Paisley cord skirts

The Great Big Cool Girl Skirt-a-thon is drawing to a close and I have another two for sharing. In the last two weeks I've made more skirts than I've worn in five years, which is either silly, or very silly.


The first skirt is a Robert Kaufman stretch cord in blues and black.


Here's a close-up of the fabric so you can admire the pretty.


Do you like how I'm pretending it's summer? And that I don't live in Scotland?


The second skirt is also a stretch cord in a paisley print, and the only vintage fabric I have in my stash. I've only used it once before to make The Ugly Coat.


Please don't be sad, but you're only getting one side shot today... The skirts are the same so use your imagination for the other one. They have side zippers (non-invisible) and are bound with ribbon on the waistband.


The Flickr pool is filling up with lovely skirts which I will round up and blog about soon. I also know about a lot of your creations because you're in my reader, but pretty please can people post their links so that I can collect them?

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A whole lot of Random

• Here is Anna super-modelling her coat, which she loved. And she wore it home, which made me very happy.
  
  

• I pinky swear that this photo isn't staged. This is where Steven put our bills yesterday. That's our frying pan:
  
  

• This week, I walked to the shop with a fox for the third time in as many months.

• Yesterday we had a coffee morning at the nursery and one of the other mums has a newborn baby. When she started nursing him, Maia turned to me and said, 'This is so exciting.'

• Oh, and Cool Girls? See the date? It's skirt due day! There's a lot of finished skirts in the Flickr pool but I'll not start blogging about everyone's skirts until tomorrow. Because if everyone else is just a tiny bit like me, there will still be some last minute Top Secret sewing.
  

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I've got the bug

Following my new-found adventures of being a Cool Girl, I definitely now have the compulsion to make more things for myself. And also, the compulsion to dress like I'm a character in Mad Men.

I saw this dress in my Dust Catalogue this week and fell in love. I'm not entirely convinced the dress would fit me though, as I'm different sizes on the top and bottom by quite a bit. With the help of GoneToEarth on Twitter, I was pointed in the direction of Colette sewing patterns and look what landed in my postbox yesterday!

The hand-drawn picture doesn't really do the dress justice. If you want to see the finished article in all it's glory, look here and here. And clearly, as I was already paying for shipping, it would have been foolhardy not to buy this one too.
I know it's hard to believe, but I'm going to be even cooler when I make me some of these. For finished dresses I like this one and this one.

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Excitement in triplicate

Reasons to be excited today:

I made a jacket. It is very pretty.

This is not me. Which means I've made an adult jacket for someone else. My angst about selling to other ladies with different bodies to mine was aleviated because Anna is in Edinburgh and we had visits for fittings and to make sure she was happy with the way it's been going.

I've tweaked the pattern and taken all the photos necessary for the tutorial so this pattern will be coming out very soon in the first two sizes.

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We need to move house

I've mentioned before that 72.7% of our building is populated by geriatrics. This can be a good thing, say if you need a stand-in for professional photographer to take your picture in the back garden. Or you're suffering from a deficiency of small talk. But it can be bad, because they are around a lot and are likely to witness all sorts of things perpetrated by your children. Remember when Jamie pressed his wee man against the window at our nemesis neighbour? Well, he later died. Probably unrelated, but it can't be underestimated how dangerous children can be.

Scene: Our front car park. A convergence of generations.
Elderly neighbour: Why, hello there!
Me: Hello.
Maia: Hello, man.
Me: This is John. He lives upstairs from us.
Elderly neighbour: My goodness, what a big girl you are now! You're not a baby anymore!
Maia: When I was a baby, I drank milk out of mummy's boobies.
Elderly neighbour: --
Me: Well. Okay. We best be going.

See? Dangerous.

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The Decoupagerie

When I was checking out Skip's Sew-along skirt yesterday, I noticed some lovely artwork in the background that looked like she made it. It's one of my great disappointments in life that I am not 'artistic'. I have lots of images in my head of things that I would like to make, but I don't have the ability to translate the ideas into reality being technical rather than artistic. But, I am rather handy with a craft knife, so I wanted to show you some decoupage I did when we first moved in to decorate out house.


This is the wedding wall in our bedroom. I painted square canvasses in different shades, painstakingly cut out some of our wedding pictures, and glued them to the canvasess.

This is our trip wall over our bed. I blew up and cut out some of pictures I had taken of landmarks when we've been on holiday. Sadly, there has been no new pictures (or new venues) since Maia has been born.

Being a narcissist, I also did a long wedding mural. This one is my favourite.

You might have seen in the background of any of the pictures I've taken in Jamie's room, but his room is a bit crazy. We moved here when I was pregnant with Maia and I was Nesting in a Major Way so I started painting his room in a farm theme. I'm a bit of a dork about when cities / towns decorate fiberglass animals so there are about thirty sheep I cut out from when we visited Pittsfield, MA's Sheep Parade and a spattering of cows from Edinburgh's Cow Parade. Including this one where a baby Jamie is riding the cow in the Botanic Gardens.

This is the duck pond, with a frog clock we picked up in Florence. You can see a little bit at the bottom, that before I spliced heads all over the place on Photoshop, I physically spliced heads with glue. That's Steven's brother and his girlfriend going fishing at the duck pond.

Here's the vegetable patch with a lot of vegetables that Jamie will never eat.

I think I'm pretty much the funniest person alive for making Steven into a scarecrow.

And here's Steven's mum picking apples in the orchard.

And my mom, baling some hay.

And my dad, riding a tractor.

One of the reasons that I decided to go batsh*t crazy in Jamie's room (other than my pregnancy hormones) was because we only get to see my family a couple of times a year and I wanted the kids to be able to see them all the time so we could talk about them and they would know that they are always a part of our lives. Much to my discredit, I stopped working on the murals when Maia was born so there are a lot of family members still missing. I'm thinking that I should set aside some time soon to get it finished.

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Colour block skirt

I promise I'm not going to rename this blog 'A skirt a day'. But I have one more that I finished last night.


For this one I used three different fabrics to make a stripe effect. The top is turquoise twill, the middle is white canvas, and the bottom is purple twill.


See how the top is a bit flimsy and lacks structure? I made a mistake in that the turquoise is the least structured of the three so it should not be at the top. And this one sits lower on the waist than my black one, probably because when I was ironing the ribbon facing into place the iron melted the ribbon into smithereens and I had to lose some of the trashed fabric.


I think I'm going to add a waistband out of a more structured fabric so it sits more on my natural waist and looks more stable. But I'm not sure if it should be the purple twill from the bottom or a pink twill... any thoughts?

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