Get Mending! A Workshop

This Saturday - 17th March - from 1pm - I'm going to be facilitating the first of 3 workshops at the Green Living Centre (aka The Watershed) 218 King St, Newtown.

This first workshop will be all about Mending clothes ... the virtuous frugality of Make Do & Mend will also help save our environment.  Think of the amount of water* and energy it takes to make a T-shirt.

 

Learn how to get a few more years from a favourite jumper ...

Underarm disaster!

Manage very nearly almost completely invisible mends in knit fabrics and woven.

Can you see the mend?

Hide those mends that are visible - and turn an "Opps!" into a "Design Feature".

Underneath those pretty flowers lurk glue stains

Have fun with Patches.

Hem? What hem?

Learn how to fix a hem so it doesn't show



and how to sew on those buttons so they don't fall off again!

We'll even learn what you are meant to do with one of these :-)





For more information about this and the following workshops:
Marrickville Council website
City of Sydney website 
The Watershed on facebook

phone: 9519 6366

Shop front 218 King Street Newtown - hours: 10am-4pm Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-7pm Thursdays.

*  Cotton T-Shirt ... takes a whopping 400 gallons of water to grow the cotton required for an ordinary cotton shirt.  (source: TreeHugger.com)

Forensic Analysis of a 1920s Flapper Dress

I've been doing a lot of mending lately - but sometimes I am given something to mend and it is just impossible - the garment is past it - gone - dead - beyond mending.   So this post comes with a warning - if the sight of a deceased garment is offensive to you, please leave now.  However, if you would know something of a genuine 1920s flapper dress then you are welcome to stay while I examine this fragmentary frock.

Here it is spread out as best I could - every time I touched the fabric it tore under my fingers.

And the colour shows quite orange in that photo and quite apricot in some of the others.  I think originally it was a peachy apricot colour, I suspect it has darkened / gone orangish with age.  Obviously this poor thing was very poorly stored and silk crepe chiffon is a fragile fabric.

Please - if you are lucky enough to own a 1920s frock do NOT store it hung up as the weight of the beading destroys them.  If you own a dress with sequins - anything earlier than the 1960s - NEVER get it wet - early sequins were made of gelatine & gelatine dissolves in water.  Now I put a very late date on the use of gelatine sequins because my mum made me a costume in 1969 with black sequins on it and those sequins went to goo when put in water - gelatine!  They were probably very old stock but dressmakers are hoarders.

Well - back to this dress - no sequins on this one.  But what we see in the photo above is a square skirt with (in the middle) a small portion of the bodice.  The square skirt, when worn, would've hung in points - this uneven hem indicates that it dates from the late 1920s.

Some detail of the beading and gold-thread embroidery.  The design is sort-of Art Deco.  Many of these dresses were made (or at least beaded) in France / Paris and it is said that most of this work was done by Russian refugees from the 1917 revolution.  To me, some elements of this design (& on other 1920s frocks I've examined) are similar to designs on Eastern Orthodox Icons. 

In the centre of the intersecting circles there are 'wheels' worked in metal (gold?) wrapped thread.  All the beads are glass and there are 2 types.   Clear glass short bugle beads that were silvered inside  - 'silver lined'  (like the clouds!)  now mostly tarnished and showing dark in the photos.  And lovely milky glass short bugle beads - I'm not sure if they make beads like this now - they are white glass and the tube is not round but a hexagon / octogon - they have flat sides and thus reflect more light.  I've also seen milky glass beads with micro-grooves on the surface - they were not so twinkly.

A corner

Most 1920s flapper frocks were tambour beaded - here is a YouTube clip that shows you how this is done.  And a lovely movie to watch (they show tambour being worked and people diving under the table / frame to see the right side) is "A Common Thread"  the original title is "Brodeuses" (2004).

Some things to mention about tambour work:

• it is done up-side down with the wrong side facing the embroiderer
• that wrong side has a distinctive chain stitch - and if you pull a thread a whole row of beads will unravel
• stretching the fine fabric onto the tambour frame (drum tight - tambour is French for drum) and punching the fine tambour hook through the fabric probably damages a fragile silk - not noticible in the short-term of course but in the long term ...

 Here we see the wrong side of the beading - note the chain stitch.  Also the gold thread embroidery and the hand-stitched hem.   A lot of woman-hours went into making these dresses.

Love the beads along the hem-line but I wonder it they snagged the wearer's stockings?


Something else to note about 1920s beaded "flapper" dresses is that they were meant to be danced in.

With this dress the square skirt would've hung from a very low 'waist' - it would've swung and moved quite nicely during a tango with all the weight of those glass beads.



And in this last photo you can see what remains of the bodice - and a double row of the silvered beads where bodice met skirt.

Seems that the bodice was quite heavily beaded - I think that row of circles in bunches is going up the side of the bodice - presume it was the same on the other side.  The back was usually beaded just as much as the front - remember - they were made for the dance-floor.

Make Do & Mend

Whether it is for reasons of frugality, or thumbing your nose at consumerism, or because you can't bear to throw out a favourite garment - it feels good to Mend, Repair, Recycle...

Oh Dear!  I had managed to get super-glue on a favourite singlet top - it is a flattering pistachio green, a nice rayon knit and it has a matching cardigan so I did not want to toss it!
But nasty dark (and stiff) spots of glue down the front - one big splodge and a trail of small ones. 

Now, I also like to mend things in a way that adds to them - Up-cycle rather than Re-cycle - and my favourite method of hiding small stains or mended holes is by embroidering something pretty over the top.  I often work lazy-daisy flowers (there are quite a few YouTube clips if you want to know how to do these) but I felt that this top deserved something a bit more special so I worked some Bullion Stitch roses, with buds etc.

 The fun part comes first - selecting which threads  to use. 
2 greens ... not too blue or 'sweet'
and for the flowers I went with shades of apricot instead of the more obvious pinky rose colours.

I like the 'Susan O'Connor' bullion stitch rose - basically you start with the darkest shade & work a bullion loop (in the middle of that big stain).  And because I'm not very good at this - I needed 2 loopy stitches!

 

 

 

Then with the next shade work bullion stitches spiralling around that centre...

Sorry for the blurry photo

Then progress to a lighter colour and work more bullions around ...  And even if you are not very skillful the result is still quite pretty.  Especially if your photos are blurry!!

The splash pattern of small stains seemed obvious as a 'rose bud' on a curving stem.  Here is the bud - 3 bullion grubs with a dark one in the middle.

 Rose and bud on finished stem - used stem stitch for the stem (naturally!) and bullion grubs beside the bud & for the leaves; small in the dark green with long grubs above in the light olive colour.

SO - those stains are quite disguised now but those flowers are awkwardly placed and the rose is floating in a very isolated way.  So I put the singlet on Daphne (my mannequin) and planned with pins how to make the emboridery look like a Deliberate Design Decision but with a minimum of additional work!     

Oops - obviously needs to be ironed, but one of those creases inspired the placement of another bud-on-stem.

And here is the finished singlet top - worked another full Susan O'Connor rose & a bud to keep that first rose company, and a 2nd bud-on-stem curving in the other direction.

Lots of Little Stitches

I was busy boasting to a friend that I'd been sewing a rolled hem by hand - "Ahah" said he, "I'm making a wedding dress in silk chiffon, would you hem it for me." And so I am - a lovely soft dove grey colour and I might, eventually, get proficient & efficient at rolled / whiped hemming but right now it takes at least an hour to stitch 1 metre and when the fabric is not on the straight of grain it flutes and plays up. This shows some of the better bits I'm also mending / renovating a lovely old hand-knitted baby's shawl. Mending & reinforcing and then embroidering over the top of the mends so they no longer look like mends. Ladybirds & leaves in bullion stitch - where there is a ladybird on one side of the shawl there are leaves on the other side.

That photo is almost to scale as the beetles are only 1.5cm from toe to toe.

So Old Fashioned :-)

I feel like I qualify as a really old-fashioned Gran'ma at the moment - have finished this sweet little dress for my granddaughter. It hasn't been washed & ironed yet but I couldn't wait to boast :-)

The pattern is from my (large) collection of vintage patterns, circa 50s, they suggest lazy-daisy stitch for the flowers but I did bullion grubs. The fabric is a soft cotton twill.

Now to make the matching bloomers (with frills, naturally) and sun-bonnet :-)

Have also been busy with the Knitting for Blythe swap (on Ravelry) which upset my own Blythe doll somewhat - Lillian demanded that I also knit something for her - such as the trousers I promised ages ago ...

The First Post

This will be a Blog of creations - what I am currently working on, or have just finished making.

I always have a number of knitting projects on the go - currently the needles are clicking on a throw of gorgeous Colinette yarns and a jacket for my granddaughter, she's almost 2mths old :-)