Archive for the ‘ideas’ Category

The last couple of weeks I’ve been making these garland rosette brooches. It all started when I needed a colourful something to wear to my Nieces wedding. I noticed Nicky wearing a large fabric brooch made from frayed strips of fabric in great colours. I asked if I could borrow it to copy or really imitate it and ended up making something that was similar and then taking the idea further into the realm of the rosette. My brooches are far more structured than the one that Nicky wears which is one of a kind and can’t be copied. They are fun to make and liven up a winter coat, jacket or bag.

I’m a cardie wearer, I think they are the perfect Melbourne garment. They have the right off-on-hot-cold-inside-outside applications, so I want to make some to sell and to wear, because like skirts they are hard to find under $150, with the elements of fun casual interesting good quality. Now… I’m not claiming to have covered all of these in the first try but here I go….having a stab.

Note to self………don’t buy fabric without knowing what you are going to do with it!!

I bought quite a lot of good quality cotton fabric a few months ago. At the time I was pretty certain of what my course of action would be. I was going to make drop hem skirts and make a feature of the hemline with a wide bias of a complimentary fabric. Sounds simple eh?

Well I have thought and deliberated and changed my mind no less that a dozen times. I have contemplated these fabrics in bed, on the walk to school, during conversations that I should have been attending to, while cooking dinner and hanging out washing, while the kids were in the bath, while stacking the dishwasher.

Quite a bit of water has been involved, and yet all of my vacillating, thinking, changing of the mind, doing other things, putting it back in the cupboard, hasn’t worked.

They were going to be wrap skirts, simple a line skirts, drop hem skirts, long skirts with a frill, dresses. Part of the problem is that they are the narrow width of quilting fabric which doesn’t lend itself well to garment making because there is a lot of waste, and that fact bothers me.

Another problem is that the patterns have a direction, a right way and a wrong way to be cut, this create a whole other set of limitations!

I don’t feel any closer to a solution now than I did when I started but I have decided that I just need to use it, it doesn’t matter how, just get rid of it so that I can move on, breathe in fact, get some sleep and re-enter the human race.

By the way I bought some fabric on-line from Japan, thats a bit of fun! Check it out fabric Tales

I don’t buy old clothes anymore, I don’t buy many ornaments anymore, I don’t buy books anymore, I don’t buy toys, very often, but I can’t resist paper patterns. I can’t resist these cheesy old eighties and nineties patterns. They take me back to a time when my mother and sister would make almost all of their own clothes. Paper patterns were relatively cheap and so was fabric. They were sewing all the time so they were quite expert and quick! It was cheaper to make clothes than to buy them. I’ve got two drawers full of these not very fashionable and not even beautiful old things. I kid myself that I’m going to get ideas or a basic shape from them at some time in the future, or maybe they will actually come back into fashion! I’ll probably end up sending them back to the opp shop.

Look at these beautiful little pieces of domestic history. They evoke memories for me of Christmas dinners and dusting and my Mum’s dressing table. My lovely friend Nell has been using them to great effect as applique for little girls pinafores. The other day I asked her if she ever planned to make skirts! I’d love to get the same effect on some denim skirts in the spring.