Market Research: Fabric-a-Brac Redux

It seems to be the season for funky craft markets. Over the last couple of months I've managed to stumble across three different market events selling a variety of crafty supplies and handmade items, and they've resulted in quite a few successful shopping trips. 

Seeing Spots

I've always envied people who can sew their own clothes. The idea that you can have clothes that fit you exactly and look just like what you want is ridiculously appealing to me. When I first got my sewing machine, I had a crafty night with my friend G and I watched in awe as she sat down with an old pair of jeans, some patchwork material and a pair of scissors and just whipped up a skirt. I've been looking for a longish black and white skirt for a while and haven't been able to find one (why is everything mini-skirt length these days?), so I decided to try making one.

Ice Cream Sandwich

My lovely friend Jade and I have been talking about moving in together for a while. It's been about a year in the making, but two weekends ago she finally moved in, and its been a blast! It seems, though, that having a new housemate is a good excuse to clean your apartment, and so for the last couple of weeks we've been attacking the kitchen and cleaning out the fridge and pantry. In the process I discovered that we have an overabundance of cocoa - apparently every time I've need to bake with it I've just bought some instead of checking if we have any.

Seeing all the cocoa made me want to bake, and we had some walnuts lying around, so I decided to make brownies. My mum has a really good Cadbury cookbook so I borrowed the recipe and a large baking tray and went to town with it. Unfortunately I seem to have taken too large a baking tray - the amount of brownie mixture that was made barely covered the bottom of the tray. The resulting brownies were dense and delicious but they were pretty flat.

Jade took a look at them and declared they looked like biscuits. She then decided that we should make ice cream sandwiches out of them, and my brain practically exploded.

I love ice cream. It's actually physically impossible for me to describe how much I love ice cream, because when my brain thinks about it it goes like this:

s;ahf;oaihefohkjsdlasdlfjkjlksoie!!!ICE CREAM!!!!sadkljhfo;hsj;adf

We'd discovered during our freezer clean-up that not only did we have ice cream in the freezer, but we had two flavours of ice cream. There was vanilla and chocolate with chocolate chunks (mmm, even more chocolate!). We ended up making two-tone ice cream sandwiches, and they were amazing. They're pretty easy to make, and we had fun mushing the ice cream into vaguely rectangular shapes. Next time we do it we might go to some extra effort and freeze the ice cream in square containers first, then cut actual rectangles out of it.

They tasted delicious, and I think I was still on a sugar high four hours later. You'll have to forgive me for the somewhat dodgy photos - I wanted to take some nice ones but I got too excited about actually eating them that I had inhaled them before I could be bothered to cleaning off the plates and lining up the shots!

Unmentionables

After being so excited at receiving my lovely sewing machine for Christmas, I suddenly got caught up with a few knitting projects. Mid March I realised that I'd had it for 3 months, I hadn't sewn anything yet, and I actually really missed it. So in a fit of (hopefully temporary) madness I upended my fabric collection onto my living room floor.

At the end of the night, I ended up with a very messy living room floor, and half a drawstring bag.

My lovely mess. Yes, that's a bottle of shampoo in the background.

For a bit of backstory, Steph asked me a while ago for a small laundry bag with a picture of lingerie on the front that she can use when she's travelling. I figured it'd be nice to have a plain bag with the detail on the front matching the lining. The fabric I'd picked up from the Fabric-a-brac late last year seemed to be just the right size and sort of pattern, so it all worked out pretty well.

Matching lining!

Usually I just dive straight in to these things but I'm glad I actually stopped and had a think first this time round. I ended up cutting out stencils of the underwear before I cut the material, and it's a good thing I did because it took a couple of goes to get the sizing of the undies right compared to the bag.

Sewing the design onto the front of the bag was actually surprisingly doable thanks to the new machine - it has a setting that my old one didn't have that lets you sew small things a lot more easily. I didn't want to fiddle with folding the edges under, so I ironed some interfacing onto the back so it wouldn't fray and just sewed close to the edges of the shapes.

It ended up taking me a few nights and a bit of thinking (making the loop for the drawstring to go through took some thought!) but it was pretty fun to make in the end. In hindsight if I were to make it again I'd probably make it out of thinner material so it'd be easier to wash. I'm pretty sure Steph likes it, though, which is probably the most important thing :)

An Exercise In Patience

The company I work for is obsessed with t-shirts, to the point that one of our customers once joked that we were a t-shirt company masquerading as a software company. Most of the shirts we get made are fairly elaborate and designed in-house for special occasions, but one of our lovely designers decided to draw up unofficial plain text-based ones of memorable things people had said around the office. I really liked the designs, so for Christmas last year I asked her partner which ones they each liked the best, and took a crack at making them.

The original shirt designs - courtesy of @samthebridge

Luckily I found a couple of plain t-shirts at Giordano (although they didn't have a dark blue male one so I had to settle for green), then I wandered off to Lincraft to find t-shirt transfers. There were two types - for white and coloured backgrounds - so I grabbed a pack of the coloured ones.

I started out by printing out a couple of draft versions of the text to get the sizing right. It turned out that choosing the colour was also somewhat difficult - at first I thought a really light grey would be good, but when I tried it out it was too dark. Light cream ended up looking a bit closer to white so I just went with that.

Experimenting with colour and positon

When I bought the transfers, I had assumed that the coloured background type would be a clear sheet that you just printed your design on to and then could cut around roughly and iron on the shirts. To my horror, when I opened the packet the whole sheet was opaque white! I have no idea why they were for 'coloured backgrounds', but it left me with no choice but to cut out all the letters individually.

Oh. My. Goodness. In general I'm not a patient person but I usually get a bit pedantic with getting craft projects perfect. This was really pushing it though. I think all up for the two shirts I was cutting up letters for at least 2 or 3 hours - at least I can say I have excellent cutting skills now. The worst part was the letters like 'e' and 'b' that had bits that needed the middle cut out, and the one 's' I had to cut out was terrible. Whenever I hit an 'l' or a capital 'i' I was over the moon.

I'm about the same size as Sam, and I'd bought myself a shirt along with the two presents I'd gotten, so I was able to position the text in the right place by trying on my shirt with the draft copies I'd made earlier. I just sort've guessed for the other one!

I had a bit of a mishap with the green one - I stuck some paper over the letters and ironed them like the instructions said, but I didn't read all the instructions properly and took the paper off too early (it has to cool down before you peel it off, oops!). Some of the letters came off, so I just grabbed the practice copies of the letters and used them as stencils directly against the t-shirt transfer. It meant that some letters were cream and some were actually white, but given that the shirt said 'Suboptimal', it sort've made sense! I'm glad I did it first though - if I had done the blue one first and lots of letters had been ruined I would've cried.

I'm actually really happy with how they turned out. The edges of the lettering aren't quite perfect and some of them came out a bit wonky but it made the t-shirts feel a bit more personal than if it'd just been printed out by a machine. Plus, while the letters were a huge pain to cut out, not having large expanses of clear t-shirt transfer stuck to the shirt was awesome. As a finishing touch I put our company's logo on the back of the shirts where it appears on our official shirts - it was much easier to cut out than the letters were!

Under Construction

Now that I have my shiny new sewing machine, I'm going to say a fond but relieved farewell to my mum's old machine by sharing with you the last project I made with it. Fittingly enough, it ended up being a Christmas present for my mum.

I've been toying with the idea of making a shoulder bag for a while - I figured the basic construction of it would be the same as a lined pouch, just with an open top and shoulder straps. I wanted to put up a pattern and tutorial, but in my last-minute rush (I started making it at 11am on Christmas morning!) I sort've ran out of time to take photos. I'll share what I have though.

The main difficulty was with the straps. To make a lined item, you sew it inside-out and then flip it round at the end. Figuring out how to sew the straps on so they'd actually be in the right place after flipping it took a lot of thinking about. I eventually worked it out - you sew them on upside down in between the lining and the outside of the bag.

Sewing the strap to the lining - the outside panels got sewn on top of this

I was also worried that the straps wouldn't be able to hold the weight of the bag. In the end I copied some of the green canvas grocery bags I had in the house and attached them with a cross pattern. Then I stitched over the crosses about 3 times for good measure.

Marking out the strap attachment

I lined the underside of the straps, too. Before attaching them to the bag I just sewed the lining and the outside material together along the long sides and the bottom, then turned them inside out. Because they were long and thin it took some coaxing with a ruler, and at times they looked somewhat inappropriate...

After the straps were on, the rest of the process was pretty straightforward. The bag itself came out really nicely - I like how the leaves are only at the bottom of it so they look like they're growing up towards the top. Mum uses it as a toiletries bag now though, so maybe I should've lined it with plastic!

With A Little Help From My Friends

I've been blessed to have the most amazing people in my life, and their support of my hobbies has been beyond belief (having a conversation with someone who's sitting there knitting must be a somewhat off-putting experience). As I've said before, my family's always put a lot of importance on presents, so with Christmas in December and my birthday in February the new year always sees me with a lot of new stuff. This year was no exception - amongst some pretty accessories and clothes (thanks Steph!) I ended up with some awesome craft-related presents.

For my birthday, my lovely friend and soon-to-be housemate got me a new knitting book. I always find pattern books a bit hit and miss but this is more of an encylopedia than anything, and it has a stitch dictionary at the back full of cable and lace patterns that I'm just itching to try out.

I love knitting in the round. I can't stand sewing at the end of a knitting project, and circular needles mean that you just don't have to seam a sleeve or two. The only problem is that every project seems to call for a different sized needle with a different length of cable, and buying all the different combinations individually has ended up being somewhat expensive. My parents got me an interchangeable knitting set - it's from Knit Pro, and it's brilliant. There are eight different sized needles that screw on to four different lengths of cable, so effectively it's stopping me from having to buy 32 different sets of needles!

Last but definitely not least, Nick got me a new sewing machine. I can't actually express how excited I was. Up until now I've been using my mum's old one which has been a bit unreliable. My machine's from Singer, but I'm not giving a link to it because I'm too scared to Google it - my mum took one look at it and went "that looks expensive!". It's so awesome to not have to stop and unpick mistakes that the machine's made, and it has a whole range of stitches. My favourite one so far has been the overlocking stitch - it makes edges look overlocked without actually needing an overlocker.

New machine!

Up close and personal

The huge range of fancy stitches

I haven't been blogging much because I've been playing with my new toys, but keep your eyes peeled for some new posts soon!