Tag Archives: Tim

Old things…

… this will be the very last of my “old things” posts.  I promise.
I’ve done a mammoth sort-through of the photos and I think this is it!  (heaves a sigh of relief…)

Firstly, since this is the only garment in this post still in our possession (apart from the Grim Reaper come burqa outfit, that is); a cardigan I knitted for Craig.  It is knitted in the fair isle method.  Above is a picture Craig took of me wearing his cardigan on a holiday last year (isn’t he sweet, giving his cold inadequately-dressed wife his nicely pre-warmed cardigan to wear, hmmm?  What a gentleman!)
And some close-ups of the cardigan I took today…
showing the right front, and at right the wrong side of the fair isle knitting… (as is correct, the yarn is carried over at the back with no weaving in, only if the distance is four stitches or less…)

Now, some costumes…
Sam as “Link”.  I thought he was so cute in this.  He loved this little outfit and often wore it just for everyday wear.  (if you would like to see what this cute little jigger looks like now, go here…)

Sam, as… guess who?  Hehe, the famous Harry Potter, natch, compete with broomstick and Hedwig the owl.  
On that note, a black cloak is such a useful thing to have in the dress-up box.  It can be the basis for so many costumes.

Here is the same robe again, worn by Cassie as Hermione, complete with Garfield Crookshanks the cat… I threw together the skirt and tie as well, but they do not bear close inspection…!)

(I’ve shown this picture before… but here it is again just to illustrate the versatility of the plain black robe as a costume), Tim and two of his mates as Grim Reapers.  I made all three of their costumes.

Tim’s same costume again, this time worn by me to an Arabian Nights party.  I didn’t want to hire an outfit and I didn’t want to make some bejewelled thing I would never wear again, and as every single female I have seen in the Arabian region is dressed something like this, so I was like, yeah this’ll do.  I naively assumed other girls would have the same idea…  As it turned out I was literally the only female dressed (I thought) anywhere near authentically!  Also the only one not heavily sequinned and baring plenty of belly-flesh…  I confess the costume was abandoned when we decided to start dancing!  Don’t worry I had a skirt and top on underneath…

So, away from costumes now, and a ball-gown of my own design that I made for balls in years gone by (Sorry for the headless shot but my face and my hair look awful in this picture…!)  It is silk organza, overlaying silk and silk jersey layers, three layers in all.  It had a beaded and embroidered neckpiece, both beaded and embroidered by me, that is…

A dress I made for Cassie for her graduation dance at the end of primary school.  It was a simple turquoise cotton halter neck dress, the fabric had metallic gold lines randomly strewn across.  I also made her jewellery, of turquoise glass fish beads and strands of gold wire.

Some rather lovely (if I say so myself) wide-legged white pants that she wore almost constantly for a summer, and a little white broderie anglaise blouse.  Both my own design.

Going way back, and this shirt is from a Vogue designer pattern that I believe my mother still has my copy…  I know I also made and am wearing here the small-waisted and very flared skirt from the same pattern too…

I made both the skirt and top and also my necklace here.  The top was an experiment, I flipped the shoulders out in a twist to get this cowl-like effect.  It used to get a lot of compliments, believe it or not! (my friends are very kind)  We are sitting on one of our sofas in its first slipcover, made by me too…  (now looks like this)

Some more dresses.  I really regret now I never got any good pictures of these two.  The white and red one was rather nice; it was a dress, but looked like a matching skirt and camisole when I was wearing it, as it had layers in several graduated lengths.  My own design.  The patchwork dress, also my own design, took lots of planning; I bought the fabrics separately and cut and pieced them together, then made the dress.  It has smaller squares at the top, graduating to larger squares around the midriff, and then down to the largest squares at the hemline.  It is all on the bias, with a handkerchief hem, and I loved it!

A drop waisted, handkerchief hemmed dress of white dotted swiss voile, pictured against a famous backdrop.  I still have this Vogue pattern too, actually…

And that should be all folks!
From now on, I will only be showing newly made stuff here….

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Harvey Two-Face

So, we don’t do Halloween here in Australia.  
But in the last few years; each year it seems my children are attending parties that have a Halloween theme.  Different from how it is in other countries; just invited kids together on the one premises, and no door-knocking and begging the neighbours for food, thank goodness.   This kind of Halloween is acceptable to me.
But still requiring a costume.
So true to form Tim informs me on Friday (the day before the party) that he wants to go as Harvey Two-Face, the character from Batman who has one half of his body all acid-burnt and crazy and evil, whilst the other half is a neat, respectable looking business man.  Can I make a half-and-half suit and shirt set fitting the brief in, like, 24 hours??  
Hehehe; funny.  Oh.  You’re serious?  Oh, well, no! sorry.  Superpowers, I have not….  But I could possibly divide up two old suits and shirts and splice them together….?  So it was off to the op-shop.  Naturally, Friday was a public holiday in Perth… oh, did you know, we’ve had a VIP in town??  Yeees, so almost everything was shut, but a bit of phoning around informed us that the op-shops in the CBD were open that day.  So in we went.  Entering Good Sammy’s I immediately scanned the clientele; hoping against hope to catch sight of Her Majesty… maybe checking out the hat and bag sections? … but  (sigh) she must have already been in and cleaned up before us because there wasn’t much of a selection.  
Disappointed!
But we did manage to score some rather paltry bits and pieces.

Bit of butchering and slashing and fudging together later…

It was all a bit mashed together; of course nothing slotted together easily and needless to say there are no HongKong finishes!, and I couldn’t help thinking if only I had had a bit more time and if Spotlight had been open I felt could have had some fun and done something really wild and funky with the “evil” side, but we did the best we could with limited time and resources.  And I was pretty chuffed that he got the Best Costume award!!
Later edit; yup, he did put horrible blotchy red and pink make-up on the evil half of his face later on…  so dya reckon he is sufficiently supervillain-ous?

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Weddings, parties, and other special events…

… seem to be the only times we ever took any photos of our family.  So thank goodness for those!  
I didn’t do a heck of a lot of sewing when I had three tiny children.  I do have an excuse.  I had three tiny children…
But I did manage to churn out a few little things.  Oh including, come to think of it, the quilts for all our beds.  They were major.  So I guess I still got a lot done.
Here are some other things:
Book Week wasn’t a big thing when my children were little like it seems to be now.  But I recall a few sporadic requirements for costumes.  I didn’t make this fabulous dog costume, loaned from a friend, but I did make the little top and pinafore that my grubby little daughter is wearing in the background.  Another TopKids pattern.

Here on the left is an outfit made just for Sam (see, he didn’t miss out!), a tartan button-up shirt and some navy corduroy jeans with some of the tartan using in the detailing, to make it a co-ordinating “outfit”.  I was into “outfits” for my kids back then, and always made tops and bottoms to match each other.  Both were using TopKids patterns.

Following are three little dresses I made for my daughter, using the same Simplicity pattern, a very nice design which had a button-up front bodice, and a sash inserted in the side seams to cinch in the waist with a lovely big bow at the back.  Or a rough knot of some kind, depending on how busy her mother was that morning… 

I customised the pink gingham version with lace edged pockets.  It was one of my favourite dresses for her at this time. 

The blue one here had gold stars printed on the fabric, and I sewed on a single star shaped button at the top, like a brooch.  In this picture, her first day at pre-school, she is standing beside a white wooden chair that Craig made, and I painted.  It was made of jarrah, so it weighed a tonne!

And my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding… I made the two bridesmaids dresses and the flower girls dress.  And yes, now I do wonder at my own sanity at attempting this feat when I had all those little children underfoot at home…  but I managed it!  (Sorry about the grainy picture, but this is the only one I have of all three of us)

(This isn’t necessarily illustrating any extra in the way of handmade-ness, but I included it because I just really love this picture.  This is my wonderful family, including my parents, my two brothers and my two sisters-in-law)

 The two bridesmaids dresses were from a Vogue pattern, and had boned bodices, with a lovely and very flattering folded portrait neckline.  I hand-sewed on all that gold lace, and miraculously got the motifs to fit perfectly on the two different sizes so I would not have to chop any in half.  Cassie’s little flower girl dress was adorable, and had a miniature sweetheart neckline, big puffy sleeves, cascading ruffles down the back of the skirt and a big bow tied in the small of her back.  Sigh…  both my dress and hers have been passed on, and I only have C’s dress (the other bridesmaid), which is pictured below.  It is a bigger size than Bessie who is modelling it here, thus necessitating Cassie’s hand you can see there unobtrusively pulling it in at the back to illustrate what it actually looks like when it fits the wearer.
Of course now I look at it and see multitude little imperfections, but at the time I was pretty darn proud of myself.

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Oh, this old thing…

… and a few more old creations.  (Don’t worry, these are drawing to an inevitable endpoint, as I go forwards through time and eventually wind up at “now”, at which point these posts will finish and you will be seeing new stuff only…  It’s just that one of the goals I set myself was to document as much as I could of my handmade things in this blog, so bear with me here.  This is a finite process…)
This is our little family (Sam on the way) in more stuff I made; Tim’s (Topkids) overall has been seen before here.  I made my dress, completely inspired by the dress (below) in Beetlejuice, do you remember this?  I basically fell in love with this loose long floral dress and set out to make myself close to an exact copy of it for myself.   Fortuitously it worked well as a maternity dress too.  I felt lucky that dropped waist blouse-y Laura Ashley numbers were quite fashionable during the years I was producing children…
The blue floral dress with lace trim that Cassie is wearing is a TopKids pattern.

Below is a four generation picture; my grandmother, mother, Cassie and me.  Cassie is wearing a dress made to the same pattern as the blue one above.  It is interesting how the very different fabrics used give each dress a completely different feel; this one seems kinda “smart” while the floral and lace above give a far more “pretty and dressy enough for a party” feel, no?  Perhaps this tiny set of two dresses makes up another miniature rogue’s gallery (like yesterday), seeing the different looks you can get from one pattern by varying minor details; in this case the fabric.

This little romper is literally the only thing that I made for my own children and passed on to other little relatives that was returned to me (!) but unfortunately without the little blouse I had made to go with it.  It had a really cute pink blouse to wear underneath, with a Peter Pan collar and full batwing sleeves gathered into elasticated wrists.  The little floral romper here has a zip up the centre front and tabs with pearl snaps on the pockets and shoulder straps.  From TopKids patterns.

Below is a  picture of Tim and Cassie on Tim’s fourth birthday (Sam is around by now, but is not in this picture!)  Cassie is wearing a dress that was truly one of my favourites, out of all that I had made for her!  It was of a lovely floral brushed cotton in very pretty shades of blue, green and violet, and had a sailor collar of soft ivory brushed cotton, around which I topstitched on a pale blue satin ribbon edging to enhance the sailor-y look.  I loved seeing her in this dress…. she looks so pretty, doesn’t she?

Below; I am with Tim and a fairly brand new Sam in a baby sling… Tim is wearing a red-and-white fair isle jumper knitted by my Mum, and I am wearing a blue, turquoise, red and pink cardigan with black and white geckoes that I knitted from a pattern, the details of which are unknown, sorry.  It is knitted entirely in the intarsia method, with each section of colour in each row, in individual balls (ie, that is 15 different balls for some rows…), and is possibly the most complex thing I have ever knitted.  Each row of the pattern was different from each other row, as you can imagine.  Even the two sleeves were different from each other!  The main of the knitting is in stocking stitch, but the red and pink sections are in reverse stocking stitch…  my modern-day me is actually pretty impressed with my olden-day more-patient me.  
I am embarrassed to admit that I went on to lose all appreciation of my own time and effort, and painted the entire interior of a house while wearing this thing, which explains some tiny spots of white paint now adorning the front.  Also it has gone camping with us (and I recall wearing it 24/7 including sleeping in it on one particularly cold camping trip) and it has been a bed-jacket too.  I still have it, but needless to say don’t really wear it anymore.  It has slightly felted, through bad washing.
(Later edit; in reply to some comments, it’s a bit hazy in my memory now but I’m pretty sure I made this before I had little kiddies underfoot… just no pictures!)

below; the wrong side, showing the intarsia method of knitting used…
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Burda 7767; a rogue’s gallery

A while ago, Myrna suggested that I do something about rounding up together in one post the number of variations on a pattern that I have made up; as a sort of “hey, look at the number of different looks you can get from just one pattern” kind of a post.  Thank you, Myrna!
I thought it was a terrific suggestion, as I do re-use favourite patterns a whole bunch of times, probably painfully and boringly so from the point of view of people who like to go for new and exciting patterns with every garment.  But to redeem the boredom of going again and again with the same old same old patterns I usually introduce a little something to a pattern to get slightly different garments each and every time.
One pattern I have used a lot is Burda 7767, a basic men’s shirt pattern.  Now agreed, it’s very basic, and seamstresses after a challenging sew usually avoid basic patterns like the plague.  Advanced seamstresses often prefer to go for something with a few exciting variations or twists already incorporated in it.  But just think, a basic pattern is often the best for playing around with and once you have mastered basic sewing techniques you can introduce your own features.  So much more fun!  I do prefer DIY-ing my own features to being spoon-fed a design; and from the sewing-challenge point of view incorporating your own ideas can be a bigger challenge than even the toughest Vogue Advanced pattern, and you will feel more like an actual “designer” in control of your own ideas.
Most of the shirts I have made from this pattern have been for the menfolk in my life; my husband and my two sons.  OK, I admit I have also made one version for me too, hehe…  and unfortunately men love for their stuff to be kinda unadorned.  But you can still squeeze a few little variations in here and there and as long as it is not too asymmetric or “weird” your menfolk will probably consent to wear it…
So here, without further ado, is my gallery of Burda 7767 (so far…)

The first version: just to the pattern with no bells or whistles, pink linen, navy blue topstitching and navy blue buttons.  I was sewing this one as a birthday surprise so couldn’t do any actual fitting.  It turned out a tad too tight under the arms for Craig, but not to worry, Tim has it in his wardrobe (he is not the kind of guy who feels his masculinity is challenged by a pink shirt) and I have borrowed it tonnes of times too.

Version two; maroon linen, with black contrasting topstitching and buttons.  Variations, a curved pocket flap, curved pocket edges, narrow spaced double rows topstitching.  I’ve also borrowed this one on a few occasions, hehe (it’s a good thing my husband is so generous with his wardrobe, hmmm?)

Version three; blue linen with light brown contrasting topstitching and light brown mottley bone buttons.  Variations, arrowhead pocket flap, curved pocket edges, wider spaced double topstitching.

Version four; for Sam, turquoise and white striped cotton with contrasting navy blue topstitching and navy blue snaps.  Variations; double bias placed breast pockets with arrowhead bias placed pocket flaps, shoulder tabs, inner sleeve tabs (so the sleeves can be rolled up like pictured) and snap closures throughout.

Version five; for Tim, blue, black and white plaid flannelette, with navy topstitching and navy blue snaps.  Variations, pieced pocket pieces (to take advantage of that interesting plaid), bias placed arrowhead pocket flaps. shoulder tabs, inner sleeve tabs and snap closure throughout.

Version six; for Craig, white linen, white topstitching and buttons. Variations; one double welt breast pocket with looped button closure, no collar, curved lower hemline.  Yup, I’ve borrowed this one a tonne too…!

Version seven; (blush) for me…, blue cotton chambray, white topstitching and copper-toned snaps.  Variations, double breast pockets with arrowhead pocket flaps, shoulder tabs and inner sleeve tabs, curved lower hemline.

Version eight; for Craig, navy and white striped cotton, yellow cotton, white topstitching and yellow buttons.  Variations, contrasting fabric for collar stand lining and sleeve cuff lining.  Buttonholes sewn on the diagonal, and grouped together down the buttonband in pairs, curved lower hemline.

Version nine; for Craig, green shot cotton, contrasting yellow topstitching, brown mottley buttons.  Variations, of summer weight cotton, with short sleeves, double curved edge breast pockets, arrowhead pocket flaps, curved lower hemline.  Did an interesting little triangular cut-out feature thingy on the ends of the sleeves

Version ten; for Tim, beige, black and white irregularly striped “scrunched” cotton, with black topstitching and black snaps.  Variations,  sleeve tabs, motif ironed onto pocket, double breast pockets, curved pocket flaps, snap closure throughout, curved lower hemline.

Version eleven; for Sam, black and white check “scrunched” cotton, black topstitching, silver snaps.  Variations, short sleeves with a little tab with snap closure on the edge of the sleeve hem.  Shoulder tabs with snap closure.  Pocket motif.  Bias cut double breast pockets, bias cut (but the opposite way) arrownhead pocket flaps, curved lower hemline.

Version twelve; for Craig, blue shot cotton, rusty red topstitching and buttons. Variations, short sleeved summer-y version, buttons on sleeve ends, double breast pockets, flattish arrowhead pocket flaps, curved lower hemline.

Version thirteen; for Sam, navy blue corduroy, navy topstitching, brown snaps.  Variations, made it a tad bigger and longer and out of corduroy to make a jacket-y thing. Double breast pockets, deep arrowhead pocket flaps, curved lower hemline.  Contrasting beige cotton for lining the collar stand, pocket flaps and pockets.  Copied some very cool double hip pockets here that I had seen on a jacket in the surf shop.  Both my boys love these jackets btw!

Version fourteen; for Tim, beige corduroy, brown topstitching (a mistake, should have chosen matching thread…), brown snaps.  Variations, as above, with the double hip pocket thing.  Contrasting blue linen for lining the collar stand, pocket flaps and pockets.

Version fifteen; not surprisingly, I have another one cut out and awaiting my attention!  This one for me.  Stay tuned for this next one…

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little overview of the very versatile Burda 7767, and can appreciate why it is one of my favourite go-to’s!

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Another trip down memory lane…

…  Remember when I said I had only once before made Cassie and myself matching clothes? Well this is Cassie’s dress, that was made from the leftover scraps of a dress I had made myself.  Her little dress, made using a TopKids pattern, has a white Peter Pan collar, and a miniature faux man’s tie in turquoise fabric, itself the leftovers from these shorts (so you can see how long I hang onto scraps…!)  I’m sorry it’s not a very good picture, and what’s more I have no pics of my own dress in this fabric; but imagine this maroon, deep turquoise and red large-scale plaid in one of those 90’s style shirt-dresses with a high small collar, long sleeves and a big full gathered skirt.  Something like the red version of this pattern at right… yes, very very very 90’s.  I hope I haven’t shattered any delusions of myself as a style maven now!  At least I never liked shoulder pads so never used them.
So I’ve got that going for me…    (Can anyone recognise that quote?)

Tim is wearing here a little jumper here that I knitted for him using scraps of wool from other projects… rather cleverly eked out if I say so myself, so that the front, back and both sleeves had the same colours and in the same proportions!  Knitters will know this is not necessarily a simple thing to achieve when you are working with scraps…  It went from the dark shades of purple, blue and green at the bottom through grey, then pale blue then the palest yellow and back to navy blue at the top, and the colours were not in defined stripes but faded together in an ombre effect.  I did this by knitting two colours together per row in the fair-isle knitting method.

In this picture, Tim is wearing another jumper I knitted, and I can’t recall now if it was from a pattern or if I took the embroidered teddy bear design from a cross stitch and just transposed it to a knitwear graph… yup, memory not what it used to be!  Again using scraps for the teddies.  Cassie is wearing a little dress I made for her using a TopKids pattern.  It was in two different white and navy blue prints, one a polka dot and the other a floral.  The fabric was slightly fluffy, brushed cotton, and I sewed in white piping around the collar, sleeve cuffs, the single curved breast pocket and around the dropped waistline where the buttoned-up blouse joined the skirt part of the dress.  It was quite cute, no? and a nice and warm little number for winter!

And the quote?  From that great 90’s cinema classic, Caddyshack.

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Featuring small versions of Tim and Cassie…

Whizzing back a few years now…
and here are some more of the little outfits I made for my children when they were small.  These were “good” outfits, but of course I used to dress my children in good outfits on a day-to-day basis anyway, reasoning that they wouldn’t fit into them for very long!  So these clothes were worn to parties, to playgroup, to picnics, as well as for playing in the sandpit at home and to the beach; anywhere.  We’re not the sort of family to ever be precious about our clothes.  Oh, OK then… with the exception of that Chanel style coat, I admit it.
These designs were all from TopKids magazines.  I still have all nine of the magazines I bought, although none of the patterns I traced out!  They were such wonderful magazines.. ooer, I’ve probably said that a few, or a dozen, times before, haven’t I?  I’ve got this tendency to rave about them, sorry.  Such a pity they were discontinued.  I’ve never seen such great, trendy, funky, interesting little children’s patterns anywhere else since.

The dress Cassie is wearing has a few rows of smocking on the bodice and a little white Peter Pan collar, on which I hand embroidered a few flowers, stems and leaves mimicking the design in the floral.  Another cute little dress that has gone, goodness knows where…
Tim’s outfit was a little short overall, of a light denim fabric and with patches of a thickish checked cotton.  I was pretty proud of this, and he wore it tonnes of times, until it got holes in the bottom…  That red button sewn on the front is an aeroplane.

The button-up boxy little jacket is of the same light denim fabric, and has contrasting fabric for the pocket flaps and the hoodie part of it.  The contrasting fabric is printed with cheerful hippos setting sail in sailing boats.

The pictures of Cassie alone and of the two of them, were taken on her first birthday.

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Tim’s shirt/jacket

Here is the shirt/jacket thingy that I made for Tim for a birthday gift… it is very similar to Sam’s here, but using a grey/beige, thin but warm, corduroy and a (leftover) contrasting dark blue/grey cotton linen for the lining of each of the collar stand, yoke, welt pockets and pocket flaps. 
I used the same ol’ Burda 7767 that is now my standby go-to men’s button-up shirt pattern, almost lost count of the number of times I’ve used it now  (just went back and checked… 14 times!)  Hehe, Myrna suggested I do an overview of different ways in which I’ve used the same pattern to get different garments, and I think this pattern might be a prime candidate, along with my all-time favourite Vogue 7303… but not until I’ve given this shirt/jacket thing its very own post here…
Variations to the pattern; 
well, apart from the obvious customised fitting to Tim’s measurements modifications I implemented the following:
1.  lengthened the fronts and back by about 6-7cm, to get a more coat or jacket like effect and curved the hemline up to each of the side seams to get that shirt-tail effect both front and back…
2. added two breast pockets with curved flaps
3. added two of those double pockets at hip height… pockets that are separately a welt pocket and are also a patch pocket (you can tell, I was pretty thrilled with how these turned out on Sam’s jacket and Tim thought they were tres cool as well, so I just had to put them on his too!)  my tutorial for doing these double pockets is here.
4. used snaps throughout in lieu of buttons.  
Little anecdote; I had nearly finished this jacket – bar putting the snaps in, and by this time Tim knew very well that I was making this for him (well, I do make them something for each of their birthdays…. he was expecting it) and he wanted to wear it out to a friend’s place that night.  Of course the snaps seems like the easy quick bit and I’m like, oh hang on, shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.  Like, well over an hour later….  hehe, SO putting in snaps does take a fair bit of time, if you are trying to be careful about placement that is and not just flying along recklessly… but he did get to wear it out, even if he was (fashionably) late!
In an unthinking moment, I selected contrasting thread to topstitch, that matched the tobacco brown snaps exactly.  Bad idea!  I adore corduroy and have used it countless times, but looking back I have always selected matching topstitching thread.  In hindsight I can see the wisdom of that (even though it was ignorant wisdom…); corduroy by its very nature does not take super well to military-precisioned topstitching, all those furry velvety little ridges, bless them, are an enemy to the topstitching perfectionist.  Moral of the story; always, but always go with matching topstitching thread on corduroy, unless uneven lines are not going to send you spare.  The good news is that Tim, being an easy-going bloke, is OK with it.  It is just something to bother me whenever I have occasion to, say, hang it up on the line and get to see those slightly-darker-therefore-blindinglyobvious wonky lines all over again (grrr…)

At left; contrasting lining: at right; the double welt/patch pockets at hip level, complete with hideous topstitching

Because of the intensity that was me-made June, it may appear I haven’t done much sewing in the last month… actually I have still been sewing and have produced some new things.  For some reason I felt I didn’t want to do postings of any new stuff during that month, so I have kept some things back.  Well, OK I did reveal some new things, a little grey top, and the new scarf… oh, OK then.  There was a smattering of minor-league new stuff, hehe.  And some old stuff that was discovered in my winter sort-out.  But, back to the subject, I do have some new creations to reveal.  Just have to muster some enthusiasm to get back in front of the camera again… you understand.

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