Skirts in progress

I haven’t often sewn with stretch fabrics before, but I’m refashioning some t-shirts into skirts at the moment and it’s been quite the learning curve. While I do have an overlocker/serger, I have yet to master it and, if I’m to be honest, it scares me a bit! So I’ve been making the skirts on my regular Janome and, after much swearing and frog stitching and tension adjustment (both mine and the machine’s), I think I have the hang of it. The Janome does NOT like to be rushed when dealing with stretch fabric, and while my lead foot is itching to put the pedal to the carpet and go for it the resulting tangle of thread and the throat plate gobbling up the fabric is an effective deterrent.

As most of my fabric supply is upcycled and has had a previous life, some of it has small marks or faults. In order to integrate those, or at least make them less a focal point for the eye, I decided to add more marks of my own with paint. The last little bit of winter and the beginning of spring brought a spell of warm, sunny days and I was able to lay out my patchworked skirts (still flat pieces rather than garments) on the backyard lawn and hurl my paint about with abandon (and unscathed carpet). I’d forgotten just how much fun it is to throw paint at stuff – lovely, drippy, spattery globs of red and black and white. Dripped from brushes, sticks and containers; flicked with a toothbrush; hurled with an overarm bowl from a loaded paintbrush. I smiled from ear to ear, managed to smear paint on my feet and face and fingers. What is it about making a glorious mess that makes me so happy? Even cleaning up my brushes and containers (and skin), a chore which usually sees me gritting my teeth, was a breeze.

I managed to eke three skirt panels from six t-shirts and some smallish scraps of cotton interlock/jersey, with a few pieces left over to seed the next round of skirt fashioning. One has five large wedge shaped pieces from the printed fronts of t-shirts to make a slightly flared skirt, the second has regular grid of patchwork, and the third is a crazed mix of block shape and size. Guess which I like best? Yep, crazed 🙂

The results please me, and I now have a growing collection of op-shopped/gifted t-skirts to chop and sew. And more plans for throwing paint in a rainbow of colours.

Brain training

I wasn’t sure I remembered how:

How to blanket stitch, that is. It has been, hmm, several years since I embroidered anything. I was a bit vague about how to form a blanket stitch and, yes, I could have googled it or looked up the instructions in my library of craft books, but where’s the challenge in that? It felt good to give my brain a metaphorical stretch and make it work. I had a couple of false starts: I had to unpick a really ugly tangle of embroidery thread that looked nothing like blanket stitch (more like a spider web on mind altering pharmaceuticals), and frog stitch again when I forgot how to hold the hoop and succeeded in stitching the front of the skirt I’m working on to the back. Oops! Perhaps I should have left the front attached to the back and gone for a very avant garde look…

The skirt is an upcycled cotton one from the op shop, to which I have added handpainted flowers in various shades of pink and purple textile markers. The flower centres are circles cut from my quilting fabric stash, appliqued with the aforementioned buttonhole stitch and basting spray, the centres and stitches also in varying pinks and purples. Love purple! The basting spray had slipped my mind until I was starting this project, entailing a search (and slightly destroy) mission to locate it. Hey, I needed to do some rearranging/tidying in the craft cupboard anyway 🙂

Fun with shoes

Last year I bought a plain white pair of sneakers, cheap. I was looking at them as a canvas, not footwear, even though the side benefit is that I get something new to wear. I hauled out the textile markers and went to town. A new obsession was born.

 

These are size AU8.

I found four more pairs of sneakers in the op shop (new and unworn – so many belongings, unwanted, unused, end up in the op shop. I dread to think how much more just gets sent straight to landfill) and painted them, too. A friend fell in love with my original pair and purchased the second pair I made.

Size AU7.

Painting shoes is kind of addictive. I’ve seldom looked closely at shoes in ops shops, now they’re on my radar. I have three more pairs, waiting for time and inspiration.

Size AU8

The three pairs pictured above are all in my Etsy shop, little pieces of wearable art looking to make someone’s feet happy. Wearing mine always cheers me up!

Find them here:

http://www.rethreading.etsy.com