Hopefully Creative

From Clay to Silver – Part 1

My aunt is visiting us this week, she’s come by boat from England and is staying with us until tomorrow night. Last week she asked me if I would like it if she brought her silver clay with her. Silver clay is a strange substance made of 92 (I think) percent silver, some water and some binder. So it looks and feels like clay but is ridiculously expensive. Anyway so she came along and brought some here so we could play with it.

So first we had to decide what we were going to make, I got my little bag of jewellery stuff and started looking at the things I liked. Eventually after looking at my stuff and liking the following three (the two right ones are the same but front and back). I selected the most right one to try and see if I could make something similar and then we started playing with fimo.

I have a big box of fimo and I’ve done quite a lot of things with fimo before, so I started playing with making roses. Eventually I settled on a rose design with a sort of loop around it, like a rose in the middle of the hanger to the right. Once we unpacked the silver clay, I found out that it is really sticky but also dries out extremely quickly. In the end I tried wrapping cling film around my fingers and that sort of worked. The first attempts at the rose were not so good, my usual technique of squishing bits flat into petal shapes failed miserably because of the stickiness. So in the end we decided to do a long petal in the middle and once I had that I added three petals to the sides. So now I had a rose. (Saying it like this makes it sound very easy but sometimes it was tough)

So then we attempted the snakelike thing around it, but the clay dried out so we couldn’t make the loop at the top, so we tried again, and again eventually it worked and we were very relieved, they even fit together nicely in the end. Well that was the first night. We needed another night to sand it, stick it together, ‘glue’ it and sand some more.

But that is a story for another day (say tomorrow if I remember writing it). I think I’m liking this new craft!

Spring Cleaning

So I haven’t been very active in the creative field. However the past Sunday was spent clearing up my sewing room. It was a complete mess to begin with so something really needed to be done. And it’s even Spring so I’m allowed to call this post Spring cleaning. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that I think!

I now have my fabrics neatly organised in boxes on their sides so they look little closets, I put all my notions in a cabinet and found out that I had way more than I though. I finally figured out that the box of buttons I thought I’d lost was just in the bottom of a bigger box in the corner. I even organised all my patterns in a big catalogue binder thing and now they are not all over the place and all the pieces are kept together. I found some (read; a lot) of projects that I did not remember I had in the works, like a jacket and a long dress, a frog dress that only needs to be hemmed and much more. I really should finish those projects someday.

I’m actually really proud of me because I’m not much of a neatfreak, I’m very bad at clearing up. I think I just like to have all my stuff surrounding me.

However the organising has helped me already because I needed some pins and could find them instantly and I figured I was going to make a friend a birthday present. I knew which fabric I wanted to use and I only had to search a little to find it! I’m making a sort of pouch with falling ‘fall’-leaves embroidered on in fall colours (red, orange, yellow, brown, some greens) and I’m really liking it. Too bad I accidentally spilled some lemonade on it and now it’s in the sink, where I’m hoping it will come out. So I’ll take some pictures once it is finished.

I hope this weekend will bring me closure for some projects. Enjoy yourselves!

Summer!

I know it is only April and that we are officially still in Spring, but I think the weather in the Netherlands disagrees. This Easter was really really hot, so I spent Saturday in the garden reading books I got from the library. Because it was finally hot enough to wear something without sleeved I pulled my embellished top from the closet.
Last year I bought a tube top, I don’t like tube tops because they have no straps and I’m never sure if it’s going to stay up. But this one was red, and had a marvelous colour, and I figured, I can always attach straps. So I did, I made yoyo’s (basically circles of fabric, gather the edge and sew them together) and attached them to the top. They are not perfect bra strap hiders but they are ok enough for me to wear it.

Here’s the picture, what do you think?

And here the straps (which is what it is all about right?)

Hopefully more interesting crafty things next week. But my internship together with studying a course at the open university makes my life pretty busy. So I guess it is wait and see.

By the way.. Happy Easter!

Blouse

So I finally took a picture. Today I got people telling me I looked like a cook in this blouse. I don’t really care because I think it’s nice and I liked making it. I’m proud that it worked so that’s good, I assume.

Well here it is:

Excuse all the wrinkles, the second button from the top is actually white/pinkish, the rest is all dark.

I worked a bit on my mothers skirt this week. So now I have most of it in one piece. Just need to put a zipper in it (the most horrible part of all), hem it and make sure it fits. Wish me luck on that.

I’m going to enjoy my blouse out in the wild now.

Vintage Pattern Blouse

So I started this project of making a blouse from a vintage pattern (Simplicity 1236) in a white linen ages ago. But at a certain moment I was so confused by the instructions that I sort of gave up, put it in a drawer and looked back at it once in a while.

But yesterday I finally had to courage and enthusiasm to try it again. And this time, after again carefully reading the instructions I finally figured out what they wanted with the collar. As you can probably (hopefully) see on the picture though, the bust area of the blouse is supposed to be really baggy, which personally I thought looked really terrible. So I took the darts up about 10 cm or so, so now it’s rather more fitted and I like it much more. I took some buttons that I got somewhere and put those on, and I think the effect is rather nice. The wonderful button making foot and options of my sewing machine were also used gratefully. I even closed of all raw seams, so I’m quite proud of myself.
I’ll show the result later when I feel like taking pictures, and have actually ironed the thing. Anyways, I’m proud of myself for finally finishing it. Only a few more unfinished projects to go.

And I think I’m going to start on one that has been in my head for a while, because I finally figured out a way to make it work. I’ll keep you posted.

Creativity ruled today, I hope to see more of that.

New Skirt Project

My mom has given me an assignment. Not too long ago my parents and me were visiting the fabric market in Utrecht. My mom had been impressed with my skirt not too long before so we went in search of a nice fabric so I could make a similar skirt for her.

Eventually we found one, it’s nice and spring ish, with red, white and other nice colour threads. I’ll post a picture later.

I’ve finally started trying to figure out how to make it work for her. I hope it’s going to work, but I don’t know yet because the problem is that she has an apple type shape, and normal sewing magazines don’t support that figure. So I am going to have to grade 4 sizes down from waist to hips. I guess it’s going to be a lot of fitting basically.

I’ve cut the pattern and I’m pinning it onto the lining, and tomorrow I’ll sew the waistband lining together and start fitting. But I’m not feeling that tonight, so that will have to wait.

Anyway, enjoy!

Pictures

So yesterday we took pictures of my parents and me in our Carnavals outfits. I think they did not want to be on the internet with their faces on, so I blurred those, but the suits are still visible. So my dad is on the left. He looks a bit like a bird especially from the back.

And this is a picture of my pirate costume. The sword that I have in my hands is a LARP sword, but it’s a little to expensive to possibly lose, so I’ve made a fabric one that’s really wonky. But it’s the idea that counts, right?

Ah well, I hope we will have fun tonight.

Carnaval Outfit

So today I was trying to make my own Carnavals outfit. I was quite inspirationless but eventually I settled on pirate. I know very not original, but I wasn’t very creative the last couple of days and I couldn’t think of anything else. Well actually I could, I wanted to go as a dinosaur/dragon, and make myself something like these below. I’d make the right one with the left one’s head. Because the left one’s head looks like Toothless and Toothless is awesome! Anyways, no inspiration or green fabric, bye bye dragon idea (pictures from here and here).

So now I’ve made a white shirt with drawstrings along the top. Based on this pattern, but I made long sleeves, thought that was more piraty. And I’m wearing a black fake leather underbust corset over that. I’m wearing a similar blue coverall under it and black boots. The coveralls are so big that I’ve got poofy pants and I fit in with the rest of the group, so perfect. I hope it’ll be fun tomorrow. We’ll see.
I’ll post a picture once I’ve managed to fit the camera to the computer.

Enjoy!

Corset

Not very long ago I added another project to my to do list: a corset. I’ve made one from the Dutch pattern journal Knipmode, and it looks really nice. But a couple of days ago I found a pattern for an underbust corset and instructions at BurdaStyle, for free. .
So currently I’m making a muslin out of some funky children’s curtainish fabric. It’s got pink, orange and yellow stripes (quite wide, I’d say 20 cm?) and green frogs and red ladybugs. It’s really cute but not something you really want your clothes made out of. I think I might have printed it out incorrectly because it seems really small. But we’ll see when it’s finished.

Carnaval Ready

Today I finished my fathers suit for Carnaval too (more on Carnaval here). I’ll try and photograph them in it Monday. I actually quite like them, they are quit fun too look at. And it’s the type of thing that you only wear for Carnalval-ish occasions. It did wreak havoc on my room, everything was covered in pink, red, green and blue fuzz. It took me quite some time with the special stairs attachment of the vacuum cleaner to get my floor looking dark blue again, and not like some weird fluorescing yeti skin. But I’ve finished them in time, and I even have some of the fuzzy fabric left, so maybe some slippers or another costume for next year can be added to the project list.

I’m now going to continue studying for my driving test, the rules and regulations.