Useful Post No.1 or Where do I go shopping?!

One of the things I often get asked (other than how did I get into this sewing game) is where do I go to buy fabric and other sewing things.  Well, with my New Year's blogging resolution to try and be helpful and spread my sewing knowledge a little, I thought I would do some useful posts about just that, and today it's all about...

Fabrics

Goldhawk Road, Shepherds Bush

Photo Credit Chris Underwood

This is a fabric lovers Mecca! About 15 shops and the market, all right next to Goldhawk Road tube station on the Hammersmith and City line, Zone 2. You can buy pretty much anything here, beautiful silks, Liberty cottons, leather, luminous lycra and sequined fabrics galore and all at really good prices. The brilliant shopkeepers are all extremely helpful and welcome a bit of haggling, this was my go to location for costuming fabric needs and I've sent many happy hours trawling the shops for just the right fabric.

Berwick Street, Soho

A more upmarket version of Goldhawk Road! If you want quality, then this is the place.  Several fabric shops are spread along and around Berwick street in Soho, including several specialists in silk. One of my favorites is Borovick fabrics, a fantastic shop that also does an excellent mail order service including a free sampling service.  The shops here are definitely more expensive than Goldhawk road, but if you are looking for an amazing, couture level fabric, for a very special project this is the place to go.

WBL Fabric

Always known to me as Whaleys, (from my RADA days darling!) this is an amazing source for plain, mostly white, black or natural fabrics in a vast number of qualities and fibres for dying, printing or just when you need a plain fabric. I once ordered 60m of plain cotton sheeting that I then made into a full chorus of ancient Greek togas! I can't think of many other places you can do that as such reasonable prices. You can buy a complete sample range, which is very useful if you need to order lots, or you can order specific individual samples.

If Silk is your thing, then go to James Hare.  Specialists in both fashion and interior silk fabrics their range is stunning and the colour variety is mouth watering! If you want mail order you do need to open a trade account which means you have to be vetted by the company, however the range is also now available to order through selected John Lewis branches and some other fabric shops that you can find via their website search facility, so although a little hard to get hold of it is worth the effort! I have a copy of their full range of fashion fabric samples (which are also available to view in the John Lewis Stores) and I often just flip through them as I find the colours and textures so inspiring. Although silk will always be more expensive in my opinion it is worth every penny because it is just soooooo beautiful and I often recommend it to brides and not just in ivory...

Platinum Bridal Fabrics aka Weisters

I found this online fabric site by chance when searching for a lace motif to put on a friends dance dress.  I was quickly hooked! A really wide range of fabrics specifically aimed at the bridal market, including loads of nets and veiling and they have a really fab range of brocades for groom's waistcoats.  The colours are all available across the different fabric types, which makes life so much easier when you have a design which has for example, satin and chiffon as you can get both with a couple of clicks-hurray!  They have a range of coloured and ivory silks as well, that are well priced.  You don't have to have a trade account and can order online, but if you do sign up for a trade account you get even better prices.  My favorite part of their range has to be the gorgeous lace fabrics and motifs that they are continually expanding and are very competitively priced.

Cheapfabrics.co.uk

This does exactly what it says on tin! Cheapfabrics.co.uk is a really useful place if you ever need to make panto costumes, you can buy all sorts of sparkly, shiny and above all cheap fabrics here that you would not use anywhere else! Or something that only needs to survive a few shows and that will then never be used again... They also do a good range of cottons and polycottons, both plain and patterned and basic fabrics like calico, that you use a lot in costume work or for toiles. All in all, a very useful site.

So these are my favorite places that I go back to again and again for fabric. I'll carry on trying to be useful and do posts about places I shop for haberdashery (all the pretty things like ribbons and beads I get to play with!) and also for hat making things and maybe a blog about some of the stranger places I've ended up searching for costume necessities...

Plans for 2014...

Well it may be a new year but my health did not get the memo and is still behaving like a stroppy child insisting I have IVs every four weeks... I am back on them for my first set of the year so as I'm not feeling very much like doing anything I have been taking stock of what I want to do in the coming months.  Well one major thing that will happen this year is that I am getting married!!!! MR EB is finally making an honest woman of me and we are getting married in June :-)  Whilst I am deliriously happy (total understatement!) I now have to organise a wedding-seeing as Mr EB has a proper job and is going to be travelling a lot in the next couple of months, it seems sensible that I get on with sorting things out.  However, I don't like organising big events, they usually leave me stressed and grumpy, and I've been involved with the wedding industry for several years now and know just how difficult, not to mention incredibly expensive weddings can get. Fortunately Mr EB and I are in agreement about pretty much everything we want and also that I do not get stressed-phew, good start! Unlike most couples getting married, the first list we made was actually not of what we wanted, but what we did not want! This was really helpful as it meant we immediately lost most of the froth of the wedding industry (I don't need colour matching, monogrammed napkins!) and have cut it down to the bare essentials- we want to get married somewhere nice, but not in church, hopefully in the sun (not much we can do about that!) with afternoon tea and then have lots of really good hog roast-my favorite. There won't be a theme and I can't be bothered to have coordinating everything, we just want simple and fun with people we love :-) At least that's the plan, whether we stick to it only time will tell! So between organising the wedding and making my dress I may not be blogging as much, as hatting and embroidery will have to take a bit of a back seat whilst I beat my dress design into shape and actually make it. It's probably just as well that I am making it myself as I really would be the client from hell!

I do want to try and carry on blogging whilst I do my wedding dress tho, so I thought I would try and share some of the knowledge I've picked up over the years.  I've not entirely decided what form this deluge of knowledge will form, maybe the odd tutorial (although there are already so many sewing tutorials out there I'm not sure they really need tuppence worth), some of my historical projects might feature or the odd book review... anyway it will be something that will hopefully be interesting and useful to someone somewhere out there in the ether.

As well as this burst of informativeness, I am also hoping to have enough time and energy, to complete some of the challenges from The Historical Sew Fortnightly, that is run by the rather marvelously named Dreamstress.  This is a brilliant idea, where the Dreamstress sets fortnightly sewing challenges online for the whole of 2014, for historical sewing enthusiasts worldwide to complete and then post about on the Facebook page and their own blogs. It is such a good way to get people interested in costume history and sewing and I'm a bit gutted that I did not know about this when she ran it last year! You don't have to do every challenge (thank goodness), you can do as many as you can manage, or just the ones that interest you. It will be really lovely to do some proper historical costuming again-I've missed doing all the research and unusual patterns and techniques that doing period costume lets you use.

So, 2014-here I come!

A Hat for Christmas

Seeing as the New Year is well and truly past I think it is safe to post some pictures of this hat that I did make in 2013 (so technically should have been in the last post!) but as it was to be a Christmas present I did not want to spoil the surprise so waited and then er... forgot to post til now! I was asked to make it by my lovely friend Helen whose wedding dress I am making this year.  It's based on a hat she owns but that her mum keeps um.. borrowing! So wanting to get her hat back full time she asked me to make a new version for her Mum for Christmas. It is a very stylish cloche with extra pleats moulded into the crown and finished with a folded felt flower. They chose a lovely warm red wool felt for the hat and I used my cloche block with a bit of additional cord taped on to create the shape (this was the same technique I used for my purple fedora only with a lot more cord and tape!)

Black felt pleated half hat

I think I will have finally caught up with blogging about all the hats I've made just in time for New Years-must try harder in 2014! This last one is a black felt pleated half hat, inspired by the styles of the 1920's.   I made it on my malleable head block that I use for free form blocking, drawing the felt over from the left side to the right in several folds that are then pinched together at the right side of the face in a small pleated tail. I kept the decoration to a minimum of a satin binding as the silhouette is quite dramatic in itself and I didn't want to distract from that.

Detail of the pinched pleats.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Black Felt Flower Mini Pillbox

During the 1940's felt flowers were a very popular way of decorating hats and making corsages and even jewellery as a way to cheer up wartime fashions. With rationing in full swing using up small scraps of felt to create flowers was an ideal way to add some much needed femininity to everyday life.  I've made silk flowers and ribbon roses before but wanted to try out using my silk flower tools on felt as I had tried them on the felt leaves for my Autumn Leaves Hat and they worked rather well. The tools themselves do rather look like instruments of torture, and you do have to heat them up so that they mould the fabric...  The ones with the balls on the end are to form a cup shape in the leaf or petal in various sizes.  The hooked ones and the shield shaped one are for creating veins and folds in the fabric.  To help make the shapes the sponge is placed beneath the petal/leaf and then the felt is steamed with a wet cloth and an iron and then you press the shape into the felt with the tool -the sponge allows the shape to form.

I made a lot of the flowers and leaves  first and then spent quite a long time arranging them on the pillbox.  I tried the in all sorts of combinations, in little groups all the way round, in two groups on opposite sides, all on the top, in a line across the top... But eventually settled for one large group on the side and top, on the right side of the hat.  The flowers are finished with a black glass bead as their centre.  I really like this little hat and shall definitely by making more felt flower as they are actually far easier than making flowers from silk!

Lilac and Cream Tribly

I made this trilby on a lightly smaller block than usual, as I wanted it to sit higher on the head than a normal headsize hat, its not a mini perching hat either-its somewhere in  between! THe block was found for me by my lovely friend Ben who happened upon it in an antique shop and very kindly nabbed it for me for the bargain price of £40. The pleating around the crown was inspired by a hat worn by The Hon. Daisy Fellows in Harpers Bazar in 1933- such a fab hat.

I didn't make my pleats as big as the original hat and finished it with a twisted cord rather than a feather, as I prefer to go with what colour trimmings suit the felt and use up some of my extremely extensive collection of decorations... The lilac and cream combination is quite versatile and will go with lots of other colours. I hand blocked the brim as I don't have a brim block in this style and size-yet! It does take a lot more work hand blocking a brim but you do get more freedom over the finished shape.

The rather jaunty snap brim.

Close up of the twisted cord.

Brown Perching Hat

I must admit that the block for this hat has been sitting in my cupboard for a while, as the last time I tried it, it really didn't work for me so I re-blocked the hood as a different shape.  My difficulty was that the top of the the crown has a dip in it and I couldn't get the felt to sit in it properly.  This time I used a bean bag with a weight on top to keep the felt in the dip whilst it dried and this time the hat came of the block in the right shape-woohoo! I was very pleased, as this is such an elegant shape for a crown and it perches most elegantly.  The brim I hand shaped by ironing it mostly flat on my ironing board, the used my tailors ham to create the curves I wanted (as I had previously done on my red felt boater).  I finished the hat with some lovely striped petersham that my Mum bought me a while ago and with a couple of pheasant feathers that I have also had for years (finally using up some of my stash!). These were just normal straight tail feathers, but I wanted them to be curly. so I tried with my usual method of curling feathers with a hair curling iron, but the main vane of the feather was a bit too thick to bend around the barrel of the tongs.  Instead, I gave the feathers a good steam and then used a pair of closed scissors pulled along the central vane to curl them, in the same way that you would curl a gift ribbon. You have to be fairly careful using this method as if you apply too much pressure you can kink or even break the feather-not good. Its also better to go slowly and repeat  this often than trying to get a massive curl in one pull.  I managed to get two fairly similar curls which I really like and having bound their ends together with thread I sewed them onto the hat and covered the ends with a little more ribbon.  I must admit to being chuffed with the finished article, its just such a jaunty little hat!

Curly feathers!

Blue Slanted Cloche

I've got a bit behind with posting about my hats recently.  I'm going to have a stall at my first craft fair next Saturday and I have been madly trying to finish as many hats as possible and make lots of hair butterflies to sell.  With so much blocking and sewing I've forgotten about taking pictures so this is me catching up!  This hat is a pale blue wool felt cloche using my new slated brim block from the marvelous Guy Morse Brown. The brim sweeps across the face from left to right and is longer on the left side than the right, making a lovely asymetrical hat. I finished the hat with a silvery grey ribbon and a cream braid.

 

Burgundy embroidered cloche

Despite more wretched IVs the hatting for the craft fair at the end of November continues, well, as much as I can manage! I had blocked this burgundy felt in my last blocking frenzy and its been sitting about waiting for the embroidered decoration to be finished and applied.  The embroidery is another of my slightly art nouveau inspired scroll work designs, similar to the ones I used on the large cerise sinamay hat I made a few months back. Instead of using a contrasting colour for the embroidery this time I decided to use as close a colour match as possible to make the deign more subtle and more suitable for everyday wear.

Close up of the embroidery.

Grey swirly pillbox

With November fast approaching I am trying to finish off as many of my designs as possible for the craft fair on Nov 30h. I actually blocked the base of this hat a couple of months ago when I had decided to block another cloche and then went a bit nuts and blocked another three small hats as well.  With an eye to selling it I wanted to try and keep the decoration as elegant and simple as possible, so I played about with the excess felt left from blocking the base until I had a sort of looped bow that I liked. It was a bit too plain as it was so I added the lines of stitches.  It wasn't until I added the Swarovski crystals that I realised how much it looked like a music stave, except that is only has four lines instead of five- next time I will definitely do five lines and add some more embroidery to turn it into music!

Only four lines, next time I'll do five!

Autumn Leaves

A while ago I made a felt button hat decorated with green leaves, and I always planned to make an autumnal version and I finally managed to finish it.  I wanted them to be clearly linked in design, so I used the same button block, only this time in orange.  I used a maple leaf as my template for the felt leaves, as I've always loved the way maple leaves go such bright colours in the autumn. To make the leaves more lifelike I added free machine embroidered veins and shaped them to look slightly crumpled with one of my silk flowers shaping tools (which looks rather more like an instrument of torture!). Another of my favorite arts of autumn is seeing leaves blowing about in the wind, although certainly not having to sweep them all up, and I wanted to get a sense of movement into the leaves as if they were blowing in the breeze, so I had to create a wire armature to attach the leaves to,which was strong enough to support them without being too obvious or bulky.  I think that this is one of the best hats I've made as its such an unusual design and it too quite a number or experiments before I got the armature to work the way I wanted- but it does work!

Felt leaves and a button waiting to be put together.

Leaves pinned together and you can't see the armature!

Detail of the leaves.

The hat from behind.

Black and cream boater

Oh dear, I've been a bad blogger and not been keeping up with my blogging every week ideal... I'm back on the IVs again so this has at least let me catch up with  this post about another hat I've made for the craft fair in November.   As I said in my previous post about my mini red felt boater, my love of the boater is down to its versatility and the fact that it suits pretty much anyone. The block I used for this hat has a slightly smaller crown section than the head measurement, so that it can perch at a jaunty angle on the head rather than fit down onto the head.  I bought the natural, window sinamay several months ago but wasn't quite sure how to use it. I asked on a milliners group page on Facebook and got lots of helpful advice, so I decided to use it in conjunction with black sinamay. The black is used underneath the window sinamay to emphasise the pattern of the windows. It's a bit more fiddly working with window sinamay as the sections with the cut outs are very delicate and tend to flop about!  I blocked the hat in three sections- the brim, the band and the tip, and then sewed it all together by hand. Because the sinamay has quite a complex appearance already I kept the decoration very minimal to not detract from it, just a simple satin ribbon band and a pinwheel bow for a little flirty touch.

Blocking the brim. The block has a string groove to make blocking the brim edge easy.

The crown sewn together.

The complete hat sewn together.

The finished hat.

I love pinwheel bows!