Category Archives: Making stuff

Waistcoats for park volunteers – update

Last year during lockdown I worked with the Friends of Brookmill Park (St.Johns, Depftford, SE London) to design a distinctive waistcoat for the volunteers…and here they are hard at work! Following the design consultations I drafted sewing patterns, making instructions and samples. One of the volunteers made the waistcoats and another made the prints for the back.

The park is a few minutes from from my house. It’s quite a narrow park along the banks of the River Ravensbourne between Eleverson Road DLR station and The Stephen Lawrence Centre – it has gardens, a lake, childrens play area and diverse wildlife. Find out more about the park and volunteering at brookmillpark.deptfordcreek.net

New & vintage linen top…

I found this printed linen square (I think it’s a 60’/70’s napkin) at ‘Hilly Fields Midsummer Fayre’ (Brockley, London) a couple of years ago.

I wanted to use it, but keep it in one piece – so decided to make a feature of it on a square top. Pink wouldn’t normally be my first choice of colour, but, not having access to fabric shops in lockdown, means using up what I have. I tacked then machine stitched the print square on to the pink linen following the inner circles of the design, so the top wouldn’t ‘bag’ when it was worn.

The front of the top was now a bit heavy! To balance it, I stitched a linen square to the back piece of the top and made an embroidered design using a detail from the front print. Luckily I have a little collection of embroidery threads – I used a chain stitch.

New old shorts…

Today I needed to get my legs out in the sun! So I altered a pair of very old saggy long shorts to make a pair of short, shorts (for garden wear!). I handed sewed the hem, with the new Gutermann “Denim” thread, using backstitch to give nice chunky stitches.

Christmas decorating…

I was very keen to try out chalk pen art this Christmas, so bought an Edding 4095 chalk marker (bullet nip) from Amazon (although since then have noticed WH Smith have a few different ones, including colours). I drew out my designs on paper first, taped them to the outside of the window, then ‘traced’ on the inside of the glass with the chalk pen – took the paper off and drew more little branches, baubles and ‘snow’ to balance the design here and there. It was really fun and also inadvertantly provided street entertainment for the people visiting the school fair over the road!! AND – I won a prize from Folksy as part of #12daysoffolksy Instagram challenge ‘Let it snow’ !!!

This year’s door wreath is a bit early – to be part of #12daysoffolksy Instagram challenge – it’s entirely made of cuttings from the garden and some green gardening wire.

Shark in the Park Storysack finished…

I finally finished the Shark in the Park storysack!

I made the game quite a while ago (and posted about that), – but I had to sew hair on the Timothy Pope doll and make him some clothes, which was a fiddley job.

The other characters were scanned from the book and made into ‘lollystick puppets’.

Luckily I had some shark print fabric in my cupboard, which is just perfect for this Storysack!

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New skirt for me…

Made myself a skirt using very very nice Merchant & Mills ‘Indigo Spot’ Indian cotton, with cotton tape from myfabrics.com. Particularly fond of the gingham pockets made from vintage bits of Oilily fabric.

I never thought I’d ever get so keen on wearing elasticated waistbands – but it’s great for working, when I have a lot of bending over do, like when Idrafting patterns or cutting fabric/patterns.

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Made a new dress…

I’ve been working on this dress for some time… partly because I was was doing a workshop at Number 57 for this particular pattern, I was making it in stages so they could see the progress – but I didn’t manage to finish it with them because I decided it needed different sleeves.  But I finished it today “Hurrah”!

I used the ‘Dress Shirt’ Merchant & Mills pattern, but it needed pockets so I drafted a pocket pattern and added those into the side seams. Once I had the main body of the dress done, I realised it needed cap sleeves (to balance the dark yoke); so spent time drafting those properly and making a calico one to make sure it worked!

I’ve made four of these dresses myself, and helped four people make theirs in workshops at Number 57. One comment I would make about this Merchant & Mills pattern is that it has a lot of ease in the sleeves, which works ok with loose weave fabrics like linen, but with fine or close weave fabrics fabrics I’ve found I have to pull in the extra fabric into a little section of gathers across the sleeve head on the shoulder.

The lovely Indian block printed fabric was bought from The Cloth Shop – Ladbrooke Grove back in February.

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Dinosaur love!

Just added “Apatosaurus’ to the Folksy shop.

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A hand sewn and embroidered dinosaur appliqué,the 17 piece appliqué is made of cotton jersey fabric, with embroidered eye and toe nails. This dinosaur is one from a set of 3 I did a while ago; another one from the set, the ‘Spinosaurus’, was bought by Mini Boden for the Winter 2013 range – they used all my original colours which is always nice.

Dinosaurs are really popular with children especially boys, so when I decided to design some dinosaur logos I had to do some serious research. I studied lots of fossil skeletons as well as artist impressions. When I was growing up this dinosaur was referred to as a ‘Brontosaurus’ now its called an ‘Apatosaurus’. No one knows what colour dinosaurs were, artists impressions usually make them grey or green, I wanted to use some colour so I looked at brightly coloured snakes to get some ideas.

I’m not sure how the ‘college style’ lettering came about, it just worked! This is rather a time consuming applique but fun. I’m very fond of Apatosaurus and I’ll do the third dinosaur in the set, Triceratops soon; after that I feel quite inspired to some more dinosaur design work.

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