A-line skull skirt...

Please excuse my wonky mannequin in this picture. I don't know what's the matter with her, she looks drunk!

Anyway, this is a new skirt for Chloe.

It's made with Alexander Henry "Mini Calaveras" fabric, bought from Cia's Palette.

The skirt is an a-line style, knee-length, with a side zip. It's fully lined, and attached to the bottom of the lining is a little ruffle of net. Not so much as to make the skirt stick out in a comedy manner, but just enough to give it a little bit of stiffness and shape.

This one is on its way to a Christmas party, so I hope Chloe can come up with some better photographs than this one!

A bag, a skirt and two costumes.

After yesterday's frenzied bout of organisation, I thought I'd better get on and actually do some sewing!

As a result I have photographs of two completed items for you:

This is a skirt which Rainbowskye needed, to replace one which I made for her under the guise of GothStuff. (Rainbowskye is not eight feet tall, by the way. It's just that my mannequin isn't very adjustable.)

It's a simple elasticated skirt in crushed velvet, with a lacy trim around the hem. It's a lot more full than my usual elasticated skirts, having four panels instead of two.



This one is another tote bag for Professor Yaffle - her third!

I'm so pleased that people are liking these little bags enough to want to buy more than one. There are so many cool fabrics out there, I almost feel as though I'd never have to repeat myself.


In other exciting news, I've been commissioned to make two costumes - McCalls M5444 and McCalls M4997. I don't usually sew costumes these days, so this is going to be a bit of a departure from my novelty prints!

The first dress is going to be made in a very dark purple satin, with silver satin underskirt and sleeve details. The second will be in forest green crushed velvet, with an antique gold under-dress. Faerierhona has been scouring Ebay for bargains, so she's even going to provide all of the fabric for me, and bring it over when it arrives. Expect lots of photographs, as the dresses progress...

T-shirts and Tidying.

Today I have been mostly listing an assortment of Organic, Fair Trade and Sweatshop Free t-shirts in my Ebay Shop. They're all on auction for a week, ending on the 19th.

There are a variety of styles, colours and sizes for men, women and kids. I hope you like them!


As well as trying to make a bit of space by listing t-shirts, I have also been trying to make a bit of space by throwing things out. I am amazed at how much junk I've managed to accumulate in the Shed in just over a year!

I needed to give the place a really good clean. Aside from the regular dust-bunnies you inevitably grow when you're working with fabric and thread, the place was full of feathers from my Hallowe'en costume, and I was getting to the stage where I had to move eighty-seven things to probably not find the one thing that I was looking for. Those of you who've seen my house will know that tidiness does not come naturally to me (I can hear my Mum laughing from here!), but the Shed is now a shining example of organisation, and I promise to try very hard to keep it that way.

The last thing I want to do is to sort out my buttons - something of a mammoth task! I've inherited half a dozen sewing and button tins from friends and family this year, and I've consolidated all of the contents - needles in one tobacco tin, pins in another, one box for trimmings, one for thread. The buttons are currently in a huge Tupperware container designed to hold a cake, and it's full to the brim! A few weeks ago I bought a "Really Useful" set of sixteen tiny boxes in a handy case, so I'm going to divide the buttons by colour and keep them in these little clear boxes, so I can see them all. I have a big tin left over, for all the black ones.

I'm really pleased with how the Shed looks now, so hopefully I'll be able to work more efficiently in my newly-organised room!

Fish Fabric!

I've just arrived home from my "Proper Job" to find my order from Cia's Palette waiting for me on the doorstep. It arrived all the way from Minneapolis in just nine days.

I opened it in a flurry of excitement - as well as Chloe's Day of the Dead Skulls, it contains my fishy fabrics!

Look!

This is what I saw when I opened the parcel:

An extra little fish! So cute!
I am saving all the labels Cia uses to wrap her parcels. Clearly I need to order a lot more fabric, so I can collect enough labels to decoupage a box or something. (That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.)

But look! Look at the fish fabric!





The fish have names! Proper fish names too, like Robert and Swimmy and Bjorn! (It probably helps if you know that my fish are called Alice and Dave. And the beautiful black one which sadly died was called Bob.) Look! The black one is called Spooky!

Sorry. I can feel a lot of eyebrows being raised at me across the internet.

But look! it has fish!

A scarf and a squirrel handbag.

Remember that frighteningly tangled skein of silk?

This is what became of it:

It's a narrow scarf, which is long enough to reach below the waist on both sides. It's knitted with one strand of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk and two strands of Colinette Parisienne held together. I cast on 13 stitches, on 5mm needles. Every fourth row, I changed to a 10mm needle. Otherwise it's just plain garter stitch - keep knitting until the yarn runs out!



Here's the last of the pre-ordered tote bags, which I finished today.



You may have noticed that it's a different shape from the others!

The photographs don't show the shape particularly well - it's more curvy than it looks. It's big, too - in the second picture the bag has an A4 pad inside it, to keep it nice and flat. It has one long handle, and you can just see a tiny sneaky peek of the Design By Claire label in there too.



Tomorrow night is Hallowe'en and I've just rustled up a very quick costume thanks to Martha Stewart. I'll tell you all about it as soon as I have some photos. Happy Hallowe'en!

Two t-shirts

I've been working non these two t-shirts over the weekend, and finished them today.

They're for Selina, made from fabric which she saw on Ebay, and sent over to me. The first t-shirt is a cotton/lycra jersey, with a silver skulls and roses print. The second is a polyester blend, I think, with a purple print of skulls and daggers.

Both t-shirts were drafted from scratch. I made the patterns based on a combination of tracing an existing t-shirt which fitted well, images of t-shirts which Selina liked, and a detailed description.



The skulls and roses t-shirt is a basic women's fitted t-shirt shape, with a double-stitched hem and neck band. The sleeves are slightly gathered at the shoulder, and have a band which forms a small cuff.



The skulls and daggers t-shirt has the same slightly puffed sleeves, but without the band. Instead it has a wide band at the bottom of the t-shirt, and the same plain black band at the v-neck.


I've really enjoyed working on these. I haven't sewn a t-shirt since the summer, and I'd forgotten how nice jersey can be to work with. I think I might have a dig around in my t-shirt pile, and see what else I can come up with.

Links and recommendations

On Tuesday I had a little frenzy of ordering things.

The first item to arrive dropped through my letterbox yesterday, which was nice and fast!
I'd placed an order with Woven Labels UK for some new labels to sew inside my creations.

I ordered 144 labels, for which I paid a grand total of £5.90, plus 99p postage and packing. Bargain!

I did cheat a little bit - because I didn't want an image or a special font, or my own logo woven onto tape, I actually ordered the school name tapes. Red text on a white background matches my website perfectly, and they look really nice. They do have a really nice selection of fancy labels though, so you could still choose something a bit more dramatic without going the whole hog and paying for your own logo to be done.

This is the second time I've used Woven Labels UK, and I would heartily recommend them.

The other items I ordered might take a little longer - one is fabric from America (more printed cottons from Cia's Palette), and the other is Fair Trade organic cotton from India.



For those of you who are knitters, I am very excited to have been signed up to Ravelry! I haven't added very many details yet, but I have just uploaded lots and lots of photos of knitting to Flickr.

I've also just bought 10 skeins of Colinette Banyan in Neptune. It was a bargain on Ebay, and with all of those lovely patterns on Ravelry, I'm afraid I couldn't resist...