Dearest Needleworking Friends and Hivers!
It has been a very intense week – it always is!! - but this one was particularly hard to navigate, with @vincentnijman and I’s mutual health crises overlapping and meeting together, as we took the Masterpeace remedy, and then had myriad interesting things unfold (which I’ll elaborate on in another post)… Then today, waking up to post my Needlework Monday blog, the chimney needed urgent attention – and we spent the morning closing it, and then tidying up the immense mess. At least one thing is definite, and the rest of the moving of the stove and suchlike is begun… But getting needlework posts posted has been less easy than usual, even if all the parts of it were ready and waiting!
My creativity these days has been HIGH though, especially with my new atelier, laden with materials and awaiting my presence each day. It is SUPER EXCITING and super-inspiring to have new ideas coming out of my ears (as we say in Scotland), and possible projects mounting in my imagination. Too many to think about at once, leading to a bit of overwhelm in interpreting them!
With the expo in late May to work towards, I’m determined to get grounded in my vision. In fact, I’m nearing completion of two major coat projects, and on Sunday I even picked up another brand new idea and ran with it immediately; a pair of old short trousers, which I got the urge to upcycle.
Similar to a pair that I made from old cushion covers, last year – I wanted to add a frilly flare to the bottom, and to make the whole trouser a lot more elegant.
They were this pair of relatively bland-design from a (probably) cheap line of clothing: I loved the idea of jazzing them up, and delved into my big cardboard box of old bed linen, etc, to find some covers I could use: it seemed like a fairly straightforward idea – they always do... but then...
I really had to wrestle with my sewing machine on this one!
I got less angry than before, because I’m beginning to understand more about how my machine works. Still, it was pretty mysterious that – even after changing the needle, rethreading the bobbin, checking various aspects – it continued chewing up the thread – but persevering, it somehow came together.
The ruffles were quite large and clumsy to handle, so pulling them through the machine was hard. The finished result was what I wanted, essentially: phew!
I also put a new waistband on the trousers, as the big old thick one made it look too lumpy – less refined. I cut out the old elastic, and then sewed down the waistband, making it half the thickness it was before. I did this by hand, rather than bothering the machine with it, as it was a fiddly connecting of the top of the old waistband with the edging under the waistband. This was pretty easy to do by hand, it just took a while. I already had the new, thinner elastic that I needed, so fed that into the new channel easily enough, and sewed it up.
I wanted to make the top of the trousers more fancy too, and to balance them a bit with the (new, flared) bottoms, as white on black is quite striking, and I didn’t want them to be too clashing between top and bottom. By now they were already pretty jazzy – so I decided on adding pockets above, to make the jazziness more uniform, as it were.
I love making pockets! It is such a beautiful way to add extra dimension to a garment – and this one got me enthusiastic; there was another old piece of embroidered cloth, left from when I made a nice bralette way back when I started my Year Of Mastery…. It has these gorgeous cross-stitched flowers on it which I thought would make amazing embroidered pockets.
If I could manage to shape a pocket to include the whole embroidered flower detail…
It didn’t take long to figure this out: I drew a quick idea for the shape, on the card from a cereal box, then had to make a bigger one, to fit the whole flower detail on. Then I lined this with another shape of cotton, from the back of one of the cushion covers that I’d made the trouser frills from. It came out rather nice, as pockets go… And all I have to do next is to sew it (probably by hand) onto the back of the newly-transformed trousers.
These mega-trousers are quite long for me, plus too small around the waist and bum, but I hope that they will interest someone, if I exhibit them in May! I don’t always sew just for myself, but am slowly imagining a perfect customer who’d be as enthusiastic as I am to come across garments that I’m making
In the meantime, I’m super-enthused to get on with some pernickety details on my big red coat, which is an amalgamation of old cords, a fancy pink-red jaquard skirt, and a funky cotton jacket… plus a failed tartan detail. When I get a replacement solution for the tartan detail, and add the side panels at the front, I will be able to share more about it.
And once we get the stove moved downstairs! Major operation, requiring possibly more brute force than just me and Vincent… But one step at a time…. First moving it, then finding the right new stove-pipe position, now that we’re without a chimney!
Sending you all love and very best wishes with your colourful creations this week!
