Autumn Zebra

We went on holiday. We came back. I decided I'll do NaNoWriMo in November. I estimate this will take up 2-3 hours per day. I have to make a Victorian cycling outfit by the 16th of November, and this week I am making a cloak for my brother's birthday. I am doing millinery (hatmaking) at the polytech this term. The process of actually enrolling in and doing a course is still a mess. I want a new job doing... something more fun, maybe my own business but I don't know what I'd actually do, which is a bit of a problem. I got my hair cut. I need to get the downstairs computer working as I finally set up the new computer before the holiday and it didn't work either. We are going to Queenstown in the weekend. I haven't done any gardening and I should. I still haven't thought of a form of exercise I actually like and would be at all convenient/practical which is bad because exercise is good for you. I am still obsessed with fabric but am trying to buy less/none beca...

I am so excited that tomorrow I can go to the university library to copy out information on how to make some Victorian combinations, as these will be the first item in my bicycling outfit I am going to make. Maybe there will be some bloomers or something in there too. I thought about doing a divided skirt, but I've decided to do wool bloomers, a woollen wide-lapelled jacket, combinations and a button-up pseudo corset thing. The cycling outfit came out of my wanting to make some "reform" clothing, so I'm also going to do a divided petticoat and some non-cycling late-Victorian or Edwardian clothes too. There's two books in the city about the women's reform clothing movement from 1850 onwards, and one has been out for the last 3 weeks and the other is at at the university library. I've applied for a library card, but they haven't sent it to me yet; maybe they lost my application :( I was going to read the book before making the clothes, but I got bored wa...

Last month's goal was to study Polish for at least 30 minutes a day, which I pretty much achieved except 2 days when I was out too much (work + out in the evening + no time in the morning before work) to do so. But some days I did 1 hour, so hopefully that makes up for it. So I achieved my goal. I think that's the first time I have achieved an explicit goal (despite endless "goal-setting" classes and exercises at school), so that's pretty weird/exciting. I think I see how it works now. Sort of. It might be the first time I've wanted something enough to have it work, but I think there's more to it than that, but I don't know what. I'm not sure how much I learnt (of Polish), as there's no way to really measure the amount of knowledge currently stored in your head on any given subject. You could do some kind of test, but I have no test handy, and how would you know you had tested for everything you know? I can't explicitly remember any Polish ...

The key crafting and sewing priorities at the moment, at least as far as I can remember, and I'm sure I can't remember what my priorities were yesterday, are: Fit a basic torso pattern properly so I can stuff it to use as a mannequin that is shaped more like me; the bought one has very little back compared to me, it is weird. I need about 5cm more across the back somehow, but not the front, and not the waist, just the top of the back. Make a linen smock, as suitable for the 15th or 16th centuries, or thereabouts. The linen is pale pink colour however, when it should be white. However, since it is not for any purpose that requires it to be historically accurate, that is fine. I might get some white linen though when I've made this one and know how much material I need, and make a high necked one. I am arranging wool and linen for the rest of the outfit, and am nearly sorted I think, although there will be less wool than I originally wanted because it is hard to get stuff lik...

I cannot be bothered writing properly for this. So you may glean information from these resources. Fabric - Mainly the striped one, but maybe I need some part of it to be another colour. The denim-like blue looks boring with it, because it is too similar to the stripe colour perhaps. The brighter blue looks better. Picture, from Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 1 book. But I probably won't do the collar, just the basic dress. It has a kind of pattern, but I'm not sure how the skirt is supposed to be attached. Dress from the same era that someone made that looks really awesome. Don't you think everyone should dress like that? This is the link to her page about the dress - A Blue Printed Cotton 1780s Gown.

Do you think one could bake a cake/batch of biscuits/whatever every day for a month? The main problem, it occurred to me, is that you would have to eat a cake every day as well, which might be a bit excessive. One could bake a cake every weekend for a month, but that is only 4 times and not terribly exciting a goal. One could bake a cake every week for a year, but maybe that is too long? What about other experimental cooking; it wouldn't be good if it was neglected. It could be one of cakes/biscuits/bread/similar foods each week for a year I guess, that would be good.

The most interesting thing I have found recently has got to be this blog by a bespoke Savile Row tailor - The English Cut . The sad people that you are, I bet you aren't even slightly interested! He talks about the world of bespoke tailoring, what makes a good suit and his own business. For some reason, I think this is the most interesting and amazing entry . Look at that beautiful shoulder seam! I've always been vaguely interested in tailoring and at some point will actually make myself a jacket, but I am currently too scared. It seems so much more difficult than making other things. I also have no idea really how these things are supposed to look or fit. Given that you can buy an absolutely awful, badly made, entirely synthetic jacket from some of the women's clothing shops in town for $300 (even on special), I should be able to make myself both a jacket and trousers out of really nice material (eg. $50/m) and still end up spending less money. The suit is in my head - it ...

I thought I'd post about what I am doing at the moment, sewing wise. Just Finished I recently finished a bunch of things for pattern making and design process classes, but I have to wait before I get them back from marking, and there are no pictures from before I handed them in because I finished them so late. I also made a simple beret, of which there will be pictures shortly. In Progress A very dark "midnight" blue skirt, Victorian inspired. I'm not sure yet whether it will look awful on me. A bustier type top for someone's formal. I am getting paid! It is a friend of mine from karate. I've done the mockup and it fits her so I will probably do most of it this weekend. There will also be a skirt. It is all from a pattern. Curtains A houndstooth skirt I just haven't sewn together yet. The timing just isn't right at the moment. Planned More berets of different designs, along with another amusing silly hat A Tudor dress (kirtle) in non-Tudor material A c...

I think I've decided to go with making the Princess Bride dress after all, even though I'm not much sure why. Reasons against I don't really want a pink dress Reasons for There's not much else I'm likely to do with the pink material I might have to do something creative to get the sleeves to look anything like the movie, and creative = fun It seems easy, and I, or someone I know who is the same size, might have a sudden need to go to some sort of pseudo-historical dress-up party on a moments notice, and I will have something on hand all ready I also have a stack of new project ideas - yippee! The most useful one at the moment, if I have time, is to make a Tudor-style smock. This should be easy, and then if I decide to make more Tudor stuff later I will already have one layer that I don't have to worry about. The neckline needs to be wide to not show from under the dresses, which would be suitable for going under the Princess Bride dress also. What a good coincid...

What is the first thing that comes into your head when someone says that there is the possibility to go over to someone's house and watch a movie you've seen several times and own yourself? Why, we should go I'll make a costume, of course! I looked though our Princess Bride DVD for everything that she wears in it and drew some little pictures too. Although there was one outfit that I would rather have made, I really had very limited choice because I don't keep large pieces of material on hand. I have a lot of material, but of each individual fabric I only have a small quantity. Except for a small number of pieces bought for a specific purpose, and a couple that are "utility" pieces - frequently useful and not needing to be any specific colour. Although I do need more white linen to keep on hand - frequently useful for folk costume shirts and any historical underwear that might be visible at all, or simply to be more correct. Anyway, I had to choose a dress not...

If an item of clothing doesn't cause some sort of visual impairment, it's not worth wearing. That's not really my new motto, but I like to think of it when I consider making things out of materials like this houndstooth: And look, I even have it in inches. How random. Doesn't it make your eyes go funny? You can see the kind of cool selvedge there too. But I won't just be making one garment out of this, oh no, there is a whole outfit, or set of outfits around this theme! Ok, two items will be made in the houndstooth, and another will have highlights of it, but there are many more items in the greater theme of outfits. But I am trying to write shorter posts oftener, so I will put that in another post. I am starting a new tag about this: houndstooth, although as you will see, another element is "corporate" and another is.... "feminism" perhaps? Or sexism? It is hard to decide. Anyways, this entry has introduced the houndstooth element. p.s. today...

Arrived from Trademe a couple of days ago was this, although this is after I had opened it and then put it back in again. See the big parcel that goes up higher than the door handle? And in it were my two lots of velvet. One is a synthetic dark purple, as shown in this really bad photo. The top part of the photo is the back, but it shows the type of purple that it is, although the lightness/darkness and the actual colour don't show, and I myself have only seen it in indoors light in the evening, so it is probably different in day light too. It is all synthetic-y, but there is lots and lots of purple, which is good and pretty. There is 6m. I bought 3, but because it was tied too tightly then it has got big creases and so she gave me 6m instead - after consulting me of course. Oh yeah, the purple is also a stretch material. The other one is this dark red kind of colour. It looked more brown in the indoor light at the time, but in the photo is more reddish, which I think is more lik...

On Tuesday evening we had the first class of the Patternmaking course. In this class we drafted a basic skirt block for ourselves. This looks something like this (but the paper would be lying flat. I also drew on the lines in on the computer because the pencil didn't show up): Then we traced around it. We are going to convert it into an A-line skirt block next week. I have to admit that it was rather slow, and not just because I have done pretty much exactly the same thing before. It's just not really that difficult to draw some lines of a certain length at right-angles to other lines, with detailed instructions, after having seen the instructions gone through in each detail. But it was still fun and I was pretty excited. I could have drafted the A-Line block too if I'd had another 5 minutes, but she decided to end the class 20 minutes early to not over-tax anyone. About half the class took twice as long as the other half, and I suppose these were the ones that might be ove...

Apparently this weekend is the Chinese New Year Celebrations in Dunedin, on Saturday evening. Presumably Chinese New Year is somewhere around this date. G and my Mum are part of the Japanese sword and other weapons demonstration at it. If you are confused already, they have stalls and various different Oriental cultural demonstrations to entertain the crowd and so on. The sword people are on at 2145, but times have been known to be, ummm, variable . Also this weekend there may or may not be the Gypsy fair in the oval. Not entirely sure about that one yet. So, for the Chinese New Year, to make it more fun, I clearly need to dress up some how or wear some new clothes. Luckily I have a pattern for a Chinese style top or dress and some gold Chinese brocade material sitting at home. So I could whip that up by Saturday. Never mind that I wouldn't have the opportunity to fit it properly and that Chinese brocade frays horribly and shifts all over the place when you try and lay it out and p...

Once again, Traci has outdone you all with a wonderful comment. She made the excellent point, "WANT THIS COAT". You can see this comment attached to one of the earlier posts. The coat in question which she links to is this one: found here at the auction site I was talking about, where there are more pictures. I think she is completely right, I also want this coat, and I thought I should share it with everyone else. It is just so awesome and bright and colourful and happy, and I think it would make anyone happy just looking at it. Even if you don't really like yellow. So now I intend to make one some day, maybe. I will keep an eye out for suitable yellow material, and if I find it I will know I am supposed to make the coat. I am not sure about the white embroidery detail yet, I presume that will become clear to me if I am destined to make it. Not only do I like the actual coat, I think it would probably actually suit me as well. Strangely, yellow is supposed to suit me, m...

Recently I bought this material from The Stitchery. I saw it there months ago when I first went there, and always intended to buy it, and to probably make a doublet I think. Even though I don't yet have time to make it, I thought I should go back and buy it in case I never get around to it and it goes or something. I think it is about $34/metre, so I got the minimum that I thought would work, which I think was 0.7m. It is actually double thickness and, as you can see, reverse colours on the other side. So now I can't decide which colour to have on the outside, and whether to line it and so on. I think to make such a structured garment as a doublet it will need to be lined, but I can have the facing and collar in the reverse colour so it still gets seen. I intend to modify an historically accurate doubet pattern and design to make something practical and not too odd looking. The main desire for such a garment comes from wanting a nice-looking sleevless garment that is also warm....

Obviously no one who reads this blog goes to Cosmic Corner or they would have seen this and immediately contacted me: That's right, cherries that are really skulls. Yay, that's fabulous. Each skull is 7.5cm/3" across. I don't know if I should make a jacket and sew it on the back, make a 1950's circle skirt and instead of a picture of a poodle or some such thing use this and that would be really funny, or something else entirely. Let me know any ideas. I'm thinking that I could make my own applique version for the 50's skirt so I can still use that amusing idea and do something awesome with these. Since it is a patch, and the other ones there were all like skulls and cat-and-crossbones and stuff, I think I shouldn't go the obvious with something like a jacket. Obviously the people who designed these knew the idea was humerous. Like all the funny cat ones - versions of tattoo and gang-type motifs but with cats. So since it is already funny and clever, and...

There's not much to think about sometimes. Like when in a bathroom there isn't much to think about for instance. So, yesterday evening while in transition to the sink, I accidentally thought of a new idea for an item of clothing to make. I tried to stop the thought, but it was too late. I cannot think of MORE things to do at the moment, there is already a lot and most of them have a time frame and cannot be delayed. So now I know what I must do with those 3 (or 4?) nice matching pieces of grey fabric, including lining, that I bought from the remnants table a year or two ago. They went together so nicely, and merely had to wait for the confluence of knowledge, time, fabric, idea and the fifth thing I forgot. Of course, time is still lacking, but the other elements have mostly, umm, confluenced. Actually, some knowledge is still lacking too, but I am already ready to make the other items that will lead to that knowledge being known. So it is all coming together and the garment is...

Yesterday I finished making something, sort of, but it is no good so I haven't finished it properly, needs shoulder straps. Later I will try and sort it out, when I have time. Also, I want to sort out that polka dot skirt so it doesn't look so odd if I don't wear a long top. When I can be bothered. Got to get organised making wedding stuff. Enlarged a new pattern to try last night, need to get some material to try it, but might not have time to go today - have an appointment so that will mostly use up my spare lunch time. I could just go in the weekend but I want it now! On to the main event. The best antique dress One day, I want to make this. Probably over a period of two years so I don't have to rush or anything and don't have to spend ALL my time on it. Spending ALL my time on the previous Victorian outfit took only about 6-8 weeks I think, so even with multitudes of other projects it shouldn't really take 2 years. Link to pictures of the dress.... But I can...