Handmade by Carolyn

Pistachio and lilac

16/04/2010 3:21 am \ 5 Comments \ Carolyn

The last time I went op-shopping at the Salvation Army I found this stunning lilac suede skirt. Yes, you read correctly, suede!! I cannot believe the lovely things people throw out sometimes… It has a very slightly graded frill around the bottom, is completely lined in mauve lining and has a raw edge hemline. It has one label reading Otto collection, and its care label is completely in Japanese. It’s in immaculate condition and fits me perfectly. And I love it. And it was $10. How could I walk away from a winner like that?
And since today is a glorious warm and sunny autumn day I’m wearing it with my pistachio linen top, refashioned from an old pair of drawstring pants here. And my boots, because it was just chilly enough this morning that my feet were cold. I’m not sure about this old necklace. At the time I made it I though it was so wonderful, but now I’m going off it a bit… I put it on because I wanted a bit of … something to add pizazz and fill in in the big open neckline of this top.

Details:
Top; own design, refashioned from old linen pants
Skirt; Otto collection, opshop
Necklace, own design, made by me
Boots; Enrico Antinori, Zomp

Just to show you, Polyvore just had a nautical competition and here is my entry. Not very classically nautical (like, nearly every single other entry was navy, red and white with stripes tossed in there somewhere) but I was going for something a bit different and fun here. And turquoise is so hot right now!!

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: accessories, own design, Polyvore, top

Exhibition; Madonna costumes

15/04/2010 8:04 am \ 7 Comments \ Carolyn

Yesterday my daughter and I went into the city and viewed the exhibition of Madonna costumes currently on show. Unfortunately I had done a bit of research before going in and was disappointed to see that the Perth exhibition was a bit pathetic compared to the “same” collection that was shown in London… I guess they assumed Perth people were not internet savvy enough to check out what was happening internationally and even if so that we were too dumb to notice that we were only going to see about half the exhibits… a typical attitude towards Australians, I’ve noticed…
Anyhoo, about the clothes themselves… I loved the whole exhibition but I won’t post all of my pictures here, but just review the few that I liked the most.
I was very excited about seeing some of these exhibits. I was especially looking forward to seeing some of the Jean Paul Gaultier offerings as I know he’s designed for Madonna for years. I’ve been mesmerised by JPG ever since seeing watching “the Fifth Element” and being blown away by the costumes. And well, everything else in the movie really. Even now years later I still adore simply everything about that movie. It comes as close to a perfect movie as you can get, I reckon. Except for the ending, which is a tiny bit sappy. The JPG items in this exhibition did not disappoint. Look at the precision stitching on these corsets! My photos may not be good enough to view the closer stitching details, if so please take it from me the stitching is superb and I was impressed. Of course these garments are stage costumes, so I was interested to note that there were make-up stains on the edging of the bust cones on the cream corset. When I had viewed these on the internet earlier I had noticed the same make-up stains from photos of the exhibition in London. It just goes to show; satin is a bummer to launder, even defeating professionals with museum-standard cleaning skills…

It was fantastic to see this magnificent jewelled gown; the “Inaugural” gown from the movie “Evita”. Look at the detail of this beading. Tres magnifique, no? However, I did cast a critical eye over that hemline. Now I know this is a vintage garment. My research has unearthed that it was originally made for an actress/dancer called Carol Lawrence, but I can find no other details on this gown; its maker, its year of construction or its lifetime, except that it was also worn by Daryl Hannah to meet the Queen! For all I know it has endured a tough life on stage and screen and is thus naturally showing the signs of wear, but still… What I know about garment preservation and restoration could fit on a postage stamp with room to spare, but I still can’t help feeling that perhaps not much is being done to maintain this gown in good condition. Any seamstress worth her salt would curl up and die before sending a hemline like that out for people to look at. However, nit-picking aside this is one magnificent dress and you don’t see workmanship like that beaded bodice every day…

The Material Girl dress was lovely. Again, there are no details on the internet about the maker of this dress, which appears to have been a dress for rent when it was used by Madonna for her video, and was subsequently rented out several other times to other people before it was purchased for this collection. I couldn’t help it, (I’m such a dreamer!) but this fact inspired a little fantasy in my imagination. Just imagine, this gown being made by some little amateur seamstress such as myself for some special occasion. With a firm vision in her head and surrounded by hot pink satin she toils over her sewing machine for a few days. She finishes her creation, wears it and basks in her man’s admiration for an evening. Special occasion over and having no further use for it, she sends it off to the rental shop. The wardrobe mistress for a little known singer steps in to the store one day, fate happens, and without the anonymous lady’s knowledge or intervention her lolly-pink creation becomes an international sensation, viewed and admired by thousands… a Cinderella story for a gown? Why not?

Now to the Versace outfit. This outfit is very rock star, and tres chic and I’m a big fan of the all-cream look, but this is not an exciting outfit from a seamstress’ point of view. Again, look at those hemlines?! To my eye they look extremely wonky and skewiff. However I obviously didn’t get a chance to inspect more closely (no touching allowed!) and maybe the pants were just hanging funny on the mannequin. Again, these are stage costumes and perhaps have seen a bit of hard wearing in their day. Those huge glittery gold belt buckles are to die for and give the whole ensemble a splash of OTT, 70’s, pimp-inspired bling. I loved it.

In my own sewing news, I have recently woken up to the fact that my husband and I are attending a ball in just over two weeks! Panic stations! I bought this fabric about ten days ago, just BT (before trek) and gave it some thought DT (during trek). I want to make something inspired by this beauty by Carolina Herrera, but fuller and more busty, and with no sleeve, but shoulder straps, and with the skirt more open and layered… yeah, OK, I’m envisioning something quite different so I guess it’s the colour scheme that’s inspiring me here and not so much the design of this gown. Not being much of a drawer I can’t show you any sketches, at least not any that won’t make you fall about laughing. I’m thinking of making a separate red petticoat with red velvet bodice with velvet ribbon straps and a full red silk skirt, and with the cream/black fabric as a separate strapless overdress with a tight waist and a boned bodice. Any thoughts? I’m making a start tonight and will keep you posted on progress… Wish me luck!

Photo above from Carolina Herrera, Fall 2010

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: couture exhibition, random life stuff

Orange and khaki combo

14/04/2010 5:56 am \ 8 Comments \ Carolyn

Went into the city this morning with my daughter, and since it was a bit blustery I leapt at the opportunity to wear my trench coat… and am excited about wearing it a lot since it was so comfortable and cosy. Crazily, I went through my wardrobe for ages this morning, unable to decide what to put on. My husband laughs incredulously when I tell him stuff like that… “But you’ve got so many clothes!” yes, but I still wail about having nothing to wear on a regular basis. Ridiculous, I know. Perhaps it’s time for a clean-out.
I’m particularly happy with the colours of my outfit today; yeah, it was inevitable that my new knotted necklace would get worn at some time with my burnt orange skirt. I love this combination of orange with khaki and beige. My mother has been telling me to wear colours like these for years. They remind me a little of the outfits that men who like to hunt wear in the US; they would be all decked out in their camouflage gear, but with a neon orange vest on the top. I was told the orange vest was so they wouldn’t inadvertently shoot each other whilst hunting. But then why the camouflage, I wondered? Kind of hilarious, when you think about it…
This little olive top I’m wearing I’ve had for about ten years. It’s getting a bit thin and mis-shapen and a few times I’ve contemplated tossing it into the Salvos pile, but I’ve kept hanging on to it because of its colour.
My daughter took this photo and the reason I look so peculiar is I’m dying of embarrassment that someone is going to come around the corner of Wesley Church (the lovely brick backdrop) and see us; I loathe people seeing me have my photo taken… I’m too shy and need to be alone.
The other photos I took today I’m keeping for tomorrow; I have some interesting sewing-related observations on famous couture to talk about, but enough from me for now and I’ll be back with more later…

Details:
Trench coat; Burda 7786 modified to be double breasted, stone cotton
Top; Cue, had for about ten years
Skirt; Vogue 7303, burnt orange silk hessian
Necklace; made by me
Shoes; Betts & Betts Brazilian collection, had these for about twenty years
Bag; Gucci

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: Burda 7786, coat, Fabric warehouse, own design, skirt, Spotlight, Vogue 7303

Polyvore

13/04/2010 3:32 am \ 4 Comments \ Carolyn

Fashion should be fun! And Polyvore is one place that is for sure injecting a whole heap of fun back into fashion. I read about this on one of my favourite blogs, Ann. So I sashayed over (in an internet sense) to check it out. Wooee! And Ann did warn us in all fairness; this is a seriously addictive site! I’m going to have to set a limit on myself here…

I made up an outfit that in a dream world I would wear out to a casual lunch with my gal pals. In reality I own no clothes that look anything like these items. Apart from maybe the grey marle camisole, the most boring and basic item. But a girl can still dream! Also … in reality, I like to make my own clothes and have no intention of buying any of these garments. I only buy ready-made once in a blue moon, usually from the same few local shops or as souvenirs from a holiday. And I find my inspiration from high end fashion shoots mostly, or stylish people I see on the streets, rarely from RTW internet shops which I pretty much never look at. I’m only interested in other seamstress’ blogs etc on the internet. But, for a commit-free fashion play-time, this site has sucked me in, big time.
When I was randomly selecting and rejecting these virtual items to go into this little virtual ensemble I felt the artistic excitement a stylist must feel, when faced with piles of endlessly beautiful clothes with which you get to play with to put together “looks” for a fashion shoot; you can go for as beautiful, as colourful, as wacky, as goth, as elegant or as twisted as you choose. You can really go to town here and play dress-ups to your heart’s content. What’s not to like? Check it out and enjoy!

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: inspiration, Polyvore, random life stuff

“Black-adder” cardigan

12/04/2010 4:37 am \ 10 Comments \ Carolyn

I finished this cardigan just before we set out on our trek but didn’t get time to do a post about it.
Do you remember me mentioning some rubber/plastic coated jersey knit, stamped in a kind of scaly print that I thought would be ideal to finish off my python print satin outfit, but it wasn’t? (I know, shocking grammar, there has to be a better way of phrasing that…) Gorgeous and unusual fabric, fell in love with it at first sight. A tough-but-still-chic-looking leather alternative to satisfy even the most ardent PETA supporter. I think I’ll be wearing it a lot this autumn/winter!
Ultimately this was a very easy project, sewn together completely on my overlocker and took all of about twenty minutes to put together once cut out. I didn’t think to take any “during” photos, but I’ll provide a few construction details in case anyone wishes to reproduce this one for themselves.
So I had 70cm of this stuff and decided to make a little cardigan out of it. I took one of my existing cardigans which I like the shape of, laid it flat and smooth as possible onto paper and drew respectively around its back, front and sleeve, adding a 1cm seam allowance.

When I tried to lay these out on my fabric the fun began and I had to have a good long think about what was possible. There really wasn’t enough fabric to make a full length cardigan, so there was compromise. This end result is proof that even if you don’t have quite enough fabric to fit your vision, if you are determined and persevere and think outside the box about using all your fabric to best effect, you can still have a good outcome. And I was determined…!
The body pieces had to be cut shorter to about waist-length. Paradoxically this still left plenty of long strips on the edges, so I used these for the waistband, sleeve bindings, and also to add a long collar/front tie to the neckline. I didn’t use pattern pieces for these strips, just measured myself, pinned and adlibbed.
The wrist bands are made by serging your wrist strip along its short edge into a tube. Fold this in half wrong sides together around the circular middle of the tube. Pin to the right side of your sewn-together sleeve and serge around the raw edges.

The waistband strip is folded in half along its long axis wrong sides together, likewise pinned to the right side of the bottom edge and raw edges simply serged together. My waistband strip wasn’t quite long enough for proper squared edges, so I sewed the ends on a narrowing curve as they ended at the front edges, and I really like the look of how this turned out. I got the idea for this from one of my Metalicus cardigans.

The raw edges of the fronts and the long tie collar posed their own finishing problem. No finish seemed to look right: visible serged edges looked a bit unprofessional; topstitching looked horrendous and my ordinary machine hated the rubbery plastic finish, it kept sticking in the machine; rolled and hand-sewn edges wouldn’t have worked because this fabric does not crease or fold. So eventually I unearthed a bit of leftover black silk jersey (leftover from this dress, made about five years ago, yes, I often keep scraps that long!!)
I had just enough to cut out two front pieces and a strip the same length as my neck piece (er, the same length once I pieced together three smaller strips, that is). Sewing these to their corresponding fashion fabric pieces right sides together at the edges, turning right side out, then treating as one piece seemed to do the trick nicely. I apologise that they look a bit cat-hair-y in this photo. I did say the fabric had been sitting around a while…! And you can probably make out the selvedge holes along the edge of the silk jersey, I really did have only just enough fabric! Yeah, I could have bought a bit more fabric, but by now I was on a minimal-wastage mission…

And so my new cardigan. Today has brought a tiny taste of winter to Perth (thank goodness we had fabulous weather for out trek!), so I’m dressing a bit wintery-like.

Details:
Cardigan; own design, scale print jersey knit
Top; Ezibuy
Skirt; Vogue 7303, olive green corduroy
Leggings; Metalicus
Boots; Sunday, Andrea & Joen, from Uggys in Dunsborough

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: cardigan, Fabulous fabrics, own design, skirt, tutorial, Vogue 7303

AT (After Trek) update

11/04/2010 2:11 pm \ 8 Comments \ Carolyn

I’m back from our “holiday”! I’ve just looked at my last post BT (before trek) and noticed that I wrote we were trekking 120km. 120km? How disgracefully inaccurate. The correct and official distance of the Cape to Cape is 134.5km. That extra 14.5km is not to be dismissed lightly. Particularly not if it counts as some of the very long, very soft sandy beaches and very steep sandy dunes we scaled. Or the very rocky stretches of coast, which have one leaping gazelle-like (ha ha!) from boulder to boulder. Or the very steep hills leading to the tops of, like, every potential lookout, heaven forbid we should miss out on even one scenic outlook, no, no skirting about bases of hills for this trek, each and every elevation simply must be scaled, yessirree. All of this with 16kg backpacks on our backs. Yeah.

I do love camping. I planned our meals down to the nth degree and I’m happy to say we walked into Dunsborough having just consumed our last morsel, pretty much. (Dunsborough? Oh yeah, we did the trek back-to-front, starting at Augusta and finishing at Dunsborough! Not that that makes any difference…)

If I’m honest there were times we questioned our sanity in doing this trek, but it’s also true that we now feel on top of the world that we have done it. I feel fitter and stronger than I have in a long time. It was the biggest physical challenge I’ve faced in my life, but we are both so proud of ourselves and so happy that we met the challenge and were equal to it.

On top of that we were privileged to walk through some of the most beautiful scenery imaginable. Pristine white beaches, piles of huge rust-red boulders scattered together like an abandoned giant-child’s marble game, tall forests of fresh, green coolness, fields of blackened tree trunks adorned with new green foliage after a bushfire… And 99.9% of the time we had it all to ourselves with not another soul in sight. Each day we came across no more than a handful of people, tops. Not counting the three towns of Prevelly, Gracetown and Yallingup that is, and even they were very quiet considering it was the school holidays. We wondered where everyone was, whether people now all go to Bali for their holidays…

Anyhoo, I apologise for the general holiday ranting and rambling and lack of hand-makingness about this post. Just a few, hopefully non-boring photos (lots of people hate holiday snaps with a passion so I promise not to force heaps and heaps upon you) There is a tiny element of “handmade” in my past week. The shorts I’m wearing here are my gabardine shorts re-fashioned from my daughter’s old charcoal puff-skirt first posted about here. I’m pleased they have proved themselves to be tough and practical.

Back to normal posting tomorrow. I’ve noticed that while I was out of internet action Wardrobe Refashion has proposed some big changes! I wonder how this is going to pan out…?

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: random life stuff

Easter sojourn

02/04/2010 12:59 am \ 7 Comments \ Carolyn

Hey peeps!
No photo today… This is a quick note that we are off on a trek for a week and I’ll be away from my blog. In fact away from all electronic stimuli, totally, 100%. Yippee!!
We’ll be walking the Cape to Cape walk, which is 120km up the south west coast of Western Australia, carrying our own tent and all our own food etc. Needless to say I won’t be wearing any jazzy clothes or high heels!!
I’ll be back to civilisation by next weekend, and back to normal hand-making business… I’m already looking forward to seeing what all of you create.

Happy Easter everyone, and wishing you all a safe and pleasant weekend with your loved ones.

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: random life stuff

Menswear; linen shirt no. 3

01/04/2010 1:30 am \ 12 Comments \ Carolyn

Here is my husband’s new shirt. It was made using Burda 7767 (again, such a great pattern!) with the fit variations I perfected making the last shirt. I altered the collar size slightly; the pattern comes with three collar variations and this one is midway between the two smaller options. I also rounded the pocket and added a pointy arrowhead collar flap. The other day I saw a man’s shirt with a single welt pocket and a button with a tiny fabric loop; it looked really cool and I’ve filed it away for a future shirt…
The double topstitching here has a slightly different gap this time. I’m super happy with my topstitching in this version, it’s as close to perfect as I can get it. Topstitching is a real meditative process; you’re hunched over the machine, eyeballing your first row of stitching and just mentally gauging and controlling that second row at an dead even gap…. almost as good as yoga. Except yoga you’re supposed to be concentrating on nothing. And with topstitching you’re full-on concentrating. OK, not quite the same. But it’s still kind of the same outcome, a calm stillness in which all other stimuli is blocked out.
Hmm, sewing as a therapeutic meditative tool; yeah, moving right along…
I used linen, part of the batch that I bought online a few months ago. I chose caramel brown contrasting thread and blotchy brown and cream, tortoise-shelly like buttons as a contrast. I just love brown and blue together. I think he will be able to wear this shirt as a business shirt, because it’s linen and quite classical in its detailing, but it will still look fine as a casual shirt, because of the colour; sort of reminiscent of the classic Levi’s chambray shirts.