Black – Page 7 – Hopefully Creative

Robin Hat

A friend of mine had a hat for larp that I really liked. It was simply four pieces sewed together with the edges folded over. It reminded me of Robin Hood’s hat with the feather missing.

So I asked him whether I could copy the pattern. It was alright and I did, years ago. Now, for some reason I never got around to making it, but I managed to rectify that situation on Thursday.

I found the remains of the first attempt at my woolen cape, where I managed to forget factoring in that necks also require space. I cut the four pieces for my hat and sewed the two quarters, then the seam was sewed flat. One had a bit left open to allow for turning the hats inside out. Once the two halves were finished, I stitched them together turned it right side out and stitched it flat again. It was a pretty easy and quick project and I had a nice warm (and probably water resistant) hat to wear this weekend.

Alternative Shower Caps

My roller derby team has chosen its colours (yay!), and we are getting ready to start playing games against other teams. In honor of this occasion (and because I really hate the pink ones we have now and I found a free pattern online), I decided to make new helmet covers. Helmet covers are large shower cap like things players put on their helmet to signal their position. There are three positions on a team and two of those require a helmet cover. The jammer (who scores the points) has a star on the helmet cover. The pivot (who is the only one eligible to become the jammer) has a stripe on the helmet cover.

The colours that were chosen were yellow and black. So I wanted to make covers in both colour combinations, and make two of each in order to have some spare. It took some time to find the lycra required. On the Rotterdam market I found the black lycra, no nice yellow in sight though. I didn’t want fluorescent yellow, but a more natural yellow. Only one shop sold that and I bought a meter.

I cut out the patterns, and I still have fabric left over for at least three more covers in each colour. Then I sewed them together using a zigzag stitch in black or yellow (which I still had in stash), depending on the base colour. Some elastic was added and hey presto, eight covers. Now we need to play and see if they work or if adjustments are needed. Exciting!

Toothless Gift

A friend of mine seemed to fall in love with my Toothless when I finished it last year. She implied or asked (long time ago, I don’t really remember) she would like one for her birthday, and I decided to try and do that. I failed in having it finished on the birthday, but it is done by now. It took slightly less than a year in little increments, but still a substantial project. I made a few changes compared to my own one. This one has a semi functional mouth with a stomach that can house a fish. His eyes are also a little different and the face does not look the same. However, it is still quite cute, I think.

And here he was, hiding on my chair during construction.

Round Up

So.. It’s been a while, but I’ve actually been doing some small things. I felt too lazy to post them before, but now I feel I should, so here goes.

May! I participated in me-made-may and wore at least one piece of self-made clothing every day in May. I also took pictures for the first half.

Fish! I saw a fish pattern on the internets here and decided to make one. So now there is a fish living in my house.

Scarf! I made a another circle scarf, now without any blue to be able to wear it with my other clothes. This one is grey-white and black-white polkadots.

Hood! So part of May was the annual LARP event that I frequent. On the Friday it was due to start, my central heater thing gave an error, so I spent the afternoon calling and waiting for a plumber-type guy to fix it. While waiting, I decided to make a hood based on this pin. I fudged the measurements a bit because I had a pieces of fabric left over from the graduation dress/blue coat that I decided should fit, even if they weren’t exactly correct. I made the thing in about.. 2 hours? I wore it for the weekend and it was nice.

Others! I’ve been working quite hard on two large projects, a graduation dress and a big plushie that have taken up a lot of time. However, they aren’t finished yet (just hems on the graduation dress though), so I won’t post them yet…

Cut Out Top

So, I found a new website with free patterns on it, always a good time. It’s called On the Cutting Floor, and it has a number of interesting, but mostly simple, patterns. I found one that was really cute, called Cut out top (you can find the tutorial here). The free patterns are size 4, which I hoped would sort of fit me. The pattern was printed, I cut it out, cut out the fabric (the same fabric as the Shrug) and sewed it all together. I did make some changes to the shoulders (squared them a little) and took in the sleeve cap a little. I think I also possibly overlapped the cut out bits a little more.

I still need to wear it out, but I hope that it will be nice and warm and that I will be able to wear it by itself. The length of the body seems quite nice and covering but the sleeves may be a little too long. We will see once I wear it out, wish me luck!

And Now, to Conquer the Galaxy!

Or just a bit of fabric with a night-time print, I guess. How did my conquering of the galaxy come about you may ask? Well, I’m currently waiting for what I hope will be a walking foot to arrive in the mail. I’ve been working on a sort of modified riding jacket from a striped wool-ish fabric. Almost all of the outside has been constructed, but it requires a lining. I cut out the lining, but from experience I know that sewing the particular fabric with the normal sewing machine is hellish. I also know that my overlocker is still being naughty in a corner and refuses to make nice seam. Thus, I’m reduced to having patience until the new foot arrives, which I hope will allow me to sew the lining without much shifting.

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What I needed was a simple, one evening or less project that I could actually finish and that would not end up in the corner. I have more than enough unfinished projects as is, don’t need any more, thank you very much. Enter, the loop-scarf (again). I bought some fabrics a while ago specifically for a loop-scarf project. One was a galaxy print fabric, with a black border print and the same print on white in the middle. This time, I took the easy way out. I made a little snip and just tore it along the grain; easy straight edge and about 100 times as fast as attempting to measure and cut. How I’ve learned from last time!

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I just sewed the long edges together (seam 1), pressed them flat and then open and then flat on the outside again. Next, I was smart enough to pin the black short edges together the right way the first time I tried! Whoo, progress and improvement ladies and gentlemen! Left about 8 cm open and sewed that shut by hand (seam 2). Hey presto, easy peasy scarfy-weasy. I’ve found that I prefer loop-scarves since they don’t hang in my food nearly as much. Who knows, there will probably be a few more in the near future, if I can bang them out in an hour, there’s a lot of space for making.

Shrug?

You may have seen the graduation dress from yesterday. You may also have noticed something missing that is crucial in winter… long sleeves. Now, I left those off intentionally, because I wanted to be able to move my arms (and fabric shortage was a contributing factor). I knew I could turn out a decent shrug in no time – i.e. an evening, since I did the exact same thing last graduation, although that one turned out to be superfluous.

Looking for curtains on the Utrecht fabric market, I stumbled across some very soft, very warm feeling, slightly fuzzy, stretchy, black fabric. There were four meters left, so I bought it all and spent 8 euros total. I figured at the time that I could always use it as a blanket if I couldn’t think of anything to make from it. But Thursday night, the first 50 cm or so turned into a shrug to wear over the graduation dress.

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The pattern I used was the free So Simple Shrug from Craftsy. I used the same pattern last time and had some real problems trying to get it to work. That was mainly due to fabric choice as the jersey was too fluid. This black fabric was more stable and I made some modifications to the pattern so this version turned out a lot better. Modifications included overlapping the seam between pages 4-8 and 9-13 by 5 cm to decrease the sleeve width. The 5 cm decrease was then also implemented along the original pattern on page 4 to decrease the back length. I took an additional triangle out of the center back and the side backs to create a closer fit around the body. I added a band around the outside for a nice finish and hemmed the sleeves with a double row of stitching – for the next version that will be a twin stitched seam to allow for some more stretch.

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This thing more than lived up to my expectations. It was so warm! It felt so soft! It was so nice! I think I may need to make an entire wardrobe out of this stuff. I’ll never be cold ever again! Just live in the black fuzz forever. For now, I may have to settle for wearing more things that allow me to wear a shrug over the top. My conclusion about this heavily modified shrug? Pure perfection!

Tooth-ish

I brought the big Toothless to work in the days after I’d finished it. I felt it unfair to keep his glory all to myself. So people told me he was awesome and adorable, which was nice. One person completely missed a meter long dragon on my desk until another colleague asked why he had not commented on it yet, which was funny. Another colleague said that he wanted one too, and since it was his birthday soon, I’d better go home and start working on it. Well, it was too involved to do that, so I refused, however, I did suggest another option, a dragon (heavily) inspired by this one.

The deadline was today, and I had failed to start until about 11 o’clock at night on Saturday… I used this pattern and cut my pieces from the same fleece blankets as the original Toothless. I took some felt in green, black and white for the eyes, a zipper, thread, scissors, pins and needles and put it all in a ziplock bag. Why? Because I had plans to go to Amsterdam on Sunday to watch two roller derby games. I figured the train would be the perfect place to hand sew the Tooth-ish head together. The train certainly gave me enough time, it took from 8:15 to 12:15 to get to the place I needed to go, with some nice chatting with a grandma for about half of it.

The roller derby games were super awesome, extremely exiting and both games down to seconds left on the period clock and the necessity to do another final jam. We were on the edge of our seats. The Amsterdam B-team lost with 1 point against the Namur B-team, while the Amsterdam A-team won with 8 points against the Namur A-team (10 points scored in that last jam!). It’s so nice to see derby in action from the sidelines instead of the screen. I was very happy I went.

I finished all the sewing in the train/at the game and at home I used iron-on hem tape to affix the eyes. I put some candy in it and wrapped it up. The reaction was nice, so I’m happy! Let’s hope the new owner also likes it! Toothless to rule the world! – So why is this one called Tooth-ish? Because when you open him up, he’s got teeth!

Put a Bow on it

[Update below!]

At some point I saw a girl with a large bow in her hair. I immediately wanted one too. This was… 2 years ago. Now, I know bows are not the most difficult objects to make, but apparently I was to lazy to actually do something about it. Until now!

I grabbed a bit of felt, cut a long strip, cut pointy bits on the two ends, did a bit of folding, a bit of sewing, some more cutting and I had myself a hair bow! Then I figured out that my hair is so dark, that my bow doesn’t actually show up very clearly in it… I may have to remedy that with another 5 minute bow in another colour.

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I put a hair elastic on the back so that I could wear it. This seems to work fairly well. So I’m happy with it. Now I just need to see whether it will swoop down or fall out during the course of the day. On to testing it is!

UPDATE:

I decided that I indeed needed some more, after wearing the black one all day yesterday. So this morning I set out to create two more. One identical to yesterday’s but in red, and a blue bow with a clip on the back and no .. pointy end bits? Here they are!

And here’s how I wore it, for about 2 minutes (never do this in real life….). Also, in case you are wondering, yes, my hair is partly grey; natural highlights or so they say.

Floral Party

Friday was the moment the Floral Party dress went out to play. Floral Party dress came into being because the first batch of students from work graduated. Graduation means a ceremony and a perfect excuse for a new dress. The dress needed three elements: a fabric, a pattern and a sewing machine. All those elements were new to me, and I’ll explain below.

How I wore it

How I wore it

Now, I’m usually not a floral person. In fact, I hadn’t even noticed that the fabric resembled something florally when I bought it. I thought it was just random smudges of colour, silly me. The fabric is stretch and has a seemingly waffle like texture to it, it felt very interesting and not something I’d really used before, so that was new. I had about 2 meters, maybe a little less of the fabric to make work.

Fabric

Second, the pattern. The pattern is called (I think) “Odkodowana sukienka” or “Decoded dress” from Papavero and can be found here. Now, this site is completely in Polish, and my Polish is *cough* very limited. It does however, have some very nice free patterns. There are no real instructions, apart from a link from someone else who made it, and the comment that the sleeves are tight. This was my first time with a Papavero pattern, so that was new too, but with a stretch fabric I figured not much could go horribly wrong. I decided to pick size 36 based on my measurements and sewed it up according to what I figured made the most sense. I added pockets, reduced the length of the back bodice about 2 cm in the centre and took at least 10 cm from the hem.

Front Back

The third element was the sewing machine. You see, I got this very old-looking sewing machine from my friends for my birthday. I didn’t know if it would work, or how it would work. So sometime in the past two weeks, I figured it was high time to get the machine out of the corner it had been stashed in since April. I googled the serial number, eventually finding a site (ismacs.net) that told me that V machines with my number were a type 15K and made in 1909. That’s old! With the model type I could YouTube a movie on how to thread and use it. So I did, and it worked! It might originally be a treadle, but I only used the hand wheel, so it is slow sewing. Very interesting to do for a change.

Singer Cluttered

This is the difference between how I should work (left) and how I actually work (right). Spot the differences..

I used the old singer for all the seams, apart from the waist seam. I figured the waist might need some stretch to be able to go over my head and stuff. The Singer is a pure straight stitch and cannot do the zig-zag necessary for stretchy seams, so I used the old machine for that. I didn’t overlock the edged since it wouldn’t ravel, and I’m not sure my serger is back to a decent stitch again.

Hem Scarf

I even hemmed it with the Singer. First stitching along the bottom edge, then cutting the 10 or so cm excess, and turning in the left over length and stitching again. I like that hem and I think it is either straight, or longer at the back. While I like the dress in general, I do think it benefits from something to break it, so that’s why I’ve added the scarf.

Verdict: another successful and comfortable Graduation Dress!

Tag: Black