Silverskin Adventures

I spent a goodly portion of the weekend doing Fancy Lady-type things. The most significant of these things was the time spent creating a dress form to use for sewing.



Essentially, you get duct taped over a spare shirt, which is then cut up the back, reassembled, and stuffed. (I used a whole pillow, a bag of fibrefill, and the filling from another pillow.)



The advantage of this is that you now have a double of your body to work with for pinning/adjusting patterns. I'm pretty happy with how mine came out, except for the bust, which isn't quite as prominent as it ought to be. I'm brainstorming ways to fix this...

Bingeing and Purging Part I

Over the last few weeks, Mat and I have undertaken a serious effort to re-organize our house. We've noticed, when we visit other people, that other people's houses are not cluttered like ours is: we simply have a lot of stuff. (I also think that the fact that we have wall-to-wall carpeting in our house contributes to this appearance, as does the total lack of storage space.) Thus, our co-resolution for the new year has been to try to make some sense out of our living space.


Mat will be the first to tell you that I am the problem here. He thinks (mostly correctly) that I am the source of all the clutter, what with my books and my knitting and my grading. While this is true, he's not totally blameless, since he does tend to leave Magic cards and video game paraphernalia lying around.

As a wedding present, we were given a dining room table, and we have just recently finally purchased the matching chairs. Yes, that's right: I am now sufficiently grown up and classy that I have a matching dining room table and chairs. Not a moment too soon, either, as two of our mismatched chairs had quite literally fallen to pieces the week before. Now that our living room looks classy, we're working on reorganizing the rest of the main floor. We've moved the computer upstairs into our spare bedroom, moving my computer desk out of the craft room to do so. The old computer desk is going to a second handstore, and we are going move the couches around and perhaps move the bookshelves into the living room, which will leave the dining room as open as it can possibly be.


I now have a 6' tall pantry cupboard in the craftroom to hold my crafting things, and I am in the process of sorting things out in there...very slowly. The thing that I need to deal with most is actually *not* my yarn stash; it's my fabric stash. I own an awful lot of fabric for someone who doesn't sew very much, and I think that now is the time to start looking for ways to weed out what I will use and what I won't use. I think that is an excellent job...for tomorrow.

I found four sweater quantities of yarn in a pale grey heather: a DK alpaca/merino/silk, an organic merino worsted weight wool, boring old Patons Classic Wool (also worsted) and an unknown fingering weight wool that my mom bought me in Scotland. Apparently I have a need for sedate, conservatively coloured garments?

The Handmade Christmas

I love the idea of the Handmade Pledge: giving handmade gifts is such a noble (and cool!) idea. I don't follow the pledge to the letter, since there are some people who would rather not get something made by a person instead of a machine, and sometimes a non-handmade gift can be more practical. I've also amended the pledge to include books and tools as acceptable gifts; I figure that if it can help you make something on your own, then I can't really ask for anything else.

I also don't do the second half of the pledge. I don't ask people to give me handmade gifts because it's a request that would (mostly) fall on deaf ears, and I don't want to put people under that kind of pressure. (Plus, I also like non-handmade things sometimes, like my awesome Scrabble pyjamas that my mom got me this year.) Thus, it was a big surprise for me this year to receive several gifts that were made by the givers. I have some very talented friends and family.

My sister-in-law made a bench for our entryway for us. She made the bench and then worked a mosaic design on the top in glass:



My friend Jamie made me a case for my interchangeable knitting needles:



My friend Steph made me a scrapbook page in a shadowbox:


And Youngest Sister made a bag. Actually, that's not true. She made me The Bag. The Bag To End All Bags. It's gorgeous:


The cat loves it too:


I am very, very lucky to have people who care for me enough to make me a gift of their time like this.

C'est l'Hallowe'en, hey!

(A wee trip down memory lane for those of us educated in Ontario's public school system- Matt Maxwell was a mainstay of our French program.)

We will be attending the annual Hallowe'en party that friends of ours throw tonight. Mat works today, so we are getting off to a late start and jetting down. He is excited to be going to a place where people will recognize his costume. I am excited because I am part of a group costume.

The roommates and I used to do group costumes when we were in school--we did both Star Wars and X-Men themes--but after I moved out, that just sort of...stopped. Last year, I had the best idea for a group theme: we could dress as the characters from Clue. Unfortunately, the H1N1 hit and I had to bail on the party, leaving my poor Miss Scarlet costume to go unworn.

This year, my friend Jessica and I decided to dress as the White and Red Queens from Through the Looking Glass. She had the further idea to make our costumes burlesque themed, and once that happened, the whole thing snowballed: we're being joined by a burlesque Cheshire Cat, as well as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and a straight-thugging White Rabbit. The only thing we lack, funnily enough, is an Alice.

For my costume, I purchased a red and black corset on eBay. I then bought a sewing pattern for a saloon girl costume, and madea bustled skirt in red satin with black lace trimming. (Jess found an online free pattern here but I was unable to wrap my head around how it got put together, so I went with a commercial pattern.) I have stockings, garters, shoes with a t-strap, a lace fan, gloves, and jewelry, as well as a bobbed black wig. It's going to be awesome.

I'm currently working on designing a cloak to wear, since it is flipping SNOWING outside.

Fascinated by Fascinators

Thanks to an intrepid reader, I've found a tutorial that, while not the one I had originally used¹, is close enough that I should be able to recreate my favourite bags without too much trouble (and hopefully lay in a supply for future gift giving. They are good bags for anyone, even if they're not knitters). They are excellent stash busting projects. Why do I have a fabric stash? I honestly don't know. I don't sew a lot, and certainly not enough to justify the amount of fabric that I own. I seem to have a knack for finding fabric stores just as they are closing or renovating, when everything is on sale.

I've been trying to figure out what to do with my hair for the wedding. I have the world's most boring hair. 98% of the time, it just sits on my head. Every once in a while, I will put it in a pony tail, but for the most part, what you see is what you get. I have no mad skillz in the hair department. To be fair, my hair itself is no help: it is very, very fine, and wavy. (I've been growing it out, so it's okay right now because the added length helps to weight it down and keep it from doing the various wacky things it likes to do when I keep it short.)

So what I've tentatively settled on is that I'll have it put up in a bun (excellent for hiding how pathetically little hair I have) and wear some kind of awesome fascinator.² The only problem is that most fascinators appear to cost an arm and a leg. The solution is obvious, of course: I should make one. I've sourced out various supply shops online, as I doubt I'll be able to find anything along those lines here, and once I head back to work in August I'll make an order and get cracking. I'm a bit nervous about the idea of sewing with feathers, but I think that I could, potentially, come up with something really interesting and unique.

Or just make a really big mess.

=====
¹ One of the finishing techniques is substantially different
² When mum was in Scotland last year for the Loch Ness Marathon, she kept running into people's weddings while touring around, so she has a whole bunch of pictures of some the awesome stuff the girls were wearing.