Couching sample

My City and Guilds in Creative Embroidery is back for the 2nd year. Here’s my first piece of homework.

Calico shopping bags

My most recent project was making shopping bags for some of my friends. Reusable shopping bags are very useful and have a large area for personalisation.

The bag are simple, flat rectangles made from one piece of fabric, double thickness for strength and so that the back of the stitched design is covered to prevent it being damaged by contact with the bag’s contents.

The designs were the fun part. Each design consists of fabric painted text with surrounding decoration, respectively applique, machine stitch, and false flowers and machine stitch.

http://twitpic.com/ixcu6

http://twitpic.com/ixcwf

http://twitpic.com/ixcsi

The fonts I found on www.fontspace.com and copied by hand to paper. On paper I coloured them in in black pen which made the lettering easy to trace onto the calico in fabric paint with a fine brush.

Itchen Way again

Click on the image to get to navigable GoogleMap

Despite all good intentions Dan and I hadn’t done the Itchen Way walk for almost 18 months. So a fortnight ago we set out to do the walk with a couple of friends. I thought I’d post about it as my previous post on the subject, Itchen Way: Eastleigh to Winchester, is one of the more popular on my blog.

The last time friends had tried to do the Itchen Way between Eastleigh and Winchester they had reported footpath closures, so we set out on a slightly different route from Eastleigh to Brambridge – shown in green on the map.

If you’re interested in walking the Itchen Way then I’d recommend visiting the What’s Happening – Itchen Navigation website for links to newsletters and a schedule of works to find out which bits of the route are likely to be closed.

The skirt and the dummy

I was able to get back into dressmaking recently due to two recent purchases: the first – a dining room table which allowed me to cut out fabric, the second – a dressmakers dummy, which made hemming easier (though it doesn’t necessarily make me any better at it). Here is my most recent dressmaking effort.

Maker’s Notebook -> Crafter’s Notebook

A couple of months ago I won a Maker’s Notebook by following @make on Twitter. Now Maker’s Notebooks sure are cool things, when they first went on sale I bought one for my partner for him to design his woodturning projects in, but I’m not so much a maker as a crafter. While I like the size and the hardcover of the Maker’s Notebook and the numbered squared pages it didn’t meet all of my requirements as a crafter.

1) It wasn’t ‘pretty’. Functional, good quality, handsome even,but not pretty.

Easily remedied. I decided to make it a fabric cover and paint and print on the inside covers. The fabric cover was a plain black cotton affair with faux chenille panels on the front and back. Here’s an ‘in progress’ photo.

Cover in progress

On the left it shows the 4 different fabrics that I layered to build up the faux chenille. These layers are then stitched down in diagonal stripes as shown on the right. Then some, or all but the black, layers are cut through parallel to the stitching with a pair of sharp scissors. The fabrics will fray to create a fluffy 3D look.

Finished it looks like this…

Finished cover

On the left is my partner’s Maker’s Notebook, on the right my Crafter’s Notebook. The faux cheniile is now very frayed allowing the different fabric colours and textures to come through. While I originally selected fabrics from my stash for their colour I found I also had a range of fabric types that all reacted quite differently to fraying. The blue lining material went thin and fluffy, the gold fabric went quite spiky, the pink silk went thick and fluffy, and the purple voile got very haphazard.

The second step towards prettying it up was the inside covers. The Maker’s Notebook has a grid of little blue icons all over. Classic and simple, but not really matching my colour scheme. I was going for a purple and pink theme.

Here it is, with a Maker’s Notebook for comparison again. I washed the pages with purple Brusho, then printed magenta acrylic paint onto them with bubble wrap. I carved up some lino to create a stamp of the simple spiral shape and printed it randomly in black. (The design of the spiral was the first thing I designed in my notebook). I outlined the spirals in gold marker to make them pop out in appearence.

2) All these electronics references are no use to me.

Electronics is not my thing which means that everything after page 158 in the Maker’s Notebook’s handy reference pages is irrelevant to me. How to put these pages to good use? I decided to keep them as reference pages, but references for things relevant to me. When I’m designing or drawing I always spend ages colouring on scraps of paper to see what colours my pencils/pastels/paints comeout as so I thought I’d create reference sheets for those.

I’ve also got a colour wheel on one of the surplus pages and the rest are gessoed ready for use. I think I’ll use them to collect image and inspirations on a specific theme per page, e.g. ‘bright’, ‘abstract’, ‘vintage’.

I’m quite happy with how it turned out. I’ve already used it to design a couple of projects. Implementation of said projects is not yet underway but watch this space.

Recently made

recently made

Originally uploaded by Kat Shann

These past few evenings I’ve been working like crazy on random crafty projects. This spate of productivity was brought about by the purchase of some new plastic storage containers for my art materials. After packing things into the drawers I had the cleanest workspace I’ve had in a long while. I immediately took advantage of this.

1) Belt. During my tidying I came across the belt clasp pictured front and centre. This clasp used to be my Grandma’s and has languished unused in my sewing basket for over a decade. I decided to make a belt to put the clasp on using the tried and trusted bondaweb and scraps fabric construction method. I had a bias cut black strip of cotton onto which I layered green, purple and silver scraps of fabric. I ironed them down and oversewed with vertical green lines and meandering purple lines. I love it – it turned out fairly awesome. The only downside is that I don’t really wear green – but I don’t think that will stop me from finding excuses to wear it.

2) Handmade cards. The triangular card on the left was made for my other half on our anniversary, the other card was made just for the hell of it. They are a fun way to use up undirected creative energy and now I have a stack of cards ready for any ‘Thank you’ or ‘RSVP’ occasion.

3) Mobile phone case. I made this as an anniversary present for Dan, to match his canvaswork internet tablet case. Canvaswork isn’t the most excitingly creative of processes but I find it quite satisfying.

Hat Fair 2009

English Gents @ Hat Fair 2009

Another year, another Hat Fair. It’s becoming something of a tradition for Dan and me. We first went together in 2007, when we were first getting together as a couple. (Though the main thing that I remember from that year is being ridiculously hung over from the night before when I went to Point in the Park in Eastleigh and stayed up until 2am drinking wine.) I bought a hat, all was good fun. Last year was pretty cool as well.

This year I had two goals – 1) Get some cool photos on my digital SLR, as it was last year’s Hat Fair that inspired me to want one, 2) Get a new hat – my awesome Hat Fair hat of awesome got broken at the Isle of Wight festival, soI needed a new one.

Well I got loads of photos which will be uploaded to flickr at some point, but I failed to get a hat exactly like my old one.

In terms of acts my favourite this year was the English Gents, pictured above, they did some truly amazing acrobatic feats. Brilliant.

Haggis and Charley seemed less awesome this year. It was the same old patter, and their hearts didn’t seem to be in it this time.

We also saw a troupe of four whose act centred around one of the girls being bad at all the acrobatics in a scarily clumsy fashion which probably took twice as much skill to pull off. It was good and funny until they went into a long skit on bottles of water, which lost our interest so we wandered off to see some other acts.

There was an interesting mechanical structure in one corner of the field which I thought might have an interesting show associated. Unfortunately when the show came on it was quite boring and quite far up its own arse. Another thing we walked away from early.

The rest of the acts were pretty good, we stayed to the end before coming home to make chilli and watch zombie movies.

Handmade @ Winchester

Pendant from All Fired Up

Today I swung by the Handmade craft fair at Winchester Guildhall. Because my primary destination today was the Hat Fair I’m afraid I didn’t give the craft fair and its Makers the full browsing time they deserved.
There was so much good stuff there, I did a quick lap and had a look at most of the stalls. There were several stalls with stunningly beautiful creations and I grabbed cards from three of them.

All Fired Up had some beautiful pendants made of dichroic glass. So beautiful that despite my intent not to buy anything I got myself a blue and pink multilayer glass pendant – pictured above.

Swell Vintage had a lot of interesting jewellery. No pieces that I would have bought then and there, but I loved the style of the antique pieces and as soon as I got home I checked out the Swell Vintage gallery. Unfortunately the Etsy shop was closed while the Handmade fair was on, but I’ll be checking back there on occasion

RHE Designs also caught my eye. The prints and cards on offer all struck me with their gorgeous use of colour.

It looked like an awesome event with many skilled creators. The sight of so many beautiful things is both inspiring and slightly scary – I don’t knowifI could ever produce such high quality items.

Wimbledon

No 1 Court

On Thursday I woke up ridiculously early (5.30) and caught the train to Wimbledon in order to queue for a grounds pass.

I had an awesome day.

In fact I hadn’t even needed to get up that early at all. The queue was only 467 people long when I joined it – I know that level of precision because when you join the end of the queue you get given a queue card with a number on, to discourage queue jumping. With Murray not playing and Centre Court tickets to the women’s not available at the gate there was less interest.

I met some lovely people in the queue, Ben from Canada, Joel from Bradford, and Katie and Ian from Wales. We chatted while we were waiting in the park and stuck together through security and through the turnstiles before going our separate ways.

I met up with my mum and my sister, who had gotten tickets in the ballot, on Henman Hill. We saw a seniors doubles match on Court 2. But then Mum, who wasn’t feeling well, left to go back to the hotel.

My sister and I had a nice day watching various doubles matches on Court 1 and then a bit of Venus Williams on the big screen from the hill. But the absolute highlight for me was, as ever, Mansour Bahrami and Henri Leconte playing doubles on Court 2 towards the end of the day.

Bahrami and Leconte are amazing and hilarious. They do almost as much playing the fool as playing tennis, And this year their opponents almost matched them in silly tricks. Necking glasses of champagne on the court, mock-bullying the umpire, holding the net down to let serves go by and various other tricks. They gave good value as always.

“Measure twice, cut once.”

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Originally uploaded by Kat Shann

My Dad always used to say this. It was once of many phrases related to projects. Other gems include “man on a galloping horse wouldn’t notice”, and “fast as a church tied to a hedge”. (That’s fast as in held fast, or “securely fixed in place”, not fast as in speedy.)
Of those sayings “measure twice, cut once” seemed the most sensible and the least obscure. I’m sorry to report that I failed in this regard this weekend.
A friend recently purchased an Acer Aspire and asked me to make a cover for it. At the point I was asked I was a little busy fixing a bunch of other people’s clothes, and the Acer was busy getting some boot issues fixed. So I had a quick measure of the Acer’s supplied fabric case. I measured once, not even the right thing, and made sure to add 1.5 cm ease in each dimension (and 1 cm seam allowance).
The next day I got up bright and early and whipped up the pictured case before breakfast. Every part of construction went perfectly, which almost never happens.
You can guess the end of the story. The supplied case was slightly stretchier than I’d accounted for, the Acer didn’t fit into the case.
Gutted.
Back to the cutting board I guess – with proper measurements this time.