Mother – Hopefully Creative

Sewing for Someone Else

Sometimes ones mistakes can be put to good use for someone else.

Somewhere in the midst of lockdown, I impulse purchased a few lengths of fabric from the internet. When they arrived, I found that one of them had quite a lot of pink in it. I’m not a pink person, I hate pink with a passion, so I wasn’t going to use much of that fabric for me. However, my mother is a colour person. Bright colours are definitely her preference, so I decided to suggest making her a thing from that fabric. She was a bit scared because choosing patterns is not something she does regularly.

When she dropped by at one point, we started looking through pattern magazines and settled on the pattern. We chose Pattern 14 from Simplicity Naaimode 31, also known as New Look 6298. Measured her and decided on the size. I sewed it up and brought it back to her and it was.. very large. Not very appealing although the fabric looked good on her. So off for a second try I went, unpicking the raglan sleeves and neckline and took it all in. Upon return it looked much better. We’ll see if she ever picks it to wear, but even if she doesn’t, I had fun making it.

Now on that first visit, I also showed her the trial version I made for the party pantsuit. It looked absolutely horrible on me, but it was made of a stretchy fabric. She found it quite nice and put it on. It looked a whole lot better on her. So we decided that I would finish it and put a band of ribbing in for a waistband. That way my trial version would actually end up being worn (potentially). It’s nice to see someone else enjoy your failures by getting use of them.

No such thing as Easter without eggs

Therefore, I insist on having an egg search in our front garden every year. I make my mother get up ‘early’ on Easter Sunday and hide some painted boiled eggs and small chocolate eggs in the front garden. However, in order to do this, one first needs… painted eggs! So that’s what we did just now, me and my mom painted some eggs.

I assume many will find this a childish habit, as I am almost 22 and still want to paint and search for eggs, but it’s tradition, and I really enjoy it. By the way, so do our neighbours from across the street. They generally come and watch us search and my mother hide the eggs (in opposite order of course).

Anyways here’s this year’s batch:

I shall describe what you see. On the first picture are all our eggs, we planned to do 10, but one broke during boiling. The ones on the right are my mum’s (the blue, green, red, orange and another blue squiggly ones). I generally paint with a plan, a bad plan usually but a plan. So the top one is a ladybug-egg, its black face is a little more visible in the right picture. The one beneath that is the night sky with the moon. It’s blue I know, but black also didn’t really work, and I wanted blue. The one next to that is called “Nature”, it has a red flower on the one side, grass on the bottom, a tree on the other side (see the right picture, where I turned it, just for your viewing pleasure) and the sun at the top. The bottom one was less planned, it’s basically an egg with semi-geometrical shapes on it, a star, an 8ish thing (I had no more ideas), a circle, a triangle and a bow tie. Well at least we had fun painting right.

My brother said he didn’t want to go search for eggs unless my mum was wearing a bunny suit, so I plan on making her a set of ears in a minute, that would be fine too, he said. Also to give the neighbours even more fun on their Easter Sunday morning.

Wish me luck, I hope to find all this year.. last year we lost 2 chocolate ones.

Jewellery

So the visit to town on Wednesday landed me some other goodies too. I’ve been looking for some big red beads since my mother showed me her necklace.

I made the red plaid skirt some time ago and found that wearing a black/grey is turtle neck with it and that necklace looked really nice. So I’ve wanted to make one for myself. I couldn’t really find any nice red (and affordable) beads, so I opted to go with purple. To add some difference I added some black beads and some white swirly ones. I really like the finished look.

The other bits I made were two earrings for my mother. She wanted some over the top earrings to wear during samba performances. So they needed to be in the samba colours, yellow and blue. However, we found it was difficult to find some in the shop. So when we were in the bead shop, we got two square donuts and two blue beads for in the donuts, to make her some earrings. I had some feathers at home and some other bits and bobs like the hooks and something to secure the feathers with. And within 5 minutes my mom had some over the top samba earrings.

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!

Tag: Mother