50 Shades of Green

I am lucky enough to have friends and colleagues who know what I can do with fabric, so I receive regular donations to play with. One lady gave me a year's worth of work dresses to refashion, on the proviso that I did take them apart and make them into something else. Not everyone wants to see their unique, specially-created frocks walking around the city on someone else.

I divided the bag of dresses into two piles: very green, and green with some blue. All but one dress were cotton fabrics: the single silk one had faded quite a lot, and it can be hard to sew fabrics of different weights together. It became my first refashion: I chopped the top off, sewed it closed, and it is now my overlocker cover! As green is my favourite colour, I was pretty happy with this!

Mum gave me these cute buttons, too.

Onto the pile of greens. I sat in front of some TV shows and picked apart all of the seams. I ended up with some odd-shaped pieces:

But I had fabric panels the full length of the dresses to work with in the end as well. I wanted to do strip-patterns for both piles of fabric, so I took over the floor. I decided that I wanted a skirt, so I laid all of the strips out on the floor and rearranged them until I was happy.

The crocodile-skin print is from an Indigenous organisation in the Northern Territory called Merrepen Arts. It's an amazing layered print, and they have produced it in a fabulous bright blue and orange combination as well.

The strips were already tapered due to the construction of the previous dresses. So I overlocked all of the edges and sewed them together. It formed a sort of fan shape.

I left the existing hems on the bottom of all of the panels, as I didn't mind if they didn't match up exactly. You can already see odd seams and shapes on the panels from the dresses, where there were darts, inserts, etc.

I overlocked the top of the fabric to seal it. Then I salvaged a zip from one of the dresses and put it at the back of the skirt, joining the back seam together. I realised after I had sewn it all that I should have shortened the zip, as it reaches two-thirds of the way down the skirt! Very easy to get in and out of though :)

Then the waist band: stretch jersey fabric, made into a sleeve for double-thickness that makes it firmer.

I loved that most of the donated dresses had cap sleeves on them, which make great pockets!

I've also started putting loops on my work skirts and dresses (I like wearing colour), so that I can attach my access pass. Lanyards annoy me, and the clip on the pass digs into my skin.

The final '50 Shades of Green' skirt:

Patchwork and Quilting

I still have the first "quilt" I made when I was 4 years old. I used to sit under the table when my mum went to patchworker's group, and I remember playing with scraps of fabric.

A couple of years ago my family decided to get together and make friendship quilts. This is when you design a quilt made of blocks or sections, and give a block to everyone in your group to make so that the final product is made by everyone. You can be as vague or specific as you like with your preferences ie. colour, style, fabrics.

Most of our quilts had specific patterns as well as colour schemes.

The blue square in the middle of this block was the starting point and the colour that we had to match. We also had to put our names in the middle.

This rather complicated jigsaw puzzle pattern had to be shades of green. My brother came fabric shopping with me on that day, hence the dinosaurs!

One cousin asked us to give her our favourite saying or verse. 'The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all' is my favourite, from Disney's movie Mulan.
We were also given four fabrics that we could use to design a border for the quote. I added some extras that I thought matched.

This was the hardest block for me: a colour gradient of 5x5cm squares! My last row was a tad bit wonky...

I really liked all the teal colours that I used in this block:

This is a piece of a very large picture of flowers. It was hand appliqued (stitched) down.

This quilt was based on lace agate stones.

This was probably the simplest design, but it had to be right because you can see the seams under the white!

The quilt that I gave everyone to do was a fractured landscape: I took a photograph and cut it into four pieces. I only gave everyone a piece, not the whole photo, and I gave it to them in black and white. They had to create their block in whatever colour they wanted. Everyone guessed that it was a bird, which gave them some direction. The results were quire spectacularly different though!

This was one of the blocks that I did myself, with scraps of Indigenous prints:

I want to make four little quilts from the sets of blocks, with black binding around the edges and ties on each side so that I can hang them in different combinations. Hopefully that will happen this year!!

Refashioning Clothes - Easy to do ones

Do you ever just get sick of wearing something?

You've had it for a few years, it's still in good condition - too good to throw out - but you're over it. You can change it!

Some of the easiest refashions are very simple. A lady in America who goes by Refashionista has been my inspiration the last few years - she does amazing things with clothes!

I regularly add things to my shirts. This includes making small shirts bigger. I was SO disappointed when I ordered this online and it was far too small. Not an XL womens at all!

I took out the seams on both sides, including the bottom join of the sleeves because they were too small as well. I had some t-shirt fabric leftover from another project, and I deliberately used the white instead of black to change the look of the shirt. I own a lot of black t-shirts.

Another easy shirt refashion is adding length, like the lace did at the bottom of this shirt.

I like adding embellishments, either for practicality to cover holes or bra straps, or for fun. I added all of the buttons to the top below (which also used to be a kimono).

Dresses can be hard to refashion, although adding straps is a very easy conversion. I detest strapless dresses, they just won't stay up. But I loved this one:

So that I could wear it, I added straps.

Originally I just added the black straps, but they weren't thick enough. So I added the red band. And then the white cotton lace, because the red band looked out of place. This was the final edit:

I wore the dress to our cousin's wedding, and loved it.. apart from my husband telling me that it gave me back dimples! 

It's a tad it too tight at the top. So it's hanging in the cupboard now, waiting for me to get around to taking the zip out of the back and making the top slightly larger. Not as easy a refashion as the ones above, but still very do-able!

Medieval Gambeson Costume

My cosplay buddy does an amazing array of fun things, including medieval longsword fighting.

As a novice, apparently, you aren't allowed to have armour or a real sword to start with. But you can wear armour padding (and I would think this would be a good idea anyway).

So my friend looked into it and discovered that she didn't like what was on offer. She asked me if I could make her one. After some research of my own, I figured that I could.

It's called a gambeson. Wikipedia says that a gambeson (or aketon or padded jack or arming doublet) is a padded defensive jacket, worn as armour separately, or combined with mail or plate armour. Gambesons were produced with a sewing technique called quilting. Usually constructed of linen or wool, the stuffing varied, and could be for example scrap cloth or horse hair. 

My instructions were:

• thigh-length
• as thick as I could make it
• full-length sleeves
• underarm holes
• ties up the front
• stiff, stand-up collar

This picture from Pinterest was the template that we both decided on, but in blue:

To further complicate it, the materials had to look like they would have been available in Medieval times, as the gambeson would be worn at events where there were rules about appearance. 

But added to that: people were going to be hitting this fabric with swords. How do you make something that tough?!

I pondered this and decided on a type of denim for the outer layer. Denim is made from cotton, and this was finer than that used for jeans. It passes the test on a visual level.
Two layers of wadding in the middle.
And a third layer attached to pre-quilted, soft denim for the inside.

This was as much as would pass through my Janome machine, which is not a commercial sewing machine.

You can get patterns for gambesons, but I'm using patterns less and less as I find that they don't fit people's bodies the way that the stupid, annoying pieces of paper say they should.

So I cut a paper pattern off a slim-fitting coat that I owned (she is smaller than me) and started pinning. 
I laid out all four layers and pinned them all over with safety pins so there was less chance of movement, and then laid the pattern over this. My scissors didn't like cutting through that much fabric and cotton, but it was better than cutting out four individual layers and trying to make them match up.

I made the garment in 6 different pieces:

• collar
• back panel
• front left panel
• front right panel
• left arm
• right arm

I cut the big pieces out first, to make best use of my materials, and then cut the sleeves out on the leftovers. There was still big enough "scraps" to make both sleeves and the collar.

I quilted the pieces together (like a sandwich) with parallel lines, all vertical except for the horizontal midriff section on the body of the coat. 

Every edge was overlocked, using the stitch on my sewing machine (I didn't have an overlocker at this stage). I then bound all of the edges with bias tape that I made myself as well, to seal them properly. Then it was a matter of joining the pieces together.

There is a gap from mid-waist down to knees, so that the coat will wrap around to the back and fit better. This also prevented the material bunching up too much when the side laces were tightened. You can see the wrap in the photo above.

There are laces up both sides of the gambeson, to make it more fitted and pull it in tighter. You don't want the tip of a sword catching in anything. I made all of the ties with twice doubled-over strips of navy cotton bias tape.

The closures on the front made me swear. It took me months to find bar and loop closure that I was happy with, that emulated bone. But when I tried to sew them on my machine snapped several needles trying to get through the glue in the middle of the them! So I gave up and put ties on instead.

The wrap around to one shoulder was unplanned, but it worked out for the best. She can leave the top couple of ties undone to walk around normally, but tie it all the way up to spar.

The final touch was a blessing. Armour back then was often inscribed with crosses or blessings, for the protection of the wearer. My friend is a European Knight-in-training, so I wanted it to be as relevant as possible. I decided on a variation of a bible verse:
But he walked through them, all the way.
It's from Luke 4:30, when Jesus was attacked and the mob tried to throw him off a cliff, but he just walked away and no-one could touch him.

It sounded like the kind of thing you might associate with knights and battle. I wrote it on a scrap of white with a fabric marker, and left the edges of the material ragged, like it was old cloth. I sewed it on the inside of the back with a cross.

It broke a few needles, this project, but I was very happy with how it turned out:

Final product on the woman herself (who wishes to remain anonymous he he he): 

Owl, really?

Corny, I know, but I love owls!

When I visited an art fair one day this fabric jumped out at me and demanded that I buy it. There was 3 metres of it and I knew that I wanted to wear as much of the fabric as I could.

I have a dress pattern that I mostly just use the skirt part of now: it is for a double-layer skirt, with full underskirt and split overskirt.

This is another skirt based on the same pattern, that I have made with a high-low hem: 

However for the underskirt I only had white fabric at home and was trying to work through my stash at the time. 

So I pulled out the fabric dye.

I dye in the washing machine. It works great. And sometimes freaks housemates out. And with this fabric they may have had a point... 

The first lot of things I dyed on the day were done with blue, for another project. 

Two things that were a bit of oops:

• I didn't wipe down the top inside of the machine afterwards (which I do now), so when I put the Apple Green in, there were still spots of blue in the mix
• I didn't pre-wet my fabric before I threw it in the machine with the dye.

Now, I was really happy with my unintentional result, but the fabric colour came out uneven and had spots, patches and runs of odd little colours from where the blue and green mixed:

Once I had washed both of my fabrics, I laid them out with the pattern pieces on the floor and cut away:

Something that saves you hours of tedious machine stitching is an overlocker (I have a Janome). You whiz all of your raw edges and joins through it and your fabric won't fray on you.

This pattern has a zip in the back. I joined both layers of the skirt together before I put the zip in, rather than adding the overskirt afterwards.

Then it was a matter of hemming the bottom and finishing the waist band.

I sometimes regret not putting an additional waist band on this skirt, because it can dig in a bit. The original pattern was designed to attached to the bodice of the dress, of course.

So what I did was fold the top over and stitch it down, so that it was comfortable. I also added a velcro closure at the top of the zip, as the last thing you want is your zip undoing itself. Sometimes velcro digs into your skin less than buttons.

I took the front of the skirt in after a few weeks, as I wanted it to sit up higher. I added a cute flower button to hide the stitching.

The final product is here, as bright as I could have ever hoped for. Green is also my favourite colour! 

All dressed up and only work to go to!

I have since taken this skirt up by about 10cm, as I was finding that I was tripping on the stairs at work and nearly breaking my neck.

The great thing about knowing how to sew (thank you, wonderful mother!) is that these kind of alterations are easy as.

Until next time ;)