A post from the Past

If I’d been more active on here, I would have noticed before today, that this draft post from August (AUGUST!!!!) had not actually gone live.

In the interests of keeping everyone up to date with what I made, and remembering happy summer holiday days, here it is:

 

Well I got some of my prep done for all the holiday crafting, before I left for France. It wasn’t exactly what I had planned but I had enough to be getting on with, so it was all good!

First up, before leaving, I created a skirt and top set in the dark violet jersey I had used for the flower decoration on the chartreuse dress. I used my trusty Simple Sew Shannon pattern for a t-shirt style top. As I’ve done in the past, I skipped the neck and arm bands for a cleaner line, and to make it look less t-shirty.

For the skirt I used my self drafted straight pull-on skirt pattern, and it’s pretty much a direct copy of my royal blue one. The only difference is that this purple one was going to be hemmed by hand, rather than adding an overlocked band.

All I needed to do was get on with the hand hemming… There were a few distractions at the start of the holiday (all 3 of my sisters being there, along with nieces and nephews, and a mahoosive cousins party) but it got done eventually.

Yes, it’s another Shannon!

I also got some work done on my 100 Day Dress so now I’m on Day 75.

&

The progress report is that I’ve got about a third of the front still to embellish, and then I need to sew it all together. I’m still debating with myself what my options are for sewing together, but I reckon it’s all feasible within the 25 days I’ve got remaining. If it looks like it may need more time, then I’ll just have to be picky about using days where I’ve got nothing else to do!
For the full gen on this dress, it has its own Instagram account.

Sadly the knitting remains unknitted. But the Granny Squares blanket that I started last summer continues apace, with over 2/3 of the squares done. I even started putting them together. I learned a new technique for that, so yay for youtube:

I also visited the fabric shop in Les Sables again, and came away with a couple of jerseys, and some super-cute sunflower buttons.

I’m very happy with that little haul.

The 100 Day Dress – A Sorry Update

The idea for the 100 Day Dress was that I would hand sew a little bit of embroidery each day, and after 100 days (calculated carefully to fall on 31st December 2017), I would have it finished. Sadly, the annual hibernation of the sewjo hit, towards the end of November, and it became harder for me to sustain that plan. As at right now, it remains an Unfinished Object, that’s been looking very sorry for itself, on the top of the sewing pile.

However, I have decided that I can still make this thing work, as a 100 Day Dress Project. All I needed to do was count the number of days that I *didn’t* work on it in 2017, and that would give me that number of days “in hand”. It would still be a 100 Day Dress, just not consecutive days is all. The sewjo is returning, thanks to my latest Simple Sew Blog make, which I should be able to reveal shortly.

So I’ve gone through my phone pictures, checking dates and times, and it looks like I’ve got 28 days available to finish this project (yes, December was a very poor show).

I have got most of the dress pieces done, there’s maybe a third of the front to complete. I’m pretty sure it’s feasible to get it all finished in the 28 days I’ve got. I’m off to make myself a little tickybox grid in my journal, so that I can count them down as I use them!

Part of the Work In Progress

A 100 Day Dress

I decided a while ago that I wanted to start a long term project, something that I could do a little at a time, each day. I’ve seen people’s 100 day projects on Instagram, and I liked that as a structure for my project. My first thought, inspired strongly by Tiny*Stitches*Miri, was embroidery on a garment. I thought about upcycling/refashioning, but in the end I settled on an Alabama Chanin inspired new make, though I’m not going to claim it’s proper AC style. I want it to have some embroidery, some appliqué, some reverse appliqué, some beading/sequinning. I don’t imagine for one moment that it will be elegantly stylish, because it’s going to have so many bits of everything, and it will all be a bit random. But hopefully the colour scheme will pull everything together, and it will be interesting to look at.

I’ll be using the pale blue jersey from FC Fabric Studio which I bought in the Spring, and the Shannon dress pattern, as I didn’t want to have to mess about with a new pattern. I’ve bought a number of embroidery silks for this project, but everything else will be from stash (there are a LOT of blue beads in the massive bead/sequin stash).

Blues

This all starts at the weekend, on Saturday. If I’ve done my maths right, the 100 days will be up on 31st December.

I’ve set up a dedicated instagram account for this make, with the idea being to record every day’s progress.