My new workshop

I finally have a space to work in that isn't also the dining room or some other room of the house used for other purposes and isn't using part of Wookie's workspace which means dodging latex, plaster dust and paint.

At the top of our road is some workshops which have a mix of uses though originally I think they were all engineering of some sort. Now however they are a mix of engineering, storage for local shops and Mandala Studios which I have mentioned here before as I work with them at times.  Next door to the Mandala unit is one that I now have which was until recently someone dealing in car parts.

We have spent the last few days cleaning it as the down side of an ex-engineering unit is the grime and oil that impregnates the place. The upside is the size and ceiling height. Sugar soap is a wonderful thing however!

Here is my Friend Nikki standing against one of the walls to show the height. You can spot where we ran out of ladder height and so couldn't finish cleaning the wall at the top.

This is looking into the back corner after we cleaned and laid out a new carpet, the wooden wall is all that divides us from Mandala's grotto which is the room they use for storage and making big projects.. There was some carpet in places but it was old and oil stained so we got rid of that. It took a couple of days of brushing, scraping and cleaning to get all the dust and old underlay up and the walls clean enough to put the carpet down. There are all sorts of blocked up openings in the wall which make me want to research the history of the building.

This is looking the other way. You can see the double doors into the unit on the  left and the office in the right. There is a big skylight at this end of the room which is the bright white bit at the top, shame it isn't in the middle so it can be over the cutting table but you can't have everything. I suspect originally there were big windows along the top of the long wall  (you can see one at the top left of the second photo) but if so they have been blocked up for a good while.

The main bit of the room is about 5m by 6m with another 3 by 5m made up of the office and area by the doors. Plus because the room is so high if we get some proper industrial shelving we can store a huge amount of stuff vertically.

No problem running a industrial sewing machine either as the floor is designed to take much heavier machinery that that.

Friday we plan to stick the carpet down and start moving in sewing machines, tables, fabric, haberdashery etc from the various places they are currently stashed which is going to take several days I suspect. I have several friends keen to come and join me and spend occasional days sewing which there should be plenty of room for and it is always better to work with company.

Suppose this means I have no excuse not to get round to all those things I keep meaning to make now !

By the way this is what it looked like before the clean or rather halfway through.

Yes we really needed the masks the underlay of some of the carpet was that 'lovely' yellow stuff which is nasty to breath in.

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 !

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.

Advent calenders of the none fattening sort.

We have a lovely wooden advent calendar Noodles gets to do each year. Each drawer has an ornament in it which then gets hung on the little wooden tree that goes with it. This year it is rather crammed on a shelf to keep it out of the way of Treestump but it is still fun and hopefully next year they will both be taking turns or perhaps I will make Treestump a fabric one to save arguments.

I've finally got down the workshop a tiny bit a couple of weeks ago and hope to do so again tomorrow, Treestump being off nursery due to inflamed throat and ears last week didn't help but he is better now. I did manage to help Wookie with a rabbit project.. The brief was a life like looking rabbit who's neck could be broken! This is for a school play apparently. There are photos on the Mandala Studio Facebook page. Wookie did most of the work on it I just helped on hand sewing, stringing the legs and generally trying to get the limbs to sit right, his airbrushing makes a huge difference to it though as without it the flat colour of the fake fur made it obviously toy like.

Tomorrow I  have some tabards to make up for Noodles school for the reception class play.. I don't have kids in reception currently but Noodles ex-teachers from year one moved to that class this year! I suppose making them end of year sewn gifts did rather put me in the spotlight for such requests :)

Anyway back to advent calanders and there are a few on line ones you might like to check out if you like making stuff or just looking at nice things.

For anyone into minitures the AIM advent calender has a project a day and so far they are wonderful..
Made in the UK also has a simple project each day ranging from biscuits to kids costumes to sweet little bags.
Tempus Fugit and NBK are both giving away scrapbooking elements everyday which go together with each other and are lovely and wintery. Currently you can still download everything from the start of the month.

(edit to add another one)
Kids Craft Weekly does a wonderful range of weekly newsletter on fun kids activities and has an Advent issue.   Two in fact the other is here or just click on newsletter in the menu to see them all..

Now a couple of pretty ones
Circles of rain has more traditional one in that it has pictures each day, though the photos are less traditional in content :).
I love this one at Stamping Mathilda it's so creative!


and Finally as the Beeb say.. dont' forget Norad's Santa tracking page for the big night ! They too have a form of advent calender and games to play