A Wet Weekend in Wales!

This year is going to be a pretty busy one celebration wise.  Not only has my Dad had his 70th birthday but my parents are celebrating their 40th anniversary in August, it'll be Sophie's first birthday and also my 30th (but we don't talk about that!) To celebrate Dad's birthday we toddled off to Wales to celebrate with the welsh half of the family. We went on Good Friday and the traffic was abysmal, and as it was the easter bank holiday the weather was also pretty foul.  Porthcawl, where Dad's brother and sister live was incredibly windy and grey, although Dad claims it was actually not that windy by Porthcawl standards, I beg to differ...  I managed to get a few pictures of the coast and the rather nice waves smashing on the rocks before I totally froze-

The other reason for going to Wales was to meet another new Evans baby, my cousin Rhodri and his wife Annette's new son, Harri.  He is only a couple of months old and is tiny and gorgeous. Almost all the Welsh family got together for a birthday lunch in Cardiff as this is where Rhod and Nettie live so little Harri would not have to go too far, although having said that they are all off to Australia for Nettie's sister's wedding so he'll be a very well travelled baby soon! This is him with his lovely Mum, (shame about my rubbish photo and odd white balance!)-

Here are the two proud Grandads with respective grandchildren, Sophie has got so much bigger since I last saw her, she is a proper little person now.  You can see the Evans family resemblance between my Dad and my Uncle John, what makes me laugh is that when he chats with him for a while my Dad even starts to sound welsh again!  And just to finish another picture of lovely Sophie with her Dad.

Mad Mini Tricorne

In my continuing experimentations in hat making I have produced this slightly crazy offering! I can't really think why I decided to make a purple silk mini tricorne hat other than it seemed like a good idea at the time.... I can't even claim that its the steroids I'm on (which do make me crazy) as I did practically all of the work on it before I started this course of pills.  Despite its lunatic design, I am rather proud of this hat as it is definitely the most complicated shape I have made so far.  It has far too many folds and changes of direction in the brim which causes all sorts of problems when making the buckram form in the first place, and with covering it without drenching everything in glue or using visible stiches- which would be bad! The top fabric of this hat is an offcut of shot silk dupion (blue warp and red weft) that I have had for at least five years, so it was about time I made something out of it!

In the picture below you can actually see the tricorne mid making.  At this stage the crown is separate from the brim which has been mulled; this is when a soft covering of interfacing (in this case vilene interfacing but sometimes flannel or domette is used to cover the buckram form.  The brim is about to be mulled with the lover layer not yet glued on.  The buckram shape has to be formed into the finished design before it is mulled or when you try and bend and shape the flat buckram into the shape of the tricorne brim the mull layer will stretch or buckle and end up looking dreadfull. Luckily having read the marvellous book From the Neck Up by Denise Dreher I did not make this mistake and waste loads of time!

The last picture is a close up of the curled ostrich plume I used to decorate the hat.  I used a similar method to the one I used on the coque feathers on the black and cream hat, only with ostrich plumes the quill is rather thicker so I had to curl individual small sections by pressing the quill with the clamp of the curling iron rather than wrapping the feather around iron's barrel.  I also curled the fluffy barbs with the curling iron so they all turned under rather than flapped about rather messily.

Ariodante Pro Shots

So it may be a year or so since it was staged, but I have finally managed to get hold of some of the professional photos taken at the dress rehearsal of Ariodante.  I've only got pictures of the first two thirds of the opera, hopefully I'll get the rest very soon.  They are a million times better than my little attempts and show how lovely an opera it was; these are a few of my favorites.

Bah Humbug!

I'm back on the IV's again..... How very, very dull!  I've had this really annoying cold since before Christmas, which despite Ciprofloxicilin pills, would not go away and had started my lungs bleeding again, not very much just somewhere in there is weeping gently and it was not showing signs of stopping.  So I've given in and decided to be sensible before the bleeding gets worse and more serious, and took the Doc's advice, and have started on the big strong drugs.  Sadly the stupid end of the IV line which I think is called a BioConnector (it's the bit you shove the syringe into) broke this morning.... Instead of resealing when you remove the syringe it left a small hole and this resulted in the line leaking! Not a lot but enough to be not very helpful and a risk of infection.  So we tried to get a replacement from local GP's but we had to goto Papworth in the end- 45 mins there and back to change a small piece of plastic that took 5mins to replace and that if I'd had one I could have done....grrr! I've never had this happen to me before and I've been doing IV's ever few months since I was 16, so that is quite a lot or experience! 

One good thing that has come of this IV course is that I've finally managed to see WALL.E :-) I've wanted to see this for ages, and the lovely Simon came to cheer me up and brought DVD's including my new favorite film! (Lots of brownie points for Mr EB) I know it is incredibly cutezy, but its also so funny and I love the fact that he is obsessed with Hello Dolly as that is another of my favorite films! Every cloud has a silver lining....

Black and Cream Fantasy

So having managed to curl my feathers, they obviously needed a hat to go on.  Carrying on my Fibonacci obsession I used the golden ratio to work out the hat's dimensions by starting at the hat ribbon width and working up from there to get the second ribbon's width, the height of the band and the diameter of the hat! So here it is-

Curling feathers

So I've had quite a bit of free time on my hands due to my daft lungs playing up again... I've had a couple of bleeds since the New Year which is incredibly annoying!  There does not seem to be any reasonwhy my lungs just decide to start bleeding, I've had a slight cold but not anything drastic and have actually managed to out some weight on and maintain this so my BMI is around the 20 mark for the first time in years. Anyway rant over, back to the feathers!

Because of my health stupidness I've only been able to manage a light workload, which whilst very dull has at least allowed me to have a bit of an experiment and do some more mad hatting!  One of the things that I have been meaning to try for ages is curling feathers to make decorations for hats and fascinators.  You see these all over the place at John Lewis, Debenhams and so on, but you can usually only buy feathers in their slightly curved original condition.  So having collecter quite a few spikey goose biots (pictured) over the years I thought I'd have a go and curling them. 

Several of my hat books and lots of websites suggest that feathers can be easily curled just like hair, using a curling iron (mine is just a good old Babylis thing I've had for years pictured above) .  I have to say I was rather sceptical about this, and was fairly convinced I would only end up with singed fingers and setting the feathers on fire!  As you can see from the picture and my plastered finger I did indeed singe myself whilst wrapping the feather around the hot barrel, but the curling actually works!

Here are a few of the feathers I have managed to curl-

They are going to be used on a rather elegant black and cream silk mini-pill-box that I am  in the process of making, photos of which will get blogged once its done!

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!

Overdue update...

So ok I have not blogged in ages (as several people have pointed out!) but to be fair my life for the past few months had resolved itself into a fairly boring mixture of work and clinical exhaustion, that was not really worth writing that much about. The doctors still have worked out exactly why I am so tired all the time, but I'm now on Insulin and having Iron infusions in an attempt to improve this. However, I've been having both for over a month now and have not noticed any marked improvement-marvellous...

Some of the only bright spots in the past six months or so, were the three lovely wedding dresses that I have made over this summer (sometimes working at the sewing machine whist staying in the CF Unit you can't say that's not dedication!). The first was for the lovely Rachel James a friend of my lovely mate Fran, for whom I made this rather sophisticated gown and veil. I particularly liked the long train and the swarovski crystals on the veil! But then again I love anything sparkly...

I nearly missed the lovely Kate and Colin's wedding due to another stupid bleed which landed me in hospital and on IV's. But thanks to my lovely parents ferrying me about, I managed to make the ceremony and dinner in between doses and sleeping! Kate's dress used some of the best and most complex embroidery that I've ever done, although it was rather stressful!

Finally came Polly and Will's wedding, for which I made Polly's dress and Will's waistcoat. Unfortunately I missed the actual ceremony as whilst I was on the train down to London someone threw themselves in front of the trainin front of mine causing the line to be closed and several hours of delay. I did eventually get into London for the wedding breakfast and reception. This was at the Reform Club in Pall Mall which was sooooo posh! I've not really got any good photos from this yet as I forgot my camera but am hoping to nab a few of the official ones. Polly's dress was gorgeous and the blue shrug was such a great idea.