White Christmas

Hope everyone had a relaxing Christmas or failing relaxing an enjoyable one !

According to the Bablake weather station , which is a great local weather station based at a school, this was one of only 3 years in the last 40 where there has been snow on the ground on Christmas day on Coventry!

I went out late morning to clear the path and decided that it was far to nice a day, cold but sunny and quite warm really, well compared to the last couple of weeks and so I announced Christmas lunch was going to be at tea time and we were going to the woods ! It seemed as nature had given us a White Christmas we should make the most of it!!

I have used one of the photos I took as a background. I don't generally like patterned backgrounds to text but I Hope I have muted the middle section enough to make this readable.

Here are a few more.

 Walking in the woods

Hide and Seek !!

Daddy shoulders are great when you have run out of energy!

 Silhouette from the low winter sun!

A busy time of year but no posts

This time if year I make things but can't post them as they are Christmas presents and some of them I have given away without photographing but after Christmas I hope to put up some posts about such things.

In the meantime it has been a very early winter in the UK. Much more snow and low temperatures than normal and my parsnips are firmly frozen in the ground when normal you would expect to be able to go and dig them for Christmas dinner. The tradition of planting garlic and onions on boxing day seems unlikely to.

According to the Bablake weather Station the lowest mean temperature for December until this year was -0.1°C in 1981 and currently we are standing at an average this month of -0.8°C so unless it really warms up over the next week or so this looks like a record breaking cold December!

One thing we haven't had much of is snow. well compared to the rest of the country anyway. We have snow and that's un-usual enough before Christmas but places both North and South of us are seriously effected by it where as we just have a small amount making things look white !  We did have enough the boys got to go sledging a couple of days ago but so far we seem to have managed to be on the edge of off a snow clouds so we have just got a bit here and there whichever side of us the main area of snow has been.

Great Tit

One thing we have been making sure we do is keep the bird feeders stocked up. Our regulars include sparrows, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, collared doves, squirrels, a nuthatch and possibly dunucks though we arn't sure on those, they look rather like sparrows at times. I think I've spotted a wren a couple of times too but again it's flighty and keeps mostly out of the way.

nuthatch

My First Temari

I have been admiring Temari from afar for ages but it's only recently I have found out how they are made and realised I could make them with things I had around the house.

Temari are Japanese thread wrapped embroidered balls. Some people use styrofoam balls as a base but the traditional way is rice husks or fabric scraps. Now Fabric scraps I have lots of.  You then cover that with some batting  (I didn't for my first ones but when I find my bits of batting I will try this as well). Then some yarn and finally a layer of thread. The yarn and thread are wrapped as randomly as possible and in fact doing it this way can result in a surprisingly round ball. I did fairly thick layers of both to give me plenty to stitch through.

Here are my first two mari (the thread wrapped balls) The purple one is about 2.5" wide the grey one a little smaller. Temari can range in size quite a lot.

I also found a fabulous website which has lots of tutorials and help called Temarikai.com and they have an associated Yahoo group which seems very friendly and useful.

The purple ball has some gold threads on it these are the divisions, in this case it is divided into 8 even vertical sections and the pattern will be based around those threads. There is one around the middle of the ball as well. Getting these correct is important as if they are wrong everything else goes wrong.

One of the things the website says is learn the techniques rather than focusing on patterns and I always find that a very valuable thing to remember for most new crafts. For my first ball I did two versions of the same stitch. This is called Uwagake Chidori Stitch (translates as Zig-zag over stitch).

The first side I worked a simple version of the stitch making a four pointed star the bottom points of which nearly reach the middle of the ball.

The second side is doing the same thing but twice so they interlock with each other.

Finally I added an obi which is just several rows of thread laid round the middle of the ball with a simple zigzag of the gold thread over it.


I am really please with it. The ball has a lovely feel in the hand, a nice weight and very tactile. The boys love them too! Treestump has told me they are for throwing and Dominic after finding out they were originally made as play things rather than decorations wants me to make some to be played with so I might look at which designs would work well for that. I think it would need something that covers a good amount of the thread base so the threads can't pull easily and also a design that has fairly short runs of thread as the longer the run the easier it is to snag.

KCWC day 3, 4 and 5

Well day three and four were a bit of a fail due to a recurrence of a hernia I hoped had sorted itself out. Not wise to be trying to lean over and cut fabric out at such times. I did a little crochet using the one solitary normal sized crochet hook I can currently find but that wasn't a kids items so doesn't really count. I hope I find the rest soon it's driving me mad as this is the time of year I suddenly get the urge to crochet things again, my brain thinks it is an autumn/winter activity obviously.

Day 5 - I did manage to do something however.  Treestump has a pair of jeans which are fashionably distressed and therefore at some point recently the knee ripped a bit. He was having a somewhat destructive afternoon and wearing said jeans.. by the time to got to the sound of ripping he was valiantly trying to rip through the hem seam having managed to create a rip all the way down from the original horizontal rip to the hem!

Exhibit A

So today I roughly stitched the whole lot back together and patched it. I find standard patches boring so tend to embroider them or use a different fabric.  I had a nice baby cord in orange I fancied using but thought a second different colour patch would be ice as it was such a big area. Then Tom suggested to do a fish and water as Treestump loves fish. The water is from the bottom of a really good quality t-shirt which has dolphins on. It's lovely but none of the adults are likely to wear it so tomorrow I'm going to  resize it for Treestump to go with his 'new' jeans !

Fish jeans.

We just hope he doesn't think he should rip all his trousers to get more fish!

KCWC day 2

Well I have managed to finish the cloak, other than a toggle which will have to wait to I unearth the button box from where ever I cunningly hid it last ! It is however very wearable without a fastening as it has shaped shoulders and being a bit stiff stays were it's put. The fur shoulder cape took a while to hand sew on because the waxed cotton is hard to sew through and my hands are having issues today for some reason and are stiff and uncooperative !

Noodles wearing the cloak before the fur was attached, shows the shaped shoulders.

I could iron out the biggest crease in the fabric which runs across the main body of the cloak. That comes from it having been folded to be sent here but I would have to do that between two pieces of brown paper to re-melt the wax and some of it would come off in the process. As it is going to get bashed about and stuffed in bags it will develop many more creases very rapidly so there seemed little point.

side view.

The Tartan coat is still just a body currently but hopefully that will get finished tomorrow. I also need to re-measure Treestump before nursery tomorrow as he is growing like a weed and is now really in age 3-4 clothes but the big bag I found in that size in storage all seems to be summer things so he is going to need some more trousers are the very least. Just for the record he is 2 1/2 years old and is 98cm high. We keep accidentally putting him in Noddles t-shirts because while his limbs are much shorter than his big brother his body isn't much different.

Kids clothing week day 1

OK everyone else maybe on day 3 but I'm a late starter :)

I got out the first two bits of fabric. Some waxed cotton such as is used in waxed jackets and some woollen tartan which is what remains from me making myself a hooded poncho several years back when I worked on a very cold market stall selling fabric !

These are both destined to make Noddles extra layers to wear at Outcast which is a Live Roleplay game he is going to with his dad.

The waxed cotton is for a hooded cloak which I have mostly made today. It still needs a fur shoulder piece added though that is already sewn so it is literally just attaching it round the neck. It also needs a fastening which we have agreed will be a toggle and loop. Having made various cloaks over the years I made this one shouldered becasue it helps stop the problem some cloaks have of trying to strangle you!

The wool is to make him a coat so he can wear it over his tunic and under his leather armour (an old leather waistcoat of mine with a few extra bits added ). I am just making him a very simple coat, a bit like a tunic split down the front and buttoned.

So far I have cut out both the wool and lining (some pale green sheeting left from the dinosaur outfit.) for the body of the coat and sewing up the main fabric. So I still need to sew the lining together, pattern and make up the sleeves in both and sort out fastenings. The sleeves might end up in more than one piece as there is only very limited fabric.

I will posts photos of how far I have got tomorrow when hopefully I can get him to model them before school.

Making kids clothes this week.

I've just found out that there is a kids clothing week challenge running this week over at Elsie Marley and as I am meant to be making Noddles some things it seems like a plan to join in. The idea is to spend an hour a day making something. Well I'm a day late already but I should be able to do a bit more than an hour some days to make up for that.

Current plan is to make some sort of warm jacket or coat and a hooded cloak out of wax jacket fabric. Now technically these are both costume for the Outcast game he is going to but they are still clothes and for a seven year old so I figure they count. Plus such things sometimes get worn at other times too.

I will try and post daily about how I'm getting on.

In other news I have found one solitary crochet hook but the rest have disappeared somewhere. However luckily the one I found is the right size for the mystery shall from Inside Crochet so I have started on that too.

Summer is always a slow time for making things

And an even slower one for me posting it seems though to be fair I've been out with tonsillitus for a good chunk of August and then we were on holiday.

However i have done a couple of things I haven't mentioned on here so here you go.

First Teachers presents, it has become a bit of a tradition that I give Noddle's teachers a present at the end of the year and it seems that they are always a bag of some kind so this year they all got shopping bags which can be folded into their own pockets making them easy to slip in a handbag or pocket. When I was at school we had one teacher at a time but these days they have several by the time you count the teaching assistants and those teachers they have stand in or cover specific things like gym.

I made a selection in different fabrics and Noddles chose who got which, five teachers in all so I had one spare in the end.

Then we had the summer holidays and making time was rather limited plus the whole tonsillitis thing. I hate that bug it gets me every time and I always get to worse and longer than others, two whole batches of antibiotics to kick it this time. Doesn't help I can't have penicillin either.

However I did get a commission that was rather rushed due to time constraints and illness but I think came out pretty well. The request was for the Red Death costume from the Phantom of the opera film.

costume from the film

Now the original is heavily embroidered and by the look of it it is hand done raised gold work. Not something I could do in two weeks or on a sensible budget. I did manage to find a real good low pile velvet in my stash and in the end myself and the client opted for painting the design on, even so it was down to the wire to get it done and I had to do less 'embroidery' than I wanted, the lapels were only outlined and I didn't extend the embroidery down the coat tails as it is in the original. The collar could have done with coming a little bit farther round the next and next time I will add boning as well as buckrum as it tended to flop backwards in wear. However the client tells me they are very happy with it and got lots of compliments at the event it was for.

The costume includes breeches, the coat, a cummerbund and black cravat as well as a very basic cloak (not shown and really just piece of of light fabric plated up and sewn to the shoulder. The mask is a leather one made by Wookie at Mandala. I lent him a LARP sword which again is not in the picture but apart from not having a skull on it fitted the look pretty well and has a black leather scabbard.

The back of the collar gives you an idea of the painting, I made a stencil for the saw tooth edging though it needed tidying up afterwards as it was hard to stencil the points well. The design of the frockcoat has been much admired and I think there may be more variants on the style in my future somehow !

I plan to design and digitise some edging designs than at 18c in feel so next time I can consider machine embroidering though that would still probably take more time than the painting did even if at times I can be doing something else while it stitches you still have to keep a weather eye on it all the time.

Shhh it's a secret

I have done a fair bit of sewing over the last few weeks including some last minute kit for Noddles to go roleplaying in this weekend.. OK I had plenty of warning but you know how it is. Hopefully photos will be taken at the event cos I didn't mange to get any in advance. It is for the same system as he did last year where this photo came from.

However most of the sewing over the last few weeks was for a project that I wasn't allowed to mention publicly while I was doing it due to it being a secret.. Secret Cinema to be precise.

In brief Secret Cinema is a brilliant idea where you buy a ticket to see a film.. what film? Well you don't know that, it's a secret. Where.. don't know that either just which city, it's a secret you see!. They let you know the time and date they are nice like that :) Then over time they let slip little clues and send you information on how you should dress for it.. now I'm sure you are asking why would they care what you wear to watch a film? and indeed what has that got to do with me sewing for them ?

Well you see you aren't just going to watch a film, you are going to enter into it or at least a version of the film's world. Because when Secret Cinema put on a film they also immerse you in the feel of the film first with props and actors, sights and sounds so by the time you watch the film you are already very much in the world yourself. Follow the link below to see some videos which explain it far better than I can.

Link to Secret Cinema.

Mandala were asked to supply some of the outfits for the most recent showing. We supplied  various things but the ones I was mostly involved in were a whole bunch of police outfits. As the showings have been and gone now I can tell you the film was Blade Runner. We did two versions the riot police in body armour and some beat cops in jackets and hats.

There are a bunch more photos of everything else Mandala supplied on facebook here.

I'm not sure which were harder to sew. The body armour was heavy work as you would expect but between Wookie and I we have access to some fairly meaty sewing machines. The jackets needed to be shiny pvc type fabric. Check the film out if you don't believe me and that in itself was hard going in a different way as neither of us much like pvc to work with but for me it was a good lesson in working in none natural fabrics as I don't have to often and I do like the fastenings !.

I think we did a fair impersonation of the film outfits give budget constraints. For instance we couldn't fully embroider the patches as it would be too material and time intensive so we used a few tricks and I think they work quite well. Wookie made the googles, badges, belts etc.

I can't wait to see what they do next to be honest !

Other sea related makes recently

As well as the Merboy outfit I also made the birthday girl a present as it's traditional and all ! As I thought I had been told she likes bags I made her a little satchel style bag with some scale patterned fabric I found. To be honest had I found it in my stash earlier we would have had a blue Merboy as it's a lovely textured scale pattern. I embroidered it with a cheerful little dolphin I got from Artistic Threadworks ages ago and lined it with the leftover fabric from the costume. Finally I added a little strap and there you go, one ocean themed bag. Apparently I was right she love bags and she was very happy to get a bag of her own.

I also realised I never posted the fish I made. These were made back in March for Treestump and a small friend who was born the day before him. In fact she is the little sister of the girl for whom I just made the bag.
These fish are made from a bought pattern! Very uncommon for me but the pattern is by Mimi Kirchner who's blog Doll I read regularly.. I love her work and I thought the fish were great. It may not be much compared to buying one of her lovely dolls but I like to support other crafters when I can so buying the pattern seemed a good way to do that and saved me trying to work out good proportions. Treestump was then and still is obsessed with fish.. you should have seen him run round the local fish shop when we took him thee recently to ask them questions about keeping some basic goldfish he couldn't stop going from tank to tank.. He just kept pointing and saying Pish!!

So the top fish was for our little friend and seemed to go down very well. The body fabric is a shirt form the charity shop, the fins are fleece blanket from IKEA and the head is from a pair of my old trousers which i kept to take a pattern off but the pink/grey fabric just worked so well with the body fabric!

The lower fish was for Treestump and is a very cuddly cashmere jumper for the body, another IKEA blanket for the fins and a scrap of blue and black wool for the head. He got it a day early so he didn't get upset we were giving a fish to someone else! However he seem perplexed the mouth didn't open and Noddles wanted a fish to give him too! So que fish number three !

This is an adaptation on the pattern to give an open mouth and is made with some charity shop trousers (hence the pocket in the body) some more of my pink trousers and the fins are from an old set of Treestumps own trousers which we wanted to keep in some way. He loved that one too and kept making it kiss us !

So the fish are now nicknamed hugging fish and kissing fish!

Merboy

So small friend of ours is having a Pirates and Mermaids Party and Noddles decides he wants to be a boy mermaid where as Treestump didn't really get a choice as we have lots of Pirate stuff which fits him in the dressing up box.

Now as it happens I've been working on some stuff for Mandala again which means that I've been working along side Wookie and so when I agreed I'd make a merboy outfit I roped him in to add some bits for me. The outfit had to be suitable for climbing about on jungle gym style play equipment so no hobble skirt style tails or anything!

First I found some vaguely scale-like looking fabric, in this case quilting cotton and some skin coloured fabric and made some basic trousers and a top that velcroed down the back, then I added fins to the back and sleeves with the lower arms, bottom edge of the top and all of the trousers in green, the rest in skin colour.

This is how it looked just as plain fabric. The fins have some wadding in them and are lightly quilted to give the effect of lines running down the fins. He is diving into the sea :)

Then I handed them over to Wookie who added a lot more detail for me by airbrushing them. Mostly he added extra tones and merged the two fabrics better. He also built up a pair of cheap school style pumps into webbed feet, covered them in fabric and airbrushed those for me as well.

Here is how they look after airbrushing with a back view to see the fin properly.

I am definitely going to look at doing more airbrushing on costumes where appropriate I think and look into what if any heatset inks will work in airbrushes as while acrylics will work I'm not sure they would stand up to repeated washing. For costume that often doesn't matter but sometimes it does and certainly for day to day clothing it does.

Finally getting involved in making things again

Those that know me will know I have been talking about making things and working with Wookie at his workshop for ages and failing to do so apart from the occational mini bits of sewing.  Well hopefully I'm changing that now. A few weeks ago he said would I help with a urgent order that Mandala Studios had recieved. I said yes and between a few of us we made a full mascot outfit in what was really a pretty short time scale.

The brief was to make as exact a copy of the customers graphic as possible.. you can see the graphic here on their website and indeed compare our costume with him at the same time as there is a photo of him in action!. We were very lucky really as he was shipped to them only a few days before the volcano errupted, had they wanted him a few days later they would have been out of luck.. The order was from Australia and no planes have taken off in the UK for several days now.

Here he is in full.

He is very much a multi media mouse, the main peices are foam of various types covered in either latex or fur and fabric.  I did all the fur and fabric, well apart from the fur on the head and it was both a challenge at times and great fun. I am very please with how he turned out and of course that is very much due to the others involved as my part had many bits but each of them fairly basic, the important parts are the things like the Head which i had very little involvement in.. Probably the bit that had me most worried was sourcing the gray T-shirt fabric for the collar !  Why is it so hard to just get the right shade of grey!

If you want to see the process in the form of many, many photos as we went along they are all on the Mandala Studios facebook page.

Mandala Studios are based just at the end of my road.. mostly cos I found the workshop for Mark and Andy originally :) They work on the principle of having a pool of people all with different specalist skills who can either work on individual projects or come together for something like this so that all areas are overed by the best person for that job. Working with Mandala has several advantages for me. The workshop is just up the road and I can work there in the evenings once the boys are in bed if I wish. They get orders from all sorts of places I don't have contacts with, there is the opertunity to work on multi-media projects like this which I couldn't do on my own and they are very happy for me to develop my own ranges of items and market them for me if I so wish. Plus Wookie and I have been friends for ages and know we can work together and brainstorm projects and any arguments are normal and not friendship breaking :)

This next week or so I am working on a couple coats and waistcoats will post some photos assuming they don't go horribly wrong.

Long time no blogging

I know I know... I will post something a bit more interesting than this soon. One of the reasons for not doing anything is my main computer is very sick and himself keeps promising the fix it but as yet hasn't. While there are plenty of others that is where i have all the photo software and so on set up just right and where I generally download the photos.. yes I have them backup on an external hard-drive too but it's just that extra effort to do anything and I normally fit blog posts into the little gaps in doing other things.

It is Treestump's second birthday today... how time flies and I certainly have an item or two made for him to post up in the coming days so do watch this space there may be something worth looking at later you never know!

A jeans bag

No more snow and in fact we had a few mild days though it has got colder again now.

Didn't do a mosaic at the beginning of the week, though I might do one later as I do have some photos.. some however you aren't going to see including the ones of my in underwear which I HOPE I will be able to compare with ones later in the year and see a visible improvement.. it's well past time I got rid of some of the excess from having two kids or rather from being more physically immobile than normal with both of them at different stages.

I can however show you a bag I made as a late Christmas present. I hope the recipient liked it, I don't know her well enough to be certain but well she's part of our extended family so will have to get sued to me I suppose :)

This was originally a set of slightly strange jean shorts but I really liked the embroidery on them so picked them up in the charity shop planning to do something along these lines at some point.

The strap was the only other thing I bought and is a wide velvet ribbon. The fastenings were salvaged off an old bag.

Mosaic week 2 - more snow and sledging.

This week's Mosaic is rather late for Monday but I just ran out of time, that and my rather dodgy computer decided to crash when i was most of the way through it but before I saved it!!

It is very rare for us to have snow for this long, more than a day or two at a time is very uncommon in fact so that I have two weeks in a row of snow pictures in not something to miss. These were all taken on Wednesday. We were asked to pick up Treestump from nursery early as the staff wanted to get home before things froze so I went to get him walking through one park in falling snow (top three photos) and Tom went to get Noddles from school. After school we all headed to a second park which in fact is just over the road from the first to sledge, by this time it had stopped snowing but the sky was very grey making the light levels quite strange it felt almost as if my glasses were in need of a clean but it was just the way everything looked...

This second park is just a big flat field except for the fact it has a bank round the edge next to the road and this bank is big enough to sled down. Normally this park is empty apart from the occasional dog walker or someone taking a short cut but as you can see it was really quite full of poeple sledging, having snowball fights or just enjoying themselves out with friends. The bottom right photo is Treestump trying to throw a snowball.. problem was he could pick up just enough snow to coat his glove but not enough to have some to throw! It was very funny if frustrating for him.. In the end he worked out there were bigger lumps he could pick up form around where others have dug up snow for snowballs.!

I love the way the snow and the light made the trees monochrome even though in the lower pictures it is mostly Rhododendron which are evergreen. It made the bright waterproofs the boys were wearing stand out all the more.
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Week 1 - mosaic

I am not trying the 365 photos thing again but would like something to encorrage me to take photos often so I'm going to try doing a mosaic a week. Sometimes they may be themed like this week, other may be a hodge podge of whatever I snapped that week.

This week has been dominated by snow. For many people this much snow is minor but we don't often get it so for us this much substained snow is unusual. Much of the rest of the UK have had even more and for longer which is even more un-usual certainly for the more southern areas that have been hit by it.

Looking at this it looks like I live somewhere rural. Believe me that isn't the case. All these were taken either in parks or on our allotment all of which are in the middle of Coventry a city with about 300,000 poeple in it.

I am posting this up on Mosaic Monday over at Little Red House.

Change of look

Thought I'd do a winter theme using some photos taken in the park yesterday !

A late Christmas Present

Late not because the person giving it to me was late bu because we were responsible for ordering it and were rather slow!

I have been wanting one of these for ages but haven't been able to justify it but now I have my very own Bpal scent locket.. from the Bpal Trading post and now I have one!

I love this clockwork one, all the others are a single colour but not this one which is two colours, gold and silver, well three if you could the blackened bits. There are various holes in the cogs and so on so that you can put a small wad on cotton or similar inside with perfume on it and the smell comes through. Very useful for perfumes you love but go weird on your skin or if you just don't want to wear them on skin for some reason such as they have cinnamon and you react to it.

Tom also got one but his is the three daggers one.

The Art of Crochet

This is a new part work magazine and as normal the first issue is at a cut price to encorrage you to try it. I quite often buy the first part if it is something I like but I haven't gone any farther in years. Most part work magazines give you very little each week when you compare them to other magazines but then they do give you items to allow you to make whatever it is they are about but over the time it takes you to get everything it tends to cost far more than buying it outright and they are often bad quality but that's like many things in life you can buy something outright for a good price or overtime for an inflated one.. do I think they are good value? Not normally but they do allow you to get something a bit at a time and there have been times in my life that has suited me, so while I think they are over inflated I don't totally knock them though I have noticed they don't seem to try very hard on quality..

So what about the Art of crochet, well the first issue you get a 4mm hook (so that's the 99p already) a dvd showing a few very, very basics of crochet, a leaflet doing the same again, a leaflet extolling the virtues of the later issues and a slightly longer magazine, with some basic stitches, the first blanket square, and a few other patterns. The yarn you get is two balls. a 16g one of a light brown (for practising) and a 25g of a raspberry (for the first square), both are acrylic and OK quality but nothing special. I assume from what is said the 25g is the normal size of yarn you will get each issue.

I don't think I'd make the blanket, I don't much like many of the squares but the colours are OK and I could see using them for other squares. I can also see it might be worth getting the first few issues to see what it is like. If you subscribe you get issues 2 and 3, 2 more balls of yarn, a yarn case, a travel case and a hook roll plus a binder and dividers for 1.99.. From then on you get 4 issues every 4 weeks at 2.99 per issue.. there are a couple more extras you can get with the first couple of deliveries depending how you pay. I suspect it would get samey very fast and these days with the wealth of on-line free patterns and so forth there is far less need for a cheap gradual information source like this but the small bite size nature can make it easier to get your head round than the over wealming amount of info you get on the net. For someone starting off the first few issues might be quite useful to give you an easy slow in to the craft.. 120 issues is probably over kill though so I suspect there is a fairly fast fall off of subscribers.