Aid! It is a really little packet - it's an individual serving of almost eight grams. I have absolutely no intention of drinking this stuff, but I am wondering just how much wool I could dye with it...

Knitty has instructions, as does a recent issue of Simply Knitting magazine, although the packets of Kool Aid in the photographs look at least twice the size of mine. I'm sure there's an old saucepan at the back of the cupboard that I can sacrifice as a dye bath, so I think I'll pick up a ball of wool and give it a go!

Psychedelic gathered skirt...

For the past two days I've been busily writing a tutorial for making my simple elasticated skirts. I have a crack team of testers reading through it at the moment, and as soon as they've let me know that you do in fact end up with a skirt at the end of the instructions, I will unleash it on the unsuspecting public!

In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures of the finished skirt:

If anybody would like this one, it's 29" long, and the waist stretches from 32-40". Maximum hip size is 40". (Although the skirt itself is very full, that's as far as the elastic stretches, so you need to be able to get it on and off!) It's £40, including postage and packing within the UK. Please leave a comment if you're interested!


The tutorial that I've been writing is the first in what will hopefully become a series. I'll let you know as soon as it's available!

50 Years of Everyday Fashion

This weekend we were idly looking at the magazines in the local shop, when Paul said, "I can't believe you haven't picked up this!"

"This" turned out to be a magazine by Yours (the best-selling lifestyle magazine for the fifty-plus woman, apparently), called, "50 Years of Everyday Fashion: How the Women of Britain Created Glamour and Style on a Shoestring".

It has a glorious picture of Audrey Hepburn on the cover, it costs £4.99, and I heartily recommend it! It covers the period 1948 to 1997, and also has sections on men's clothes, Royalty, and weddings.

The thing which particularly interests me about this magazine is its "everyday fashion" approach. So many fashion magazines and books, whatever period they're discussing, tend to only talk about the prominent designers of that time. Of course this is important, but it often bears very little relation to what was being sold on the high street, what women were making for themselves, and what kinds of clothes people were wearing to go about their everyday lives.

There's a whole chapter on making your own clothes, and it's full of photographs of people wearing the most beautiful outfits. Some of the clothing made during wartime and post-war rationing is particularly noteworthy, because people had to be imaginative in the ways that they used fabrics and re-used old clothes. The magazine suggests that the rise of designer labels during the 1980s was one cause of home dressmaking going into decline, but cites the recent resurgence in the popularity of knitting as a hopeful sign that people might also regain enthusiasm in making their own clothes.

I think that enthusiasm is already here - although I'm naturally somewhat biased on the subject!

The TV show Project Runway, for example, has inspired a range of Simplicity sewing patterns. Books such as Rip It and Generation T are a drop in the ocean of books telling you how to make new clothes out of old ones, and there are dozens of online communities devoted to showing off clothes that you've made yourself.

If I was going to recommend one book to anybody who wanted to learn how to make their own clothes, it would be the Reader's Digest New Complete Guide to Sewing. I have the original 1978 edition, and it's an absolute goldmine. Anything you could possibly want to know about making your own clothes, you'll find it in there.

If you're more interested in reading about clothes than in making them yourself, then you might enjoy The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping. It's little snippets from literature which give an insight into the ways that people used to shop, and it's absolutely wonderful.

Happy Day After Valentine's Day!

After an unprecedented amount of secrecy from my former boyfriend...

...he is now no longer my boyfriend, but my fiancé!

I have a pretty, sparkly ring, and at some point in the future I will need to think about making myself a wedding dress.

Oh my goodness though... so many styles... so much beautiful fabric... (so many shoes...) and only one wedding!* How am I ever going to choose?

Still, we're not planning on doing the wedding part any time soon, so at least I can take as long as I want to think about it.

My current thoughts are straying towards this Vintage Vogue 1957 dress, or maybe this Butterick one, in the beautiful silk we had delivered to work yesterday. It's lime green, shot with pink.

I can't imagine anyone else (i.e. Paul) being too thrilled by a lime green and magenta wedding though, so perhaps I'd better think again!





*Okay, this will be my second wedding. But beautiful as my first dress was, I think it might be considered slightly inappropriate to wear it again! ;)

Jennie's Halter Top

I haven't done much sewing for about a week, thanks entirely to a horrible lurgy which has left me barking like a sealion and generally feeling sorry for myself. Today I was supposed to be at work, but I'm still coughing and losing my voice. I did feel up to doing something a little more strenuous than fiddling with the website though, so I've made a top.

This one's for Jennie - she saw the Pink Panther dress and asked whether I could make a top for her, from the leftover fabric. The answer was yes, but I wanted to make a mock-up before I took the scissors to the real thing.

This is now in the post, winging its way up the country for Jennie to try on, and give me some feedback on the fit and style.

Updating the website...

The Design By Claire website has just undergone its umpteenth fiddling-with!

This has been done partly in response to some of your comments about how you've found the experience of using it. You may also notice that the colour scheme has now completely changed over from red to green. (Subtle? Moi?)

The blog page is now embedded within the site itself. It needs a bit of work on the formatting of the feed, but the content's all there. You can still read it at Blogspot, where you can also see my tags and links to other blogs, should you so desire, and of course all of the content is also available on LiveJournal. If you use feed readers, you can subscribe to the feed too, if you so desire.

I've switched the gallery so that it's now just a single page which links out to my Flickr account. I've uploaded a hundred or so photographs from my archives, so my next mammoth task is to describe and tag them all. That should keep me quiet for a while...

I should now be more clear that the shop is actually a separate entity from the rest of the website. I've also tried to make a distinction between the items for sale in the shop and the items I have listed on Etsy. I've kept all of the clothing in the shop, including the organic t-shirts, and everything that I make to order. Etsy is more for odds-and-ends - things that I'm not going to make all year round, but just when the fancy takes me. This means that Etsy will mostly be for knitting and bagdes, I expect.

Hopefully the Design By Claire website is starting to reflect what I'm actually doing, right now, as opposed to something I think I ought to be doing, or something I'm working up to doing in six months' time.

I'm quite pleased with it, if I do say so myself.

As always, feedback is very much appreciated!

Bloomeenee's Bambi Bolero.

This is the second bolero that I've made for Bloomeenee. It's made from a recycled duvet cover, with an original Disney Bambi print. It's lined with plain brown, which was the original reverse side of the duvet cover.

The seam allowances are carefully placed to ensure that there are no decapitated Bambis... unlike Giles Deacon's newest dress! I particularly like the matching hat. ;)

McCalls M5444 - a work in progress.

Here's a long overdue post - a picture of McCalls 5444, ready for its first fitting.

As soon as the recipient has tried it on, I can trim the hem to the correct length. I also need to take a couple of pertinent arm measurements before I cut out the pieces for the complicated sleeve.

This photograph is making me feel a whole lot better about this dress. To be perfectly honest, I have spent the past two weeks fervently desiring to throw the damn thing into the garden and stomp up and down on it until I felt better about the world.

There are two reasons for this, one of which is that McCalls have made a teensy little error in the pattern, which means that the underskirt piece isn't actually the same size as the two front pieces it's attached to. This doesn't matter in the great scheme of things, as all the layers are gathered together at the empire line, but it did mean that I had to get a bit creative about the order of putting all the pieces together.

The second reason is that I don't work with satin and voile very much these days. This particular satin is a very lightweight one, perfect for gathering without being bulky, but unfortunately it's also extremely slippery to work with. I'm used to cotton, where the layers pretty much stick to each other, and don't shift about in the sewing too much. I hadn't allowed for the extra time it would take to pin everything, baste everything, sew everything, check the pieces hadn't shifted, unpick bits, sew them again...

I'm very glad that the dress looks so nice, now that it's on the mannequin and ready for fitting. looking at it like that, I feel as though I'm not making such a bad job of it after all!

Fair Trade batik fabrics, direct from India.

I work part time in a fabric shop, on the days when I'm not busily sewing away in my Shed.

We had a delivery on Wednesday, of a dozen of the most gorgeous batik fabrics.

Imagine my delight to discover that not only are they gorgeous, they're also Fair Trade!

You can see all twelve designs in their own Flickr set. I've also updated the organic & Fair Trade fabrics page on Design By Claire.

All of the designs will be subject to availability - they're extremely popular, and some of them will probably sell out pretty quickly. One of our regular customers asked us to out by five metres of each design for her, before she'd even seen them!

Just as exciting is the news that some of our silk dupions are fairly traded as well - I'm just waiting for an email from the Warehouse to confirm exactly which ones. Hopefully, if we can manage to convince the company owners of the rising demand for both organic and fairly traded fabrics, I'll be able to show you even more examples in the future!