Icarus

Hand-cut collage, approx. 4" x 6"

Hercules

Hand-cut collage on card, approx 4" x 6". 

Cards

The last couple of weekends have seen a flurry of activity, lots of paper scraps and bits of glue flying about, and some papercuts sustained in the process. And this is the result of all that. One-of-a-kind, handmade cards, which will be available, as usual, at the Tea Rooms stall. Feast your eyes. 

Some Cards

When it gets quiet at the Tea Rooms, out come my scissors and glue for a bit of cut-and-paste action. 

More Cards

A few new handmade cards - some vaguely Christmas-themed - are now available at my Tea Rooms stall from this weekend onwards. If you're interested in one but can't get to Brick Lane, send me an email and I'll try to reserve it for you. 

Cards

I made some any-occasion cards.

All handmade and one-of-a-kind, they have been left blank inside so you can include your own messages. These and more will be available at my stall in the Tea Rooms, Brick Lane, every Saturday and Sunday. 

Life's A Peach Mini-dress

Happy New Year, readers! I thought I'd kick off 2012 with yet another sewing post - those who come here for the food will have to hang on for a while more. I purchased the original pattern from eBay about 6 months back, with the intention of making up the traditionally Chinese style in an unconventional fabric (wear a cheongsam in any kind of shiny/floral/shiny and floral fabric and people automatically think you're a waitress in a fancypants Chinese restaurant. Try it if you dare). 

Original cheongsam-inspired pattern

However, after deciding that I wasn't willing to endure the drastic dieting needed to whip my figure into the required hourglass shape for such a fitted style, I decided to simply redesign the skirt portion of the dress. Yes, re-doing a pattern is much easier for me than just eating less. I wanted to keep the bodice section but attach a much fuller skirt on it. This was easy enough - I simply cut the pattern off at the waist while tracing it out onto paper (I always do this with all my patterns, in order to keep the originals as pristine as poss). The skirt would then be a simple circle or rectangle skirt, gathered at the top for the requisite fullness. 

I've got some shiny red brocade fabric in mind for the 'proper' dress, but decided to make a wearable toile of it first just to make sure it all worked. The fabrics came from various op-shopping expeditions - I was going to make a circle skirt for more twirliness but realised there wasn't enough of the shiny fabric for that, so settled for a simple gathered rectangle instead. 

You may have noticed that the collar in the pattern illustration met much closer together - I decided to leave some space in between when making mine up, for two reasons. Tight necklines such as this often leave me feeling slightly suffocated, especially on hot days, and a wide band of fabric around my neck is not that flattering when the neck in question is as short as mine. 

Lace trim around hem 

Bow detail made from the remnants of both fabrics. 

The finished dress was okay, but not that exciting. It needed...more. I finished the hem off with some pink nylon lace that I purchased ages ago, and then sewed a double bow on the back. The final product reminds me a little of a bridesmaid's dress (a feeling compounded by all that peach fabric used), but that's no bad thing, right? 

Invite

For a special event happening soon, and also appearing in the upcoming issue of The Great Unwashed. 

Recycled Padded Envelopes - A Tutorial

If you're like me and do a fair bit of wheelin' and dealin' on the interwebs, you probably end up with lots of used, padded envelopes piled up precariously too. The little recycled padded envelopes shown here can be made in various sizes, don't take much time to whip up, and won't cost you any money at all!

You'll need:

Large padded envelopes

Scissors (DO NOT use your best fabric scissors!)

Glue (I used Copydex, nut you can use any kind of paper glue) 

Scrap paper (Magazines, catalogues, wallpaper, newspaper etc)

Sewing machine

Thread

Sewing needle (if you haven't got a sewing machine)

Here we go!

1) You'll need to transform this huge padded envelope (above) into this (picture below). Start by splitting the front and back of the envelope apart, so you get 2 pieces of padded goodness. Then, fold the separated parts into halves or quarters, depending on the size you want to end up with, and cut them up into into 2 or 4 parts. Those will be the front and back bits of your new and improved, little padded envelopes. Trim the bit that you'll use as the back so it's about an inch shorter than the front - this way, the longer portion forms a flap that you can simply fold over and tape when you need to post something.

2) Still with me? Ok, good. Now, get the scrap paper that you want to use on your envelopes, and trim them so they're just slightly larger than the padded pieces. This makes it easier to glue them on. Put glue on the front of the padded pieces (the side with the paper, not the bubble-wrap).You don't need to glue the whole piece, just a dab on all for sides will do, then stick them onto the back of the scrap paper. Trim the overlapping paper bits away, so the edges are all flush. 

Do the same for all your padded pieces.

3) Let the glued pieces dry (overnight is best, but at least 4 hours if you're in a hurry). This is so the glue doesn't make your sewing needle all sticky.

Time to sew. Set your machine to a zig-zag stitch (if you haven't got one on your machine, just go over it a few times). 

Place the front and back envelope pieces together, wrong sides (i.e bubble-wrap sides) facing each other. Turn it around so the shorter, back side faces you, and start sewing. You'll only need to sew around three sides, leaving the top open so you can slip your goodies in later. Backstitch a couple of times at the beginning and end, and at the corners of the envelope, to make it more secure.

4) Cut the hanging bits of thread off, and voila, you're done! Congratulations, young grasshopper, you've made a fancy little recycled envelope! Now go make more...

Tips and suggestions and other stuff - I made my envelopes fairly small (about 6 x 7 inches) but you can, of course, make yours any size you like/need. If you need a huge envelope, you can always just glue some scrap paper or newspaper all over it, and re-use it. 

I used some pages from a Toast catalogue for the example above, and some pages from a travel catalogue for the others. You can use any kind of paper you have laying around - newspapers, wallpaper, wrapping paper, whatever. If you're going to pop these into the post, it may be a good idea to leave the front fairly plain, and make the back a little fancier, so it's not too distracting for the postie. 

If you haven't got access to a sewing machine, or you're simply not up for abusing your machine like I do, you can always sew the sides up using a needle and thread. I think a nice blanket stitch would make it fairly secure, and you can use some yarn or embroidery floss for something a little fancier. It takes a little more time, but at least your sewing machine won't be making any angry noises.

Prowler

The weather's been fairly, well, London-ish recently, and all I've been wanting to do lately is stay in my PJs or wrap myself up in a blanket constantly. Which is all fine and dandy when I'm at home, but apparently, it's not the done thing when I'm out and about.

So I took matters into my own hands and whipped up a solution. I got one metre each of leopard print faux fur and a red/blue plaid flannel fabric (two of my favourite patterns!) and sewed up a reversible vest, with detachable (and reversible) hood. Can you tell I'm big on reversible items. No 'making-of' pictures, as I wasn't certain it would work. Didn't follow a pattern either, just cut and pinned and held my breath. And here's the end result.

I made the hood slightly bigger than usual, so it would go over my other hoodies or even hats. That way, I'll never need an umbrella. Stupid things are only useful if you want to poke someone's eyes out anyway.

Vest - DIY, black hoodie - some store in Hong Kong, blue flannie - KMart Boys section, t-shirt - hand me down from Hansen, jeans - opshop, beanie - opshop, bowler hat (2nd pic) - eBay

I premiered the vest last night on a supermarket run, and guess what? It's like wearing a blanket and PJs TOGETHER! Best thing ever! Expect to see lots of this little baby in the coming months...

Upcycle Update

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I'm taking part in Folksy's Upcycle Christmas Challenge. The last few weeks have mainly been spent tearing clothes apart so I could reuse the material, but I've managed to make a couple of items so far.

I've pretty much completely given in to my current yo-yo obsession and based almost all the designs in the competition on yo-yos. The first one is a little brooch, with the base part made from the WAG-ish lilac Karen Millen jacket (I'm not even sure why that jacket makes me think of WAGs, it just does. Could be the colour reminds me of their talon-like acrylic nails?). There's also a little hair-clip made from the giant old man's pyjama set for now.

Besides those two little items, I'm also working on a couple of statement necklaces type items, with yo-yos strung together, and probably held up by ribbons or lace. This one down here's a preview, but I've got another one in the works. And I'm also working on a stupidly long icord loop scarf thingo, I don't even know if that's going to turn out in the way I think it will, but I hope so.

 

You can have a look at the other items in the competition over here, and if you like anything, make sure you vote for it during the auction in December! All the proceeds will go to Sue Ryder Care.

Fashion Tip

Gah! So much to do this week! I'm leaving you with this, The Great Unwashed will be printed soon, check out the Etsy shop for new and old issues!

Have a good week, everyone!

(Too many exclamation marks? Sorry!)

Jump Around!

Folksy is organising an 'Upcycle Christmas Competition' this year to raise money for the Sue Ryder Care charity, and I'll be taking part in it. The deal is this - you enter, print up a ticket and go to a participating Sue Ryder store to pick up 5 items to upcycle, which you then auction on Folksy, with the proceeds going to Sue Ryder Care. I thought this was an awesome idea, since I get a large portion of my materials from op-shops anyway, and it fits it almost perfectly with the cut-and-paste way I usually work.

So last Saturday, I printed up my ticket and went to the Sue Ryder store in Camden to pick up 5 items to tear apart for charity. It turned out to be slim pickings, as I only had 2 bags of stuff to choose from, but I did manage to dig through and get my mitts on 5 items in the end.

I found this brand new, fairly see-through (though it doesn't appear so in the photo) white cotton mesh tank top and gross, shiny lavender brocade blazer jacket after sifting through some of the other items in the bag. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with them yet, but rest assured that I'll be ripping that disgusting jacket apart. And as you can see from the photos, I graduated with honours from the Kate Bush School of Dance.

More digging, and I was rewarded with this white, knitted, batwinged top with lacey panels. Not completely hideous, now that I look at it again, but I think I'll be unraveling it so I can use the yarn to make up something - maybe a cape? And yes, I am wearing trackies in this photo - please don't judge me, it was before breakfast.

And lastly, I picked up this gigantic stripey men's pyjama set to complete my 5 items. The Mancreature is convinced some old guy died in this. Urgghh! I picked it mainly because it was so large, which meant that I would have loads of material to sew things from.

You can't really see it, but the trousers were ENORMOUS, which resulted in a lot of awkward tucking and folding after I put them on.

I can't wait to start cutting these things up and making pretty little things out of them. (After all, there's been some shocking atrocities committed in the name of charity recently, and it's about time to put things right.) If you're interested in bidding on items in the auction, or you want to take part in the competition, then get thee over to the Folksy site. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Folksy, it's pretty much like Etsy, but with a focus on UK sellers. I'll be posting updates as I finish making stuff.