Introducing.....

....My gorgeous new niece Sophie Rosalind Evans!!! She was born on 9th November and is quite frankly perfect! The first photo was taken by her Dad, my bro Richard, hence its much better than the other three that are my attempts...

More Fibonacci Fascinators!

Ok so really they are mini hats, but Fibonacci Fascinators sound better!  These two hats are again made using the Golden Ratio in deciding on their size and relative measurements.

Hat Insanity!

So with my rubbish lungs I can't always do the kind of work I want to do. Believe it or not sewing can actually be quite physical and tiring! If you are doing a whole show, then cutting out an entire cast of togas for example can be really awful, manipulating 50 odd metres of fabric is a big task....well it is for me! As a way of increasing my productivity (and because it's fun) I have been trying out making hats-much smaller scale, much less fabric, much less tiring-marvellous. My first few attempts at paper mock ups were somewhat laughable, my mini top hat turned out more Ab Lincoln Stovepipe than the cute mini Victorian Riding hat I had in mind... So I clearly needed some way of determining the various lengths and measurements I was using that was not simply pulling them out of my head-which did not work. Now my maths is a bit rubbish, but one of the things I can remember is the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. Now both of these have been explained far more clearly than I possibly can, so a quick summary culled from Wikipedia -

Two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger one equals the ratio of the larger one to the smaller. The golden ratio is an irrational mathematical constant, approximately 1.6180339887

In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are the following sequence of numbers: 0, 1, 1,2,3,5,8,13,21 etc. By definition, the first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each remaining number is the sum of the previous two.

If you want more detail then look it up! So I knew that both these prinicples have been applied to art and even occasionally to music, with varying success- so why not hats?! Basically all I did was to either use the fibonacci sequence itself or create a sequence of numbers using the constant of 1.618 and then use these numbers on the hats. So, for example in this green hat the realtionship between the height of the crown, the diameter of the crown at the top and bottom, the width of the brim and the diameter of the brim are all related by the golden ratio and I think it looks pretty good! The black leather topper was created in the same way. Certainly better than the first ones I made with no relationship between the different hats parts.

Important please read!!!!

As I write this a wonderful girl called Jess Wales desperately needs your help. Like me she has CF but she is in the end stages of the disease and needs a double lung transplant to survive. Her friend Emily Thackary, herself the recipient of a double lung transplant and chair of Live Life then Give Life a charity to raise awareness of organ donation, has started an online campaign to increase awareness of organ donation in the hope that this will help Jess-see the story on Sky News here-

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Jess-Wales-Fights-For-Life-Organ-Donation-Supporters-Launch-SaveJess-Twitter-Campaign/Article/200909415386045?lpos=UK_News_First_Home_Page_Feature_Teaser_Region_0&lid=ARTICLE_15386045_Jess_Wales_Fights_For_Life%3A_Organ_Donation_Supporters_Launch_%23SaveJess_Twitter_Campaign

If you are not on the organ donor register then please sign up and help save someones life. It is very easy and can be done online here-http://www.uktransplant.org.uk/ukt/how_to_become_a_donor/how_to_become_a_donor.jsp

Hannah's Wedding Dress

This is a lovely bias cut dress that I made for Hannah Watson now Joels wedding day on August 2nd. I totally love this dress and even tho it looks simple is was quite a complex dress to make as the bias cut nature of the design makes all sort of little problems, like a hem that had to be remarked several times as it kept dropping... It is a bit influenced by the green dress Kiera Knightly wears in Atonement but with Hannah's own individual spin!

A decent picture at last!

So I've finally got my act together and can post this lovely picture of Polly and Will wearing my creations (Polly's Dress and Shrug and Will's Waistcoat). I love Polly's Blue shrug one of my favorite things I've made. This photo was taken upstairs at the Reform Club on Pall Mall , hence the very posh surroundings :-)

Ariodante

So here are a couple of my wobbly photos of CHOG's production of Ariodante. Blogger is being a pain and only letting me upload a couple but there are some more on my Piacassa web albums thing-which is here-http://picasaweb.google.com/musoros/Ariodante#
I particularly like this one of the king in his fantastic Dracula-esque wig!