My Sewing Studio: A Tour

I've been wanting to do a post for a while an indeterminate number of years about my sewing space, but have always been put off by how cluttered, messy and generally untidy it looks. When is a good time to do this post? Truthfully? If I want it to look tidy, probably never.

I have a tendency to jump right into the next project as soon as I have finished something, and not pack away patterns, scissors, pins, scraps etc. I am also prone to rummaging through my stash and putting aside fabric that I want to make up next, and leave it on the edge of my cutting table. Indefinitely.

When I have a large scale projecct like curtains to do, I am forced to do a bit of a clean up, as I need all the space I could get to manoeuvre multiple metres of fabric around without knocking everything off every available surface. Organising my studio was also helped enormously by putting in my pigeon holes and store room fabric storage.

Here's a panoramic shot of my studio that I took a few years ago - MESSY!

I decided to do a whirlwind cleanup and take photos as part of my January hosting of the Stashbusting Sewalong. What better way to get organised than to clean up your sewing space. When I walk into my studio now I feel inspired to use up all that space and SEW SOMETHING!

Tutorial: Hemming a lined wedding dress with horsehair braid

I've altered my share of wedding dresses over the years that use horsehair braid in the hem, but have just finished my first wedding dress from scratch using it. I'm a convert. Horsehair braid, where have you been all my life? It gives a beautiful crisp finish to not only hems, but necklines too. (See Gertie's tutorial for adding horsehair braid to necklines. I followed it to put braid in the neckline of this same dress)

I only wish I had taken more notice of how the braid was sewn into the hems, and, you know, taken photos and stuff? I thought I remembered how they were done, but wasn't 100% sure, so turned to my friend Google to find an answer. Alas, the only instructions I could find either featured hand stitching the braid to the outer layer of the dress, or sewing the hem to the very edge of the braid (similar to how you would use ban-rol, without pulling it out), and either topstitching it down, or use handstitching at the top. Neither of these was the solution I was looking for.

Hemming Tutorial - The wonders of Ban-Rol

I first came across ban-rol a few weeks ago, when a member of the Stashbusting Facebook group was asking for opinions on hemming a shirt, and someone else posted a tutorial to sewing baby hems with ban-rol. Not that I had a need for it, but I started searching for some straight away. Local sewing shops had never even heard of it, so I switched to searching online. Even there I wasn't having any luck.

I was trying again one day to find an Australian supplier, and came across another tutorial for using ban-rol, when I happened upon a comment from an Australian saying that she was getting some in for her shop. That person was Helene from Stitch 56 in Melbourne, a company that I had not previously heard of, nor had it come up in any of my searches for ban-rol. Less than a week later, I had my ban-rol, and a client who needed 50 silk scarves hemmed! I bought 5 metres of the widest ban-rol available, 2 inches. In hindsight, I should have bought more. I mean, the postage cost me as much as the ban-rol did, and if I need more, I'll be up for even more postage!

Blog Hop

Thank you to Sue from fadanista for the nomination for the blog hop. I love seeing all the new things that Sue has been making. She sets such a fast sewing pace that I can't always keep up with her new makes! I've been enjoying reading other people's blog hop posts, and seeing a bit about what makes them tick.

Always inquisitive about things like this, I did a bit of research to try and find where this blog hop all started, and for the most part have come up with other bloggers saying that they have done a bit of research trying to find out where it all started. Example.

I'm not sure if it started as the same blog hop, but I found lots of quilters participating in the Around the World Blog Hop (even with it's own button you can add!), some posts with slightly different questions to the ones that I will be answering here. One post suggested if you want to know where it started that you go back through the nominations and find the start. Which is what I started to do, but gave up after a while. My computer had so many tabs open that I thought it might rebel and crash on me, and I'd only gone back about a month!

The quilters questions seem to be aimed more at the creative process of their quilting, whereas the sewing blog hop seems to be about the blog itself.

Anyway, enough about that, I'm sure you're much more interested in my answers.

Tutorial: Inserting Strap Retainers in a Dress

Whilst making bridesmaid dresses recently, one of the girls during her toile fitting voiced some concern about the sleeves, and whether they might fall off her shoulder, or have her bra strap showing. To ease her concern, I suggesting putting strap retainers in the dresses.

The sleeves on these dresses are more or less a pleated rectangle sewn into a strapless dress, giving the look of a short cap sleeve, or a very wide strap, whichever way you choose to look at it.

Never having actually had anyone take me up on the offer of using them before, I googled strap retainers to see if I could use the shared wisdom of the internet to help me with the best way to put them in. Alas, I came up empty, so had to use my own brain to devise the best method.

Tutorial: Gathers

I recently came to the end of a couple of crazy months sewing dresses for other people. Sadly for my spring wardrobe (and winter for that matter), that meant there wasn't much time to do any sewing for myself! Amongst the eight outfits that I had on the go at once, were five identical bridesmaid dresses.

I don't know about you, but gathering is not my favourite sewing technique in the world. As I started writing this, I came across this tutorial on gathering with an overlocker, something I've never tried myself, so if you want to try that method, head on over and check it out. I'm planning on giving it a go in the not too distant future myself.

Here's how I did the gathers on all of my bridesmaid dresses. It's just your traditional sew two parallel lines and pull them up, but I thought I'd try something a little different when pinning the gathers down, and found that not only does I produce more even gathers, but it doesn't take as long.

Tips for Shirring with sucess

Take one enormous reel of shirring elastic,

one piece of fabric,

and a couple of hours later, you have - A dress

Sewing with Stretch Fabrics. Who Me?

This month's theme for the stash busting sewalong that I'm participating in, is stretch sewing, so I thought it was a perfect time to finish up this post that I actually started writing a couple of months ago!

I am a self professed non stretch seamstress. Apart from the odd alteration, I have been known to turn clients down in the past if they even mentioned the word "stretch".

There's a few reasons that I have avoided stretch sewing. Most of these stem from the fact that the fabric stretches. Yeah, kind of obvious I know, but this presents a few issues.

Firstly, you can't really make a toile to try out a pattern. Calico won't work, as it doesn't stretch! Unless you make a toile up in the same fabric as the final garment, you don't really get an idea of what it will do, so making things for others can get tricky. And if you're going to make the toile from the same fabric, you might as well just dive in and make the actual garment. (Which is what I usually do for myself,  not always successfully).

Made to Measure Dresses, What is Involved?

I make more dresses for others than I ever make for myself. When you sew a lot for yourself, you get used to the adjustments that you generally make on a garment to fit yourself. If this describes you, then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. To sew for someone else however, you have to take each body as it comes and fit and re-fit until the garment fits like a glove.

My last client for 2013, Gemma, agreed for me to share the process involved in making a made to measure bridesmaid dress for her.

A Dress For my Sister

Here's my first stash bust for the year. Unfortunately though, it isn't from my stash. My sister asked me late last year if I could make her a dress, copying one that she already had. She came to stay a short time later with the dress to be copied, but no fabric! At least I got to make the pattern and give the dress back before she went home again.

The Original dress

Book Week 2013: Hooded Cape

In previous years, my son has come up with an idea for a book week costume about a week before, and expects that I'll be able to whip up something for him. Last year when I said no, he went as the saucepan man, and I wasn't even there for the parade thanks to a quick trip to Melbourne with the husband (Book Week Parade, what Book Week Parade? I'm having too much fun!) The previous year I convinced him to use an existing dress up and go as Robin Hood. I did have time though, to make him a quiver for his arrows (which he was rather impressed with).

This year, I had plenty of notice that he wanted to go as Lief from Deltora Quest. He has been devouring the books, and just in the last few months has read all 3 series from start to finish. Quite an effort for a boy who isn't even 8 years old yet! Thankfully my husband had been borrowing the books from him and reading them too, so he was able to give me a pretty good idea of what we needed for the costume. The boys came home from a walk one day with seven giant gems to use in a belt, and we all went for a trip to Marrickville in search of some fabric for a cloak. We were after something dark, but not plain black, and when we came across this fabric we knew we'd found the perfect fabric. It's a black stretch fabric with sparkly threads all through it.

The Fabric

Rainbow Brite costume

If you've read my previous post on doing a leather jacket refashion, you'll know that I have started to do blog posts on some of my more interesting sewing adventures.

A few weeks ago I received a request that stated:

costume for city to surf

Nothing heavy but would like to know if you can make a Rainbow Brite costume?

"Matrix Jacket" Refashion

Sometimes I get some very interesting requests via my website. For a few of these recently I have asked my clients if I can write a blog post about these somewhat more interesting projects. I recently received one such enquiry from Sheila, asking if I could turn her leather jacket into a skirt. I got quite excited by the prospect of being able to cut someone elses leather jacket into smaller pieces.