I have finally bitten the bullet and put abeautifulpalegreen on Facebook. I am not a huge fan of facebook, and I don’t really understand it, and they made me put a capital A at the beginning of abeautifulpalegreen, which is just wrong, but there we are! You can find it by clicking HERE!
Tartan
June 17th, 2011
My dad was throwing away an old kilt, and I decided it was far too good to get rid of. So I shanghaied it and dismantled it.
It was bought for him when he was a child, which means it was made, we think, in 1956, so this is proper vintage stuff.
It’s a bit motheaten in places, but the thing that people who don’t wear kilts may not realise is that they are huge. This one was made for an 8 year old, and contains 4 metres of fabric.
Full sized kilts can have up to nine yards of cloth, which is a huge amount. Seven yards is pretty standard, though.
So I now have four metres of 50 year old, pure Scottish wool Mackenzie tartan to do something with. Any suggestions?
Also I have another kilt to unpick this afternoon.
It’s been a long time.
June 7th, 2011As the title suggests, this is going to be an example of the most common of all blogposts.
I’m sorry I haven’t posted in SOOOOOOOO long.
All sorts of things got in the way of abeautifulpalegreen for a while, but hopefully things should be picking up soon. I have officially registerred as self employed, and I am now running this website, as well as another. This site will stay as it always has, bringing you stuff that is ridiculously cute and awesome- the kind of thing you can comfortably wear every day, while never running the risk of running in to someone who’s wearing the same outfit. My other website, carneval.co.uk, is along similar lines, but aimed at a more alternative/ fetish based market. They’ll both be constantly updated with new products and posts and all sorts of things. And so the empire will grow! (You can imagine my evil laugh here. It’s really not that evil.)
In the meantime, I have a new sewing machine, and the case was boring, so I made it better!
El Coronel Ocell
July 14th, 2010On my last visit to Barcelona, I was fortunate enough to see Marta in her theatre group’s production of El Coronel Ocell, or Colonel Bird.
As much as I enjoyed the play, this was special for another reason. It was the first time my name had appeared on a programme for something I have made. The first time, I hope, of many. My name is on the left hand side. Enlarge the picture to see it properly.
And a picture of them in action:
Also, check out Marta lying on the floor down there!
These jackets were made from a heavyish polycotton twill. Five were identical, for the regular soldiers, and one was a little longer to make the Colonel seem more authoritative. I also embroidered badges for them all, since in the play, they are U.N. uniforms. Or possibly just U.N.iforms.
An Unusual Parallel
May 15th, 2010I am going to draw, as you may have guessed from the title, an unusual parallel.
I enjoy playing video games, particularly the kind that involve shooting at people and corrupting society.
I play online, on a server that allows up to 30 players at one time, which means that things can get a little cramped.
All too often, I will run into an area, and there will be five or more members of the opposite team, each an excellent and easy target.
However, in the time it takes to choose between them, I am usually taken out myself.
This is sort of how I feel right now. I have some catsuits to make, and a pair of jeans for a friend, and two pairs of trousers that my mother wants doing, and two dresses for Marta, and a bustle for Etsy. On top of this, I really want to make Marta a corset, if only for the practice of making a corset, and for the secret reason that she looks really good in a corset.
But here I sit, unable to pick a target.
I think, for tonight at least, I will stick to video games. At least that way the choice is made for me.
Catsuits and Dancewear
April 30th, 2010Marta has long been interested in dance, and, when I met her, she was a keen oriental dancer, which is basically the smart name for bellydancing, as I understand it. All veils and shimmying and so forth. It was this which inspired me to make Marta a bustle skirt;
This, with some tweaks to the original design, gave birth to this skirt(link to our Etsy page) which was made after someone saw Marta wearing hers casually, just over jeans, and literally ran over and asked her where she got it (with the benefit of hindsight, this story may have been made up by Marta for the benefit of my ego). Anyway, streams of consciousness aside, the idea behind the skirt was that it would really pick up on the hip movement that is so important in this particular dance style, and it also turned out to be pretty good for casual wear.
Since then, Marta has turned to a more traditional dance format, incorporating several styles, and, for rehearsals at least, she needed a one piece catsuit (Or mono as it is called in Spanish, which interestingly means monkey). This was just after I had bought my new sewing machine, with all it’s zig-zag capabilities, so I got right on it, and made her two, one from a lovely feeling, but horrible to work with cotton lycra mix, very stretchy, and the second from a pure, or as pure as lycra ever is, lycra.
Interestingly, I was sort of scared of working with stretch fabrics before this. I didn’t have a sewing machine that could sew them properly, my armless, legless dress form was not really suited to the business of templating, and I assumed that calculating for stretch would be hideously difficult. As it turns out, I know love stretchy fabrics! I have a bunch of projects to make finish right now, including a silk cocktail dress for my mother to wear to a ball in two weeks, but I am most looking forward to receiving the measurements of a client who wants a catsuit, so I can once more get my stretch on. (That last sentence marks the first time I have referred to myself as having a “client”. I feel terribly grown up!)
A further irony that has stemmed from the advent of the stretch era is that my way of making has no apparent relation to commercial methods; I recently saw a website where you could order a bespoke leather catsuit for around $900. Commercially, they are available, un-bespoke, for around $200-300. Naturally my methods mean that every garment I make is made individually, but it is weird that while I could make a bespoke leather catsuit (and for a lot less than $900, if anyone fancies one!), I have no idea how I would make a non bespoke suit.
Pi
April 26th, 2010As I said in the Etsy description, I know it’s irrational, but I love this cushion.
At christmas, my aunt, a reformed dressmaker herself, came to stay with my parents, and when my mother started knitting, and I started knitting, she lamented the fact that she had not brought any knitting with her. I told her that I was, very slowly, making another knitted patchwork quilt, and if she wanted to knit some pieces, that would be very much appreciated. So she began, and knitted a good number of pieces for the quilt. Recently, my mother finished her project, and didn’t have anything lined up, so offered to knit more patches. But I suggested she knit something more immediate, perhaps four equal sized patches to make into a cushion cover. Then we started talking about Harry Potter.
Shortly after that, we were talking about the jumpers that they recieve every christmas from Mrs. Weasley, and I mentioned that I would like to knit something like that for Etsy, but that it would be a shame if I knitted one with an H, and then someone called Julie really wanted one. And I didn’t really have time to knit 26.
Then, we hit on symbols. Symbols are tremendously important these days. It’s a generational thing. My mother, brought up before iTunes, and when CD players still had text on them, doesn’t know what that little equilateral triangle and those two vertical lines mean, but I know that it means play/pause. And then, when you think about it, there are an enormous amount of symbols in everyday like. You just have to look at any comic or cartoon where a character swears in a speech bubble to see that.
A short period of frenzied creation later, we came up with the projects. I would knit the Pi LLOW, and my mother would knit the square root of X, which, at time of writing, is still under construction, but should be available on Etsy soon! What is the square root of X? I don’t know. Perhaps it is nine. Perhaps 12. It might even be Pi.
Steampunk Corset
April 17th, 2010It has long been my belief that there are not enough tarnished brass buckles in the world. With the steampunk corset, Marta and I set out to rectify that. Fastening with buckles at the side, there is no need for either a busk or for lacing, and the corset should be easy to put on by onesself, without the irritation of having excess lacing hanging down the back or the need for a well built friend to get the damn thing laced up.
(Image kindly provided by Marta)
It would probably be made of a heavy duty cotton, with plenty of interlining to make it pleasingly rigid and strong.
I am going to make this for etsy, hopefully quite soon. Quicker if someone says they are interested in it!
Póntelo Todo
April 7th, 2010As you can read at various places, Marta is Spanish. Since she has been handing out a lot of business cards for me in Barcelona, as well as drawing compliments (!) by wearing my clothes, we thought it would be a good idea to have the item descriptions on etsy in Spanish as well as English. As a result, we garnered the attention of a spanish blogger who is dedicated to the maker community, and has been kind enough to feature abeautifulpalegreen on her blog.
Póntelo Todo is an adventurous blog, in which the author shares her discovery of anything that takes her eye. Check her out!
And here is the post that she wrote about us.
Sewing machines
April 6th, 2010I recently purchased my third sewing machine, and prior to this, I did a little research. I wanted a small machine that I could take away with me when I go to Spain or elsewhere, and that also had to be able to zig-zag stitch, for reasons that will become obvious soon.
At this stage, there are some things that you should know.
Up until now, all of my sewing has been done on one of two machines. There is my 1957 Singer 15k treadle, and that seems very old until I tell you that the other machine is a 1930 Jones family CS. Each does a straight lockstitch, and each can have the stitch length adjusted, and that is it. (I should note however, that the Jones will do that straight lockstitch through absolutely anything. I think the record is five layers of heavy canvas, one of leather, and two of a light polycotton, all at once) The Singer has a zipper foot, and a few hemming feet, a ruffler, and various other bits. Naturally this leaves me incapable of effectively sewing stretch fabrics, which is one of the reasons I bought the new machine, but on those two machines, I have made everything that I have made up until I got the new machine. So you can imagine my surprise when, upon reading a review of my new Janome (I decided on the Janome sew mini, now no longer produced), I saw this:
“Con: Only does 10 different stitches.”
As I have said, I wanted a machine that could stitch in zigzags for stretch fabrics. I figured that, with adjustable stitch length, two stitches would be good for pretty much everything. So this aroused my curiosity, and after a little searching, I discovered that it is pretty hard to find a machine with less than 40 stitches, and all too easy to find one with well over 100. I realise that these stitches are often solely decorative, but is anyone ever going to use all 400ish stitches offered by the Janome MC 11000?
The odd thing, though, is that in spite of my scepticism, I still kind of want one.