I think that secretly I have always wanted one of those cool old fashioned sewing blogs with the shitty pictures and the first post from like 2003. I, however, am a being of infinite wisdom so I just straight up forgot about this whole website. blog. thing. This was not helped by the fact that my school wifi blocked the entire neocities platform for some reason. BUT. I have since left school. And I remembered that this exists.
You know what that means.
I'm going to try and maintain a sewing blog.
Now, chances are that I won't be very good at it. I am very, very bad at maintaning things. That aside, I just plain old don't sew very much. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my machine is currently broken. But I think I'm going to try. And I hope that I enjoy it. And I hope that, should anyone both stumble across my site and then continue stumbling through to this ever so top-secret page, you enjoy it too.
Who knows how I'm going to organise it though.
Yes, this is how I have decided to organise this page. Although I might be forced to change the quote unquote "organisational system" at a later date when I have made enough posts for the current method to become unwieldy, should that mythical date ever arise.
Also, mad congrats to me for uploading the first, like, proper entry within a week of creating the intial page. Pretty pleased with that. Do Not expect it to last.
Anyway, enough of my rambling and onto the actual sewing stuff!
As you can probably tell from the title, the project that I am sharing with you today was a mending one. It was also an embroidery project, because I wanted it to look cool and pretty. It takes me a figurative ice age to complete things, so I started this project an embarrassingly long time ago. As such, my memory is a little foggy about the details of this project, and I hope you can find within yourself to forgive me for it. The repair project in question was done to a pair of light grey pyjama bottoms with little pandas that I am rather fond of and have done less ambitious repairs on in the past. For some reason pyjama bottoms always seem to wear out quite quickly on me, which is very annoying, especially as I just plain old don’t like throwing clothes away.
This time the pyjama bottoms had developed three holes, all quite near each other. Two were small and manageable, but one was much larger and more complex. If I recall correctly, the larger hole was actually a cluster of holes that had sprung up around a previous repair. I could've done something more simple and less time consuming to fix them all, or even just thrown the garment away, but inconviently I was Inspired and decided to turn the little holes into flowers. The petals were just lazy daisy stitches, which is appropriate as the flowers were just lazy daisies. I also covered the big hole with a patch of some grey scrap fabric I already had, with a matching one on the inside of the garment.
Here's a picture of the finished thing:
I'm not really sure what else to say. This is my first time doing a project write up like this, as I'm sure you've guessed. I hope you enjoyed reading this post anyway. See you next time, whenever that is.
Apparantly having this blog is like motivating to me or something, because here is another project that I started ages ago and am now writing up to share with you. I'm really proud of myself, and I'm also really proud that I did the majority of this in like two days which is just straight up impressive for me. I also have more pictures this time, which is good, except for the fact that some of them really show of the utter potato quality of my phone camera.
This time the thing getting embroidered was a black bag. I've had it for several years now and it is pretty much utterly perfect. It's just the most excellent length for me when I wear it cross-body, and it's not too long when I'm wearing it uncrossed(?) either. Unfortunately I also bought it at the height of my Supernatural phase so it also had some random mystical type symbol that I thought looked cool at the time. I no longer think it looked cool, which is why I stitch-ripped the symbol off and replaced it with embroidery of my own.
I wanted the finished embroidery to be a flowering almond branch. I don't remember exactly why but I imagine that it was largely because a) I thought it'd be pretty easy to do, and thus within my limited embroidery skils, and b) I have a long standing fondness for Victorian Flower Language, and flowering almond means hope, which is always nice.
Anyway, I started by doing the branch. I used a nice shade of brown embroidery thread and a weird combination of running and backstich to basically bash it into the shape I wanted. I think it turned out pretty alright, although maybe a little curvier than I might have wanted for almond branch. Here's an in-progress picture of it:
After I'd finished the branch I went back and added in the blossoms. I used two different shades of pink embroidery thread to do this, to try and add depth of colour or something. The blossoms were just french knots, which I kept forgetting how to do, but they were pretty easy once I'd properly gotten the hang of them. Here's another in-progress picture that I took to show a friend when I was part way through the first colour:
All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how this project turned out. The embroidery is quite pretty and readily clockable as some kind of blossoming or flowering plant, even if most people's first thought wouldn't neccessarily be flowering almonds. This is a win. I am also very pleased to have the bag itself back in action, since it's been stuck on my sewing desk for ages. Here's the finished project for you to judge for yourself though:
And a close up, since the previous photo isn't very good and the two-tone thing doesn't show up:
Wow, all of those photos are a bit shit, and that first one is pretty annoyingly shaped. I need to replace my current phone anyway, so I should probably make sure that my next phone has a better camera, especially if I plan to keep doing this blog thing. See you next time, if photo quality hasn't put you off!
So! Long time no see! I wasn't lying when I said I can be bad at updating things! It's been so long that I got a new phone with a much better camera, but that phone got water damaged and broke so I had to get another one after that with an equally shit camera. Whoops! I also got a job, which, yay for being a grown up.
But! I persist! I fixed my sewing machine and I've been feeling more like sewing recently (an emotion probably at least partially inspired by that new(ish) Morgan Donner video on making a patchwork waistcoat which was just magnificent) and so, honestly almost a month ago, when I went bowling for a friends birthday one Sunday, I decided to make them a little guy as part of their present.
The pattern was one I'd seen on Tumblr a while ago but I was pretty confident I could find it again. So, a couple of days before I wanted the little frog to be ready I went digging and found it again. The pattern was created by boigameista on tumblr, and as this goes to the presses, a very good and thorough step by step guide is their pinned post. After downloading the pattern I didn't do anything for several days because I am a master procrastinator.
The night before going bowling I found the fabric I wanted (some scraps of some fun fabrics left over from when my parents were choosing either a sofa fabric or a curtain fabric, I honestly don't remember) and cut out the pattern. I then went to sleep.
Here is a picture of the little pattern pieces on their little squares of fabric:
I did that early the next morning, AKA the day I planned to give it to my friend and I think I pretty much just cut the shapes out and then put everything in a bag to do on the train. I did manage to get it all done in time, thank you very much trains, and also train stations. Unfortunatly, however, I didn't get any pictures.
Okay, I am going to level with you, dear reader, because I love you. I wrote half of this blog post a fortnight ago on what I thought was a day off, got summoned into work unexpectedly then went on holiday. I have edited what I'd already written and I will endeavour to finish this, because I love you, but I a)don't really remember it so well now, and b)just am not so hyped about it as I was when I started writing this. Here is Frogbert in his finished form:
My friend liked him very much, and I did enjoy both the sewing and writing the first part of the blog post. I think that after I failed to finish it in one sitting I just lost the vibes and felt a bit guilty. Which is, in turn, not very good for generating the right vibes lol! Anyway, this has been a little more melancholy than I meant it to be whoops. I hope to see you next time before to long and for something a little more consistently upbeat.