Category Archives: Sewing

September 16, 2013 · 2:32 pm

Hatchling silkworms and other thrills

Last year, I bought five silk worms at a school fair and raised them into moths. Later, when I was wondering what to expect next, I had quite a conversation with a delightful woman in the Button Bar in the Adelaide Arcade, as you do.  I can’t remember how we got from the tea cosy she was knitting to silk worms, but somehow we did.  She told me to expect the eggs that resulted from a dalliance between a couple of my moths to hatch in September.  I remember thinking about this on 1 September.  Then on Friday 13 September I realised I had taken no action and sprinted down the hall to check on them and lo!  There were tiny black creatures wiggling around!  I made an immediate mercy dash to the nearest mulberry tree.  Can you make the hatchlings out?

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The hatchlings are the tiny black lines.  Those spots on the cardboard are eggs.  Today I conservatively estimate I have 50 silkworm hatchlings, and I have started working on finding some of them new homes.

Meanwhile, I have been on a bag jag… sewing loads more bags and taming [some of] my scrap collection.  I decided to photograph a lining in progress on the weekend, because what is more thrilling than a lining?

 

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Well, one of our chooks seemed to think so.  She could tell whatever was happening on the table was worth looking into, so she flew up immediately to check into it.  Regrettably, this was not an edible thrill from her point of view.

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Thrills come in very disparate packages, all depending on perspective… or so it seems to me!  Audrey finds earwigs a lot more thrilling than I do.

Meanwhile, I have taken the nettle stems back out of the retting bath (which this time certainly did go to the garden–) and set them out in the rain to rinse.  Since so much of my crafting takes place in crevices of time and is ordered by whim rather than a linear plan, I hope you’re managing to follow all these emerging themes …

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September 9, 2013 · 4:41 pm

Waste not, want not, with a side serving of the election

I live in a society so wealthy and so wasteful, in global context, that any selection of actions I make about waste reduction can feel a bit arbitrary.  I see so many missed opportunities every day!  But still the principle that waste should be avoided is beyond criticism, and the principle that I should do what I can, is likewise sound.  So this election night, I took the eucalyptus-printed silk/hemp scraps from my previous foray into shirtmaking (I was piecing them together back in this post) and the scraps of my skirt adventure, and created bags from them. I love bags.  I love making them, giving them and carrying them around.  I seldom leave home with less than three, a curious fact I’ve decided to relax about.

Skirt bag 1: has already gone to an enthusiastic new owner who cooked a fabulous dinner for us last night:

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Skirt bag 2 is with me now and soon to be introduced to someone I am confident will like it:

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I decided to line the hemp/silk bags on account of the method of piecing I had chosen and being unsure of the fabric’s propensity to wear.  I had leftover silk noil from various workshops and from making pillowcases.  Apologies for the dodgy pictures taken after dark, indoors, with a flash.  Some bloggers are so impatient!

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There were some small sample pieces that had indigo australis and local eucalyptus leaves printed onto them and then an iron afterbath in the Blue Mountains.  I took these pictures just before they vanished into the interior of the bags to be seen only by the new owners, whom I hope will enjoy having this treat inside their bags!  I personally am the kind of person who revels in pocket linings made of treasured fabrics, whether they are organic flour bags or were formerly part of my late Grandmother’s extensive scarf collection.  Needless to say, I love a bag lining with a story.

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I like these bags a lot. The weight of the fabric with the lining works well, to my way of thinking.  I could feel the urge to give these away before they were off the sewing machine, so here are pictures on an overcast morning!

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This next one has been rated suitable as a gift for my mother-out-law, who is apparently generous enough in her assessment of my skills to talk to her friends about my crafting sometimes.  She has friends who have been weavers and dyers for years.  She herself has been a wonderful garment creator for decades and keeps thinking she has given it up and then changing her mind, so her judgment may not be unbiased but I am flattered by it nonetheless.  Her bag has been finished with a strip from a heavy weight ramie shirt found at an op shop (thrift store)–beautiful fabric and sewing skill but an appalling garment I felt no compunction about cutting up and redeploying.  Most of it became another bag complete with interior welt/flap pockets which had been a beautifully crafted feature of the front of the shirt.  Sadly they were an offence against fashion even to me, and I don’t hold with fashion much!

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And for gratuitous images, I have these of our hens.  They don’t stand around waiting for their photos to be taken when there are earwigs to be found.

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However, they are glorious, and they are also blissfully ignorant of the election that was taking place the day I snapped their pictures.  We were planting and pruning and mowing and they were seeking insects and seeds.

I feel deeply sad that the people of my country have elected a government that thinks we need to pay less international aid to fund infrastructure here; that expresses routine contempt rather than compassion for refugees taking desperate measures to escape their mostly war torn homelands and get to our shores; that thinks roads are a higher priority than public transport; that cares little for renewable energy and plans to fund it less; and that has expressed little interest in participating in global efforts to halt or turn back environmental devastation or climate change.  Here’s India Flint on the subject, should you wish for more.  I haven’t made a habit of commenting on the state of our nation here, but I felt the need to mark the day.  There will be some serious further consideration given to the forms of action that might be needed in the coming period at our house and in our community of friends.  Thinking about the state of the world and our impact upon it, in all their complexity, will continue to be crucial.

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September 6, 2013 · 2:19 pm

Show time!

It is Adelaide Royal Show time again.  Spring began here only a few days ago, by the calendar.  There was a brief hot spell–33C is too much too soon for me–and then for the first day of the show, overcast and threatening rain as these dim pictures may suggest.  This week I have been tuning up the bunting I made to protect our little community revegetation project–around one of my favourite E Scoparia trees.  I sewed all the pieces back together, made some more, joined it all with some recycled cotton yarn, and… this morning we went out and applied it.

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The saltbush and other natives we have planted here have come on wonderfully–and there has been a spectacular fail with transplanting dianellas which I’ll pull out once the show is over. The yellow flowering tree on the right is a wattle that is doing really well (and not because we planted it).  The modest goal of this bunting is to gently suggest to people walking from the show (who will likely come down the path on the right of the image below) heading for the car parking on the left of the image below… that they should walk around this patch rather than trampling it in the dark after the fireworks are over, tipsy/sleepy/not paying attention as they may well be after an exciting day and too much fairy floss.  I think I replaced it three times last year, so I have some backup bunting already in hand, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  Happy show!  Happy springtime!

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August 26, 2013 · 4:03 pm

A new skirt

I am not much of a skirt wearer, so I have not made myself a skirt for well over a decade.  I do remember making one for my daughter that she wanted to be very long and very swishy… I remember that hem going on forever!  Well.  Last summer I acquired a lovely skirt that I enjoyed wearing, so I have decided to branch out.  I found this beautiful fabric at The Drapery, a newly opened and lovely little shop I was keen to see and keen to support.  I am so glad I went.  It has a lovely selection of fabrics in fibres and designs I loved.  There are far fewer choices than in Spotlight… but far more I would like to actually sew with or wear.  And the women who are running it are delightful.

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This is a first instalment in my plans to make anything new I need for my summer wardrobe.  So far, so good, I think!  It is cut on the bias and lined.  I drafted the pattern from the skirt I like to wear. I bought enough fabric and then some for a simple A-line skirt but not quite enough to cut it on the bias.  I’ve pieced in a small section near the waist and I think it will work just fine.

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August 9, 2013 · 1:02 pm

Indigo dyeing

A while back, I did a workshop on Nigerian Indigo dyeing with CraftSouth.  The tutor was the fabulous Oluwole Oginni.  I highly recommend this workshop, part of a series of Traditional Craft Workshops.  Indigo dyeing wasn’t offered in 2012 but hopefully there will be another opportunity.

We used wax resists and then dyed with indigo, using several dips.

I turned some of the fabric I worked on into these fully lined bags.

The denim is from recycled jeans, one pair to each bag!  This pair are a hemp blend.

And since we’re here… a couple of gratuitous pictures of a poppy that came up in my garden.  I can’t really claim to have planted it, though it bears a strong resemblance to some blood poppies I grew years back from a gift of seed.  But it was beautiful, and the bees love these flowers.  It is winter here now and I have just a few of these poppies beginning life in the garden, which have escaped the caterpillars.  So here’s hoping for more flowers later in the year!

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August 7, 2013 · 9:33 am

Embroidery for the heart, from the heart

One of my friends is a poet, and a social worker.  She has spent years dedicating herself to the wellbeing of the people in the locality where she works, a place where poverty and violence have taken their toll, creating tough lives.  She witnesses people’s skills and talents in the face of difficulty and enables the bringing into existence of new connections, new skills, new capacities and new lives.  She helps those who must escape violence to make that difficult, vital journey into new lives without abuse.  I am full of admiration for all that she can do and all that she is.

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She has been facing some powerful challenges of her own in the face of government budget cuts and policy changes.  I have been thinking of her a great deal.  There is one poem in particular that brings her solace.  I decided to embroider it for her.  It has been a pleasure to spend so many hours thinking of her, holding her in my heart and wishing her well.  I’ve stitched the words on hemp dyed with indigofera australis and thread dyed with indigofera for blue and silky oak for yellow.

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August 5, 2013 · 8:11 pm

Small things…

They say ‘small things amuse small minds’. I think that if you can be amused by small things, you can be amused and delighted on a regular basis.  And that small things are often delightful.  Moss, for instance.

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This is such a small thing. I loved Cossack Design’s needle safe, and what with all the embroidery going on round here, I decided to make my own needle case.  I think the last one I made was created in my primary school years–both long gone. 
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I decided on golden stitching for the edges, so dyed some silk with Silky Oak (Grevillea Robusta) leaves.  A nod to Ida Grae of Nature’s Colors fame for the recipe, wherever she may now be.  Hopefully hale and hearty and dyeing away though apparently no longer publishing.  How wonderful that she figured out this dye plant–which is native to Australia–from California!

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Here is the thread…

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And the inside of the needle case. These two fine scraps of recycled woolen blanket and that lovely piece of cotton string saved for just such a special occasion have found happy homes at last.

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July 19, 2013 · 10:58 am

Who knew embroidery could be so much fun?

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I have been so inspired by other dyers’ work with naturally dyed embroidery thread that I decided a while back that perhaps I could include some silk thread in my many dye pots.  I dyed a large quantity of wool in small batches over the last few months, so there have been quite a few opportunities.  Really, I had friends who like to embroider in mind at the time.  I thought I could gift them my little lengths of dyed thread.  However, a vast new plan has sprung into my mind.  I dug out the embroidery hoop I brought home from an op shop years back, but have never used.  It helps enormously but also makes embroidery rather louder than I had anticipated, as if the fabric were a drumhead!  I did not expect to find embroidery so thrilling, or so noisy.

This new project has had me out and about in the neighbourhood visiting species of eucalypt I use less.  There have been some  surprises.  The two spindly E Websterianas with their minnirichi bark and their heart-shaped leaves are gone!  They were not thriving in that location just a few blocks away, I admit.  But I am sorry to have lost them (let alone that someone probably took all that leafage to the dump).

Another day I went to two different E Scoparias, walking further to get to the one which dependably hangs low when I couldn’t reach the leaves of the closest.  Gone was the lush straggly undergrowth that used to surround it, and gone was the low hanging branch.  I am not sure whom it had offended.

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At least the tree is still there, snuggled up to an equally large carob tree.  Since major infrastructure came to my neighbourhood and trucks became a constant form of traffic through streets large, medium and small, the low hanging branches of many of my favourite trees have been removed.  Apparently no one was considering the suburban gleaner at the time…

On a subsequent trip, I discovered that the largest, most luxurious E Scoparia in my neighbourhood, whose tree hating neighbour had me worried when I was collecting bark, has been pruned with a chain saw so that no longer do its lovely leaves hang anywhere I will be able to reach them without a ladder.  Luckily, the bark will fall where I can reach it, and the tree is still there despite having such a determined human enemy.

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June 14, 2013 · 8:53 am

Of moths and mending

I have a serious programme of moth management due to the amount of wool that is stored at my place.  It involves ziplock bags, careful wool storage, regular washing of clothing and pheromone traps.  However, there are noticeably more moths in this house than our previous one, and it has wool carpets.  This winter when I pulled out my woolens, the jumpers were all intact but one of my fine woollen undergarments had suffered some nibbling.  There is a small hole on the front:

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And a small cluster of holes on the back.

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I thought I might just leave them.  This garment is not outerwear and surely they wouldn’t run too far.  But then I thought of mending them with silk thread and overdyeing the whole garment in eucalyptus… and just when that was tickling my fancy, I dyed silk embroidery thread with Plum Pine and got colours that seemed like they might fit… and so I spent an evening working on my mending.

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Since the moths gave me circles (more or less), I worked with that theme.  I’ve tried to leave a little extra thread at the outer edge of each part of the darn to accommodate stretch–which is what my Mum taught me to do when darning a sock.

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The silk yarn I pulled out of the plum pine and vinegar dyepot the day after darning is a deeper shade, so I’m considering further embellishment with that, or the silk I dyed the night we worked with the indigo dyepot.  But for now, I’m pleased to have mended these holes… and on the same weekend as I mended a ravelled hem, for good measure.  This will be an initial washfastness test for the plum pine on silk, too…

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April 5, 2013 · 1:12 pm

Waste not want not

Having made two shirts from my length of leaf-printed hemp/silk, I was left with a selection of mostly quite small pieces.  Other people have clever ways of designing that don’t leave waste but use the whole length of fabric.  Not me.  Maybe I’ll learn this one day.  But I have my ways.  I cut all the pieces into rectangles and squares.

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Then I start piecing them together and matching sizes.

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I stitch them into bigger and bigger pieces, until I can decide whether to make a bag or a cushion cover or whatever seems to suit the fabric and design.  Finally all I have left are useable pieces of patchwork.

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And a really small pile of scraps.

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And of course, the second shirt.

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