Wedding dress!

This post may get a bit long, in fact 'm fairly sure it may end up being more than one post!  It took ages for me to finally decide what I wanted to wear when I got married.  Mainly because what was most important to me was that I felt like me.  I went and tried loads of dresses on with my marvelous cousin Emma, and whilst it was great fun flouncing around in acres of satin and net, none of the dresses were right. I know some people have that 'moment' when they try on the perfect dress and fireworks burst over head, the orchestra plays and everything goes tra la, but I wasn't really expecting that to happen to me as I haven't known what I want to wear as a wedding dress since I was four!   There were several ones that I really liked and if I could not sew then I might have gone with one.  Over the years I have learnt what kind of dresses suit me and what styles I like;  I am a big fan of 1930's evening wear a la Vionnet, Schiaparelli and the Fred and Ginger movies. I love the simple lines and elegance of this period of fashion and I'm lucky that being fairly skinny and flat chested, I can wear bias cut without worrying about bulges (too much!).  From trying dresses on I also knew I wanted a cowl neck, as its very flattering to the less than amply endowed!  Bias cutting is not my favorite thing when drafting patterns, the additional dimension of the stretch across the bias means you pretty much chuck out the usual rules for pattern drafting... So I decided to save myself a lot of time and swearing and check to see if any of the pattern companies had something similar that I could adapt.  I was so lucky that Vogue had this pattern, V2965.  It had all the main points, slightly 1930's feel, cowl neck and bias cut; the low back would also be approved of by my future husband ;-)

My fabric choice was kind of made for me, in that bias cut really only works in fabric that drapes beautifully and preferably is a natural not man-made fabric. Natural fibres have more stretch and every time I've made a bias cut dress, the silk ones just work better than the man made fabric. I did think about having a patterned fabric but in the end I opted for a rich, strong colour (being as pale as I am, white or ivory really don't suit me - unless dragged from the grave is a look you find attractive!).  I found my material at the wonderful shop Borovicks on Berwick Sreet in Soho.  I was originally looking for a pale blue, but the assistant showed me the peacock silk in the sunlight of the shop front and I was sold!  There was also matching silk habotai for the lining and georgette for the detachable train.

I followed the pattern pretty closely, marking the silk with thread tacks rather than chalk or carbon paper, so there would be no danger of it leaving marks and spoiling the dress.  Vogue patterns have always been my favorite of the commercial brands as they always go together really well with no fudging to get marks and seams to match.  My main deviation was the embroidery I designed to cover the top of the detachable train.

Bias cut layout.

many, many thread tacks!

Because the dress has a slight 1930's feel I wanted the beaded cover for the top of the train to have an art deco feel to it.  The design is very geometric and was inspired by some architectural elements I found in one of my many art deco books.  I used my embroidery machine to embroider a template to follow, then hand beaded all the gorgeous beads onto it by hand,  They were a mixture of Swarovski crystals and silver lined teal Toho seed and bugle beads  (I bought them from the marvelous online bead shop I-beads) .  It took quite a long time to make but was definitely worth the effort.  I made the motif as a seperate entity to the actual train so that you can wear the dress with the motif and the train, or just with the motif by itself.

Embroidered template

The detachable train is a really lovely idea and I added some more beads over the chiffon for extra sparkle, cos you can never have too much sparkle! The pattern went together really easily with no problems matching up seams and markings. So thats it, the tale of my wedding dress. I'll finish with a couple more of PaulmWhite's wonderful photos.

Catching up

I've been on a blogging break of late- I've not really been up to anything particularly interesting for a while in sewing terms and I've had a lot of anxiety and stress with starting to consider transplant.  If I'm honest the transplant issue has rather knocked me for six and totally shaken my confidence, so blogging and a lot of other things have rather gone by the wayside.  However, I've got a couple of things to post about now so it's time for a quick catch up.  The first are a couple of hats I made for an old friend Martin who I used to do costume work for back in the day.  He was designing a production of Urinetown in Norwich and wanted a couple of steampunky mini top hats.  I really enjoyed making these and it was really nice to get some hatting done again.  

I've also been doing some more embroidery recently, as my beautiful Brother V3 has Ben sitting idle for ages and needs some more use.  I'm currently working on some cherry blossom designs to go on a kimono style jacket, these are my first sew out on some old silk crepe-

I'm pleased with how they turned out, they need a little bit of adjustment with which stabiliser I use to eliminate all the wrinkles.  So hopefully I'll be doing lots more embroidery to actually have something worthwhile to blog about:-) 

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.

Bits and bobs

I've signed myself up for a craft fair at the end of November-eek! I'm not entirely convinced this is a sensible idea, for one thing I can't gauruntee I can stay off ivs... and also rather than making things to someones specification I'll be showing off my desgns for everyone's scrutiny, which is much more scary.  Fortunately, its only a day long fair so I should manage to make it through that long and also I won't have to deal with scary members of the public for too long-I'm such a coward sometimes!  So, I've been going back through old ideas to try and pinpoint things that will hopefully sell. This means I've been remaking and improving  and adjusting lots of different things so this post is a few pics of the different hats, headpieces and embroidery I've been trying out.

This is my prototype for a freestanding embroidered damselfly I've been working on. It's not a great picture as you can't see what a nice greeny-blue colour the stitching on the wings is.  For the next version I am going to try using a different kind of stabiliser, as the tear away one I used here is difficult to get out from between the lines of stitches.  I think wash away or heat away would work better. It also needs a little bit more sparkle, so some beads are definitely in order.

I've also been designing some embroidered word art. My machine does such beautiful lettering that I wanted to see if some amusing sayings would sell...

I've also been doing some more feather ornaments. The left over part of the feathers from making my butterfly headpiece have been hanging around for a while so I thought I'd use them up by making peacock feather pom-poms.  I've been curling the tines to make them into little corkscrews curls, and the iridescent green is gorgeous.

My favorite hat block has also been getting some use.  I'm trying to build up a selection of colours for the fair. I love this burgandy colour, so I may have to make anoter one to keep...

This orange button is going to be an autumn leaves hat to go with my leafy green hat. I'm going to decorate it with a swirl of orange and red leaves.  I want it to look like they are being blown in the wind.

And finally I've got a sinamay boater with a pinwheel bow decoration that I am just finishing off. It'll get its own post later when I've taken some better pictures.  This block is another lovely shape that I hope will be popular.

Seahorse

Continuing my rather odd obsession with animals wearing hats, I decided to add some headgear to a seahorse. Along with my octopus design,  I should perhaps do a shrimp or a lobster, and I'll have a positive underwater tea party!  I started by digitising a normal seahorse and after a trial run of that I added the top hat, monocle and cane. I'm rather pleased by how the sea horses expression came out and with a few more tweaks it will be ready for sewing onto cushions and bags and anything else I may fancy.

Normal seahorse...

Dressed up seahorse.

I'm ready for my close up...

Hat of the Month- Embroidered hat

Goodness two posts in s many days! How unlike me... This is due to my finally finishing the hat I've been working on for ages and some of the embroidery I was doing during the IVs I finished on Friday.  This time I've used my new embroidery capability to add decoration to the hat I had waiting for decoration (see this post for the making of the hat).  I've always doodled curls and scrolls all over the place and it's something I've been making lots of embroiderys of recently, I just never thought to put them on a hat until now. I had tried lots of different decorations for this hat, including feathers, lace and sinamay flowers, but had not found one I was happy with.  But with my marvelous new machine it seemed a perfect opportunity to use all these designs. I first embroidered the scrolls onto black tulle using with dissolvable stabiliser to help support it.  Once they were complete I cut away the excess tulle and washed away the stabiliser to leave the freestanding scrolls.  There are four separate motifs that I sewed and glued onto the hat.  I think the decoration doesn't distract from the elegant lines of the actual hat and it also covers the join in the hat band rather cunningly.  Now I just need a good occasion to wear it to!

How messy is my workroom!

A new machine and an Octopus

Sadly my old computer went phut a few months ago and with it went my embroidery software.  When we upgraded the family computer I tried to reinstall it on the new machine.  It was having none of it.  I still had the original disc and my licence number, but the website that would have verified it and allowed the instillation no longer exists.  When Elna was bought out by Janome a few years back, they did not carry on the support for my machine because it was no longer in production.  I tried everything to get it to install, and then got Mr EB to try an awful lot more that I certainly did not understand.  The upshot was that there was no way to get the software onto the new machine without doing stuff that was not strictly legal and was immensely complicated.  I must admit to being incredibly annoyed about this, I spent a heck of a lot of money on my machine and software so to be given no help whatsoever by either Janome or Elna -despite repeated contact with both, did not endear me to either company.  My capability to design new embroidery had basically been removed through no fault of my own and I could not use my fully paid for, legal copy of the software.  In the end the only option was to buy a new set of machine and software, but I was definitely not going to go for a Janome as I was particularly annoyed with them. In the end I went to the marvellous Sew Creative centre in Bury St Edmunds to chat with their embroidery machine expert Elaine.  She was totally brilliant!  She did not try and recommend the really expensive machines but actually took the time to find out what other machines I already have and what capabilities I was particularly interested in.  In the end I opted for a Brother Innov-is V3 embroidery machine.

My Elna still works perfectly as a sewing machine, with all its fancy buttonholes, stitches etc, so there was no point in spending an extra couple of grand to get another machine that would both embroider and sew, which would duplicate these capabilities.  Because Elaine suggested this embroidery only idea, I saved a lot of money-hurrah!  I also was unaware that Brother incorporate a lot of the complex extras from their professional multi-head embroidery machines into their smaller, home based models.  Again, I had no idea about this, so thanks to Elaine's expertise and experience with lots of different machines I think I came away with the best machine for my needs and so far I cannot fault it in any way!

I've done a few trial embroiderys and have spent a lot of time playing with the new embroidery software to work out how to do all the extra things it offers.  One annoying thin is that there are not standard terms across embroidery software, so what was called one thing with the Elna means something totally different on the Brother!  I have just about got the hang of it, after a fair amount of swearing and a lot of consulting of the instruction manual, and this is my first proper attempt at a design entirely digitized by me-

My Octopus!

During sewing, nearly complete

The idea for the octopus arrived via rather circuitous route... It all started with the fabric I used to make a foot stool for our living room.  It was a sort of sepia tint map of the world, which I got from John Lewis.  I had enough to make a cushion as well, and i wanted to add a seam monster embroidery to it, cos every good map needs a sea monster.  So trolling around google I found lots of pictures of various sea serpents and monsters but the most common one was a Kraken or giant squid/octopus like creature. I loved all the crazy octopus pictures that are out there on the net.  My favorite turned up when I searched for octopus on Pinterest.  It is a marvellous picture of an octopus in a top hat and monocle drinking tea!  What's not to love?  I can't find an attribution for the lovely picture, the link on Pinterest was broken and I can only find it on a random tumbler account that no one replies from.  So, if somehow the artist sees this (unlikely, but you never know) then thank you so much for such a fabulous piece of art and I hope you don't mind me using it at the basis for my embroidery...

I am really pleased with how it turned out.  The  machine sews so quickly and quietly it only took about 45mins to complete it.  I tried to use some of the new special effects the Brother has, all the different programmable fills are great.  I used different ones for the various legs and radial stitches for the joins between the legs.  They look really good if I say so myself!

I need to work out which interfacing and stabilizers to use with this new machine, as the tension of such a large area of stitching has puckered the fabric a little around the edges, but ill soon get the hang of it.  I know intend to do a whole lot more of underwater creatures wearing various hat styles.  Don't ask me why I love this whimsical theme, perhaps it appeals to my love of Edward Lear/Lewis Carroll-inian nonsense and fantasy and anthropomorphised animals, but I think it may take up a lot of time and thread in future...

One lump or two?

Hey Diddle Diddle!

One of my Mum's close friends has recently become a Nanna, and as a gift for her new grandaughter she wanted a cot blanket with the nursey rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle embroidered on it. I'd made one for a friend of mines first baby boy, so out with the Xquisit, and here is the result-

The Complete Blanket

The Cat and the Fiddle

The Cow jumped over the Moon

The Little Dog Laughed

And the Dish ran away with the Spoon!