Autumn Zebra

A couple of years ago, I set up a search on Trade Me for the corset books that were generally regarded as pretty good, so that it would email me if someone was selling them. The likelihood that someone would first buy and then actually sell on TradeMe one of these books was low, but I was patient, and recently "Waisted Efforts" came up and I got it at a fraction of the price (like a half or a third) that it would cost to buy it from overseas, thus making it a price that I would reasonably pay for a book here if I really wanted it. Woohoo! It arrived today and it is thicker (fairly chunky), slightly bigger (about landscape A4), and a lot more readable than I thought it would be. I was sort of thinking of it more like a reference book only, but it looks like you could read through it rather than just flick to relevant pages. This is good. For some reason I thought it was written by a woman, and read through the overview and preface with this in mind, before seeing that the pref...

There's this thing called "my creative space" where each week you post a pic of what creative stuff you're doing, and add a link to a list, so that everyone can go and look at everyone's stuff. I'm thinking of participating.... This week - more mindless than creative. That's a book with a picture of some stays similar to the ones I'm making, some cable ties that will be boning, and the fabric and embroidery thread I am using to make them - sewing boning channels in backstitch down each piece. Just another couple of dozen hours or something to go, sigh.. I'm not sure they'll work out that great even, but I wanted to hand sew some, just because I did. This weeks creative space link

Finished - entry on LJ . Picture for those who don't want to read that.

Posted on my Live Journal for the same reason as last time.... entry here .

I have sewn the inner and outer layers of the stays so far, but still need to make bias binding, bind the edges, and sew the eyelets. Also, I might want to hand-sew in a lining. Here's the outer layer. It is wonky because it is hard to get it to look sensible on the mannequin. I think the fabric looks better in the photos than in real life; it is rather poor quality because it is upholstery material, but I like it anyway and in this case it's supposed to look "rougher" as the one I liked in my book seemed itself very roughly made. I didn't think to pattern-match it until I had sewn it and it seems a waste to cut more, so I'll just have to make another one some time with pattern matching. There are a lot of straight lines so it shouldn't be too hard to get it looking a bit better. Since the inner layers are the "strength" layers, the outer layer wouldn't necessarily have to be cut on the grain, if it needed to be mucked around with to match th...

I posted this on Live Journal because I also posted it on the corset makers community over there. Link to the Live Journal post. I've since discovered it's fairly wrong, but I think it will still work well enough so I'll make them up anyway (I am about half-way through actually). It won't be too much of an investment of time etc if it doesn't work out that well, as it is machine sewn and doesn't use special materials.

So this weekend I didn't feel like writing 4 blog entries in preparation for the coming week like I did last weekend. But we'll see what happens in the next 1.5 hours. It would be a lot easier and more fun if the right shift key on this keyboard didn't only work intermittently. It hardly ever works when I try to do a capital 't', but I'm not sure if that's just pretty much the only letter I capitalise with the right hand. Other than 'i'. I think it is just the shift key that is breaking, stupid shift key. This weekend, what did I do? Garden Well, I cut the lawn a little on both days, with the scythe, and now it is a lot shorter, and a lot flatter. I think I am getting better though. The lawn looks a lot bigger now as well without all the grass. G and I also cleared the sticks off at some point, maybe that was last weekend and I already talked about it? Anyway, from when the hedge and stuff was cut, there were sticks all over the grass. Actually, they...