Another dress for Amy
Feb 14th
All this time at home and waking up early has given me space to sew. So I’ve made another dress for Amy! I bought the fabric about a year ago and the inclination hit me yesterday to make it into a dress.
The feedback from the blue dress was that although it was a bit big now, she will grow into it, plus that she was better with clothes with a waist line. Bring on the summer dress pattern:
I made most of it yesterday morning and had fun learning how to make a button hole on my sewing machine this morning. I was going to hand sew the hem, but as my tendons have started hurting again, I decided that a machined hem would be fine!
It’s very pink and girly!
Blue dress in honour of Mam
Feb 8th
I made my niece this beautiful blue dress over the weekend. I found the corduroy fabric on Bewick Street and got far too excited about it! I’d been thinking about making Amy a little skirt using pink cord fabric and the shop had exactly what I wanted and it was in their sale too! I ended up buying fabric in pink, blue and green. Peter has his eye on the green and announced that he would like a jacket. I don’t have a pattern for a men’s jacket and think it is probably beyond me at present.
I lined the dress with some fabric from my grandma Mam’s scrap bag. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to get all the pieces cut out, but I got there in the end. Some of them are cut slightly on the bias and there had to be a seam down the front.
The pattern had a flap at the back, with two buttons at the top. I decided that the dress would be better with a zip down the back. Hopefully Amy will still be able to run about in the dress. Altering the pattern added an interesting twist as I had to work out how to put the concealed zip in and sew the lining in too. It does look great inside out and some people have commented that it could be reversible. I’ll leave that to my sister to see what she thinks!
The best bit are the flowers on the front. I sewed on some pretty yo-yos with button centres. I’m really pleased with how these turned out. My grandma, Mam died on Thursday and somehow sewing with fabric that had been hers helped me connect with her, it was surprisingly therapeutic.
Curtains
Feb 8th
We now have beautiful handmade curtains hanging in our spare room. They’ve been WIP since October, when I went over to see Peter’s Aunty Jean who helped pin them in place and get them all ready for sewing up. She suggested I try and finish them for her visit at the beginning of December, but that didn’t happen. Making Christmas presents kind of took over!
I finally finished them at the end of January… Peter had to help me sew the header tape on as there was too much fabric to hold myself!
Here they are in situ:
New WordPress application for my phone!
Feb 6th
Well, just spotted this new app in the android app store. It let’s you write and edit posts and pages. Like all good android apps its also free…
If this post arrives on the blog then there may well be more!
WordPress for a blog and beyond
Jan 24th
Well,
Having set up a blog for my wife to make a record of all her crafty endeavours – and then modified it, added to it and generally tinkered it became clearer that wordpress would do it all!
So, herewith first attempt at a new site. I’m still trying to make sense of how to add pages and menu options that appear for family members only. I may have to do something seperate for the internal pages (Thus the ext and int in the url…).
More later, time to eat now.
Yipee! I can knit again
Jan 19th
After some tentative knitting before Christmas – I can now safely say “I can knit again!”
It is wonderful!
Before Christmas I finished off my niece Amy’s lovely selection of knitted cakes (plus an apple, to keep the doctor away!)
and made a red cardigan for the doll Amy had for Christmas.
Over Christmas, my Aunt Rhiannon helped me make a pattern for a dress for the same doll and it turned out rather well! I had some denim fabric from the scrapstore and some red spotty fabric in my fabric stash… a little red stitching and voila – a lovely little dress! Amy so enjoyed playing with it – putting it on and taking it off again and again!
I also made some lovely bunting for Amy and my cousins children Jasmine and Oliver. Here is Amy with hers:
I’m currently knitting a jumper for my lovely husband Peter to an Elizabeth Zimmerman’s pattern. I think set-in sleeves will look best on him, so am going for that pattern, in her knitting workshop book. In 10 days, I managed to knit the 16.5″ of the body in gorgeous 100% wool from New Lanark. FAB!
This new lease of knitting life is allowing me to think about what I’ll make next. I’m rather tentatively becoming excited by all the patterns I see around me.
Ooooo… this is wonderful! Next in my queue is:
Apres surf hoodie (from interweave knits)
Alpaca cardigan (still struggling to find a pattern for this 2 ply yarn)
Hot water bottle covers (from Susan Coopers pretty knits)
Happy Knitting to me!! (and Yes, I’m still remembering to stretch my tendons out!!)
Knitting David’s jumper
Oct 30th
David is a great friend of mine. He’s one of a few who have a hand-knitted jumper from me. I made him a sleeveless jumper, knitted in the round until the split for the armholes. I spent a long time working out the pattern and had lots of help from Mam (my grandma). There were beautiful swathes of colour sweeping across the jumper like lightening bolts.
Then David met a style guru and together they decided that the ‘stripes’ across his middle didn’t do him any favours… would I please knit the bottom half again so the colours weren’t in stripes?
I said yes! (Like I said, David is a great friend!) So I snipped a stitch under the armhole, unravelled downwards and have re-knitted a significant part of it. It seems shorter than before, but there may be more wool in the wardrobe! I’m still pleased with how it looks:
David's Jumper
David's Jumper (back)
The liquid soap mystery
Oct 29th
Well, the water didn’t really disolve very well into the soap paste overnight, so after work yesterday, I decided to help it along by heating it up a bit. It went all amber and translucent with the odd bit of white thick/foamy stuff.
I forgot about it for a bit [ops!] and when I went back to it, there were lots of bubbles on top it didn’t seem to be thining so out came my trusty potato masher. This didn’t help at all, and in fact it seemed to make it even thicker.
I gave up [again] and left it.
Here it is this morning – it’s all thick again and the paste is clear.
Let’s see what tonight’s experiments produce! Soap maybe? I did find lots of lovely bottles in the bathroom cupboard all empty and ready to be filled with soap…
Liquid soap experiment
Oct 27th
The recipe says to cook the soap paste for 3 to 4 hours, so that when diluted the water is clear.
After 8 1/2 hours it still wasn’t clear, so giving up on this experiment.
I’ve added the water anyway – the result somewhat speaks for its self…
Brownies. Yum!
Oct 24th
Don’t these look fab! Our neighbour lent us his angle grinder and as we’ve finished or rather as Peter has finished with it, I’ve made some brownies to say thank-you! Yummy squishy chocolate brownies.