Little Pieces of Me

It must be the official (not to say in any way actual ) first day of Spring last week that made me have a bit of a tidy up of my closet. That or I was avoiding doing something else, which is when I usually find myself getting all organized. For example, at peak marking times I get the overwhelming urge to do things like alphabetize my sock drawer. All I did was re-group everything in the closet by length and then by colour which makes it much faster to find something to wear in the morning. (Really Gil? How exactly do you sort an all black winter wardrobe by colour?) As usual I found some items I hadn't worn for a while. Some were nice surprises, some were headed for the charity bag, others I still had hope for. One of these last items was this (cough) black H&M dress. When I really stopped to think about it, I realized I have only worn this dress once - about 4 years ago in LA. I'd needed something that could pass as a LBD for an alumni event, but seeing as I...

I've started to put some of those painted and stamped elements from earlier this month into use. My first application has been a partial fail. This infinity scarf (made from a recycled t shirt) with painted motifs appliqued looks nice and is quite comfortable to wear, but it is a fail in terms of the stiffness of the motifs. The jersey absorbed too much of the fabric paint and therefore the 'hand' of these appliqued elements is much stiffer than the main body of the scarf. It's not a  total  fail. It looks OK, the colours are good and it's actually quite nice to wear. I like the obvious hand stitching around the appliqued pieces. It's just that stiffness. Sigh. I need to go back to the printing and painting station in the basement and have another go - this time with a lighter approach when working on this kind of fabric. On the bright side: One thing is clear here... how much better, more consistent,  my hand sewing has become. I'm inspir...

After last week's T shirt scarf project, I was left with a bunch of non-loop tubes. And a few days later I received a big pile of men's thin white undershirts, the kind without side seams. There was no choice but to make more scarves. Hey look at me... I'm up cycling! First off, I dealt with the left overs. The trouble with those non-loop tubes is that they were too short to use for a double wrap, and too long (and not enough of them) for a satisfying single wrap scarf. So I needed to find a way to add length. The solution was to make a band to extend the length. This has worked out very well. The flat band is invisible once the scarf is double wrapped. It actually sits very comfortably at the back of the neck and reduces the bulk of the material when worn under a jacket or coat. The sample shown could certainly be sewn better… had a little trouble with my bobbin thread for some reason… but you can see the general approach. Then it was time to deal with some of those...