#not my neatest sewing so far

[sainte-melasse]

Working on a new doll dress since I haven’t made anything for Léopoldine in a while.

[mythical-lotus]

Homemade Bitter Rabbit Part 3!!

(First Post)

Here is how he looks thus far!!

I know there's been a decent jump in how much I've gotten done, so I'll detail everything!

I'll try and go in order of what I did

1) I finished painting and sealing his eyes like I said in the previous post, and reattached them with glue.

2) I gave him a small white bunny tail that helps him sit properly, so I did Not have to alter his legs like I previously thought

3) I sewed his ruffled white shirt, which is fully removable and buttons up the back. I really Really like this shirt, and I'm tempted to sew one for myself because I enjoyed the process so much

4) I made his little waistcoat which!!! I'm so happy with!! I've had the fabric for literal years, and it was my mother's before it was mine, so I'm thrilled to finally put a section to use. It's lined with a shiny grey fabric, and has six buttons on the front that are fully functional. I also sewed button holes for the first time, and while they are not the neatest, I'm pleased.

5) Next up was his eye patch, which I made from foam, covered in fabric, and sewn together with a purple thread so it was slightly more visible. The strap is sewn at the back rather than tied like Ciel usually has it because the ribbon I used was quite thick. I'm not sure if I like the ribbon, considering how prominent the bow at the back is in the series, so I may change it out eventually, but it stays for now.

6) His neck ribbon 💜 not much to add, but a very Very lovely detail that fits under his ruffled collar

7) the hat!!! Which gave me so much grief??? I made like three versions before I was completely happy, and I'm still iffy on this one. It's held in place by pipe cleaners and a quilting pin, which makes it removable but also. Y'know. There's a needle and wires in his head, which isn't very cuddly. While I plan for this to be a display doll, I still want to be able to safely hold it without fear of stabbing myself, so I'm open to any suggestions from people lol. Finally, I had some small fabric roses and a small thematically fitting broach pin that fit well on the hat

--Next I plan to make his cape, which will have the same fabric as his top hat - black on the outside with the blue fabric as an inner lining. I also plan to add a black lace trim around the collar and a large bow. Stay tuned, because after that, he should be completely done!!!

[silverfoxstole]

Seamstress’s Log: NotD coat Day Six. It’s very satisfying when a project comes together to the point where it starts to look more or less as you envisaged.

Mind you, I honestly can’t remember the last time i did so much unpicking. My seam ripper will be blunt at this rate, and everywhere I go in the house I’m followed by bits of green thread. I’ve been through seven lots of bobbin thread and will need another one before I’m finished!

The ribbon for the sleeves finally arrived yesterday; you keeping your fingers crossed obviously worked, @theancientvaleofsoulmaking !

Once the sleeves were together and I started setting them in I realised that, despite having checked on the toile and then added an extra inch just in case, they were going to be too short even if I took the tiniest hem allowance. That got me into a bit of a panic but I tried a sleeve facing instead of a hem and fortunately they sit exactly where I wanted them. Phew! If they hadn’t I’m not sure what I would have done! Sleeve facing is visible here; it’s just a ring of extra fabric added at the end and turned in so that the seam line is just inside the cuff:

As I was messing about with that I realised that the sleeves were actually far too wide, especially at the cuffs. I have twiglet wrists so that wasn’t going to be a good look! I ended up taking in the sleeves both at the cuff and most of the way up the back seam to reduce the fullness and they’re much better now.

With the sleeves in I could then add the sleeve heads, shoulder pads and the chest shield, all of which I always now include in any tailored garments I’m making. For the first coat and jackets I made I didn’t use shoulder pads - probably because as a child of the 80s they just bring power suits and Dynasty to mind! - but I now know that they’re essential for shape and structure. It doesn’t look pretty but this is the inside afterwards:

With that sorted I finished the lining off, though I ended up sewing the skirts on three times having realised I’d put them in the wrong place. It would have been twice, but the second time I managed to sew them in exactly the same way I had originally so had to do it again! A combination of the instructions not being very clear and my brain evidently wandering off somewhere, which it has a tendency to do at times. 🙄

I got the skirts on the shell today, though had to do that twice because again I’d got them slightly out. That done I decided to carry on and sew the shell to the lining at the facings and had another panic when it seemed the lapels weren’t going to end up the right shape. Thankfully after a bit of messing about (unpicking, resewing, unpicking, resewing again, rinse, repeat) I did get it sorted and I think they’ll be OK.

And after all that this is how it’s looking now!

The lining still needs to be attached inside, and the binding and under collar to be added as well as buttons and buttonholes. There’s going to be a fair bit of hand finishing needed which I can’t say I’m over the moon about as my hand sewing is not the neatest but there we go. The collar attachment is a funny one and I hope it’ll look OK; I should really have tried it on the toile. I ordered some green melton under collar wool which will hopefully come by the weekend; I do already have some in navy blue but I didn’t like the way it looked. In the meantime I will give myself a day off tomorrow (though it won’t be really as it’s cleaning day…)!

[stopbeingartsy]

Okay but like.. Bernadette Banner?? Yes. I’m such a history nerd and her videos make me so !! happy!!!!!! Hour long videos about her endeavours on making Victorian underwear? sign me the fuck up

[donuts4evry1]

From this:

To this:

I’m not completely finished with this yet (still need to add the oral arms, I’m not confident enough to add the tentacles) but I love how this turned out so far! 

I’m not the neatest person when it comes to sewing but I still like the idea of having a cute little jellyfish friend by my side haha

[consumeconstantly]

Lady Cross (first aid)

Summary: Somehow, Marinette always ends up biting off more than she can chew. It started off with a kid and a nasty gash on their knee. The sudden escalation to treating the new head of Gotham’s underworld? It can only be explained by the fact that she’s catnip for trouble. 

_____________________________________________

Marinette supposed she should have expected something like this to happen eventually.

Really, she patches up a few street kids and offers a meal and some resources and suddenly she's made a name for herself in the slums of Gotham. It’s not like she’s doing anything revolutionary. Well, okay, maybe she does cheat a little bit and uses her healing powers on a few of the tougher cases that really should have been out of her realm of expertise, but she’s living near the slums of Gotham for a reason. That reason being Marinette is just a little broke and can’t really afford to send everyone she comes across to the hospital, and the people who are injured certainly can’t. It’s not like she can leave them to die. That would be heartless.

When she stopped treating scrapes and cuts for kids on the streets as she came across them and instead found her apartment balcony frequented by families who needed her help, she couldn’t just say no. And so, more and more serious wounds started coming in. Kids brought their parents and friends. The parents and friends brought... well, if the police stopped by her apartment any time soon, she’s fairly certain they’d have a field day.

But again, it’s not like she’s going to turn these people into the police when they’ve come to her for help and have a small army of people who swear up and down that they’re good people and only doing what they have to do in order to get by.

Morality comes in such a variety of shades, who was she to judge? Ladybug and Marinette have both certainly had their fair share of mistakes that they’d gladly go back in time to rectify, and her hands weren’t clean of blood either. Sure, the Miraculous Cure may have brought people back, but their deaths were still on her. And Hawkmoth? Yeah, he’s alive now, but she hammered him into the pavement after dropping him from the top of the Eiffel tower, and she’s not going to pretend that she didn’t take a bit of morbid joy in that moment.

But back to the matter at hand. Which was, the notorious Red Hood—responsible for a coup amongst Gotham’s drug dealers and responsible for taking down a man whose morality truly vanished with the wind, Black Mask himself— was currently bleeding out on her second floor balcony, smoking a cigarette and lounging against the rail like he owned the place. 

“Lady Cross,” he inclined his head.

“Red Hood,” Marinette returned his greeting.

God, she really didn’t want to get involved with Red Hood. She wasn’t opposed to helping out street thugs and criminals, but Red Hood was a different league. He seemed to be a fairly decent guy, ensuring that kids weren’t dealt drugs and tried to keep them out of the circuit as much as possible. He took down plenty of worse criminals while he was at it. In fact, Marinette would go so far to say the Red Hood as one the good guys.

But the issue was, once she started treating people of a certain level, she’d be open game. And that didn’t seem very enticing to her. Not at all. Everyone knew that Red Hood had beef with the Bat Family for some reason or other, and also made enemies with almost every single rogue in Gotham, and a good number of enemies outside of it as well. Basically, Red Hood was a universal enemy of both the vigilantes and rogues. Someone she shouldn’t get involved with while she was trying to investigate the darkness surrounding Gotham whole running her online boutique and going to college at Gotham University.

Unfortunately, Tom and Sabine and her own stint as Ladybug taught her that she could never ignore someone in need. Marinette sighed and slid the mesh open, leading Red Hood to her living room. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

“Real nice place you got here,” he said.

With the mask covering the whole of his face, Marinette had no facial expressions to figure out whether he was poking fun at her current living situation or not. His voice sounded genuine, but vocal emotions were easy to fake.

The apartment she was living in was not on the nice side of town. There were three bullet holes in the wall between her living room and bedroom that she just didn’t have time to patch up, some pretty nasty looking stains on the ceiling near her kitchen, and a huge, spray painted red cross on one of her walls, which was where her street name derived from. Her floor and coffee table were also in states of disarray; she hadn’t gotten the opportunity to clean up after working on two commissions and the last guest whose wounds were heavy enough to warrant several rolls of gauze, which was now half stuffed into a garbage can sitting next to rolls of fabric. Perhaps not the neatest or most sanitary situation, but she didn’t have time to clean up before every single one of her unexpected guests came in.

Look, it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have time to fix things up real nice and neat. She’d only been living in the apartment for a month and a half, and most times, she barely spent any time in it other than to sleep, cram last minute projects for her design course, or to help heal people. Her living situation wasn’t the biggest of worries.

“Sit,” Marinette gestured to the one of the few pieces of furniture that she specifically bought for the apartment. She didn’t mind the stained, half broken, and extremely creaky couch the last owners left behind for the first week, but after she started bringing back her first… visitors, it seemed important that the couch was comfortable, sturdy, and most crucially, cleanable.

Rummaging through a cabinet, she pulled out a tattered briefcase she thrifted a while back to keep all of her medical supplies in. Not the prettiest of things, but she tried not to keep expensive looking items in her apartment because she wasn’t a fan of getting mugged. The medicine she kept was already expensive enough, she didn’t need to attract everyone’s attention by owning one of those metal containers used in hospitals. Even though most of the people who dropped by her apartment were thankful to be treated, she had a few instances where people tried to steal things from her.

“What’s the damage, doc?” Red Hood’s voice came through rather tinny through his helmet. 

Marinette grimaced. The helmet must have awful air circulation. It looked like some sort of metal, and wet and metal never smelled good together. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

“Thought you were supposed to be some mystic healer who came from the far east.”

She paused and looked at the man, trying to judge whether he was racist as well as rude. “That’s rather insulting.” 

Red Hood shrugged. Marinette applauded the man for showing no outward sign of pain at that, even though there was a bullet embedded in his shoulder, and shrugging had to bite. “That’s what the word on the street is, though you sound French to me. Thought I’d come and check out who’s healing Gotham’s criminals. What’re you planning?”

“Sorry to foil your plans, but I’m not planning anything other than getting my college degree and not pissing off the people I live near.” She paused, flipping the lock on the briefcase upwards. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use me as your go to healer from now on. You’re going to bring trouble my way.”

“Trouble? Me? Perish the thought.” His hand rested comfortably on the holister of his gun, ready to shoot if the girl pulled out a weapon from the briefcase. “We’ll talk about repeat appearances after I see how you do today.”

Marinette rolled her eyes. “Any wounds other than the obvious?”

“Just need the bullet out, and some stitches on the gash.” His shoulder and his abdomen, respectively. The gash looked nastier than the bullet; no shrapnel, but the cut on his stomach was jagged and wide. Not a normal, sharp blade. Probably needed a good cleaning.

She grabbed the tweezers, a sterilized needle, and medical thread. “That’s fine. Now are you going to undress, or am I going to have to cut your… costume… up?”

“Getting me naked already? We haven’t even had our first date yet.”

“Very funny, little Red Riding Hood. Now hop to it. I have class at 9 tomorrow and projects to finish tonight.” Somehow, trouble always seemed to find her when she least wanted it to. Not that she wanted to have trouble find her at all, but luck was a two way street, and for all that being Ladybug granted her good luck, she attracted criminals like catnip. 

“And here my informants had me thinking you were a regular Florence Nightingale.”

Marinette snorted. “They wish. I’ve got to ask who told you, because everybody should know the rules. You know, the ones where they don’t speak of my existence to their higher ups?”

“I’m not a rat,” Red Hood said, taking the top part of his outfit off. “And it’s not like you would have gone unnoticed anyways. You might be treating small timers now, but people catch on to healers pretty easy.”

“Because some gauze and sewing skills make me such a prime target.”

“No, your magic does.”

Shit. Marinette never told anyone she was using magic, and she rarely used it unless it was a dire situation. If she could patch them up using regular skills, she did. 

“Yeah right, if I had magic healing powers, do you think I’d be shoving my fingers into your shoulder to get a bullet out?”

“Not a very good liar, Lady Cross. You have this deer-caught-in-the-headlights look about you.”

“Thanks for the compliment. I’m also the deer that tramples through your windshield and takes a dump on the driver’s seat.” She maneuvered the tweezers a little rougher, hoping to make Red Hood hiss in pain. He just chuckled, amused. His high pain tolerance was getting rather annoying. She had half a mind to pour hydrogen peroxide over the wound just to see if that would make him show he was in pain, but thought better of it. Even though she didn’t like the man, she also didn’t want to piss him off. Or worse, have him come back and make her fix him up again. 

Threading the needle, she made quick, small stitches on his shoulder, sewing the bullet hole up, then put some petroleum jelly to speed up the healing process and reduce scarring. At least the wound was in a position that didn’t require a lot of gauze. She needed to go out and buy some more soon. She barely had enough to wrap around Red Hood’s waist.

“So, the magic,” Red Hood started. “Is it a conditional thing? Can you not use it all the time?”

“Again, I don’t have magic.” Marinette did have to use some antibacterial on the knife wound. He would need to take good care of that one to make sure it didn’t get infected. 

“So a meta, then. What are you doing in Gotham? Everybody knows Batman hates metas.”

“Not a meta, either, sorry to disappoint.” She tied off the gauze, then stood to wash her hands. “Make sure to clean the stomach wound well. Hope you have your tetanus shot, otherwise you should look into getting one.”

“Surprisingly, I’m inclined to believe you on the not-a-meta thing. Back to the first thing, then. Magic. Why don’t you show me the old razzle dazzle? Do you have to say one of those weird spells like the godmother in Cinderella? Bibbity bobbity boo?”

“You’re hilarious,” Marinette dead panned. 

“How’s this for magic? Bibbity bobbity boo, kindly leave. Shoo.” She followed his suggestion, made a show of jazz hands as well. “Pity I don’t use magic otherwise you’d be gone now. Anyways, it’s time for you to make your exit. It would be great if you didn't visit me again. Ever. Thanks.”

She ushered him out onto her patio, then slammed the sliding door. He saluted her before dropping off the side of the building. She could imagine the man under the helmet smirking.

Marinette ran a hand through her loose hair. “He’s going to come back, isn’t he.”

@jasonette-july-2k20

[bellagbear]

The time spent on projects differed a lot this month. The first two weeks were the last two of a reading challenge I participated in and I really wanted to finish it, and I did! But this also meant less time for sewing because I was reading. I did, however, discover the joy of doing simple crafts with an audiobook to satisfy the urge for reading and making things with my hands simultaneously. The second half of the month I had to do fieldwork for my studies, which comes with a lot of nerves, so I spent a lot of time sewing to calm down.

An exciting sewing-related thing that happened this month was my first quilting sewing bee! My mother participates every month in one and it happened to be when I was at my parents place for my schoolwork. The sewing bee consisted of a big group of ladies who welcomed me in their midst. It was very nice to meet other quilters and to talk about each other’s work. I put quite a lot of ladies in awe as well because of the tininess of the project I was working on, which was the revolving lone star below.

The revolving lone star

This project is started this month, and with this project I re-discovered that I like to make tiny things. The pattern is based on the revolving star variation by Jan Krentz of a classical quilt pattern, named the lone star. Usually the block which results from this pattern covers the whole size of the quilt, but when I finish this piece I think I’ll use it as adornment on a denim bag.

Lone star pattern of this project. The hatching indicates a lighter fabric of the same colour.

Every piece is about 1,5 by 1,5 centimetre.  The great thing of this project is that I can put everything I need to work on it in a glass jar and take it with me to work on it in the train. Below is a picture of the progress I’ve made so far.

Two points are done so far.

Update Fish English paper piercing

Last month I told you that I was not sure if this project was going to work, well I can tell you know that it does! And quite well if I say so myself. It is not the neatest stitching you will ever find, but I actually like the hand-made look it gives the work. In the picture you can see that I am putting on a border now. This will allow me to take out all of the plastic pieces necessary for a project like this. After that the fish get eyes and fins by quilting. When that is finished it will probably become part of a small shoulder back.

The fabric will flatten out when all the plastic is removed.

Bee block scrap quilt

Two things happened in succession of each other to make this project happen: the first is an agreement to housesit for two weeks in Augustus in a beautiful house with garden in a very small Dutch village. The other one is the wish to hand quilt a big project by hand and to work on it while I am housesitting to give me something to do in the tranquillity of a quiet place. To be able to do that I first needed to make the quilt top, where all the pieces go together, and I had a blast doing that!

The pattern

All the pieces in a pile

The pattern of this one is based on the traditional bee bloc, visible in the picture above. I could not find the origin of this pattern yet, so if anyone knows please tell me! I like to give credit where it’s due. This pattern is very suitable to use up a lot of scrap fabric because the pieces are small and very straightforward. At hindsight I might have made my pieces a bit too small, because I needed 348 pieces for the whole quilt top, but we’ll see how it turns out. It where at least enough pieces to cover me up.

Melancholia of the quilter

For the fabric use I decided to go for the theory that if nothing fits together, everything will look fine in the end. To really pursue that aim I also asked around if people had non-conventional, difficult to work with, fabric I could use for this quilt. The weird fabrics look fun together, and I got a lot of practise handling difficult fabrics.

Lay-out of some of the pieces

Mayan quilt piece

This is the last one already for this month. This is the latest addition to Dreamproject 3: The Big Quilt. My friend brought some Mayan fabric home with her when she was in Guatemala, and asked if I could use it in her quilt, and I did. The pattern is the same as the scrap quilt above. This pattern allows a lot of variation because essentially it consist of some basic pieces you can arrange to your own liking.

Finished Mayan Piece

I also wrote a blogpost about this piece and similar ones for The Big Quilt here: The patchwork pieces.

Well, that’s it for this month my lovelies. See you in the next blogpost and enjoy sewing this month.

  Monthly update June 2017 The time spent on projects differed a lot this month. The first two weeks were the last two of a reading challenge I participated in and I really wanted to finish it, and I did!