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Me Made May 2013

I, Ally of London Calling, sign up as a participant of Me-Made-May '13. I endeavour to create at least three new garments for the duration of May 2013 and wear (weather permitting) as many already created as possible.

All but one of my Me-Made item are summer clothes, so provided there is sunshine, you will see lots of them. If not, I foresee the making of my first cardigan, wintery/spring transitional dress and another longsleeved Renfrew.

I'm BACK.

V&A Ballgowns exhibition + a group of talented ladies = a fantastic inspirational evening

I know I haven't posted for ages. Things happened. Mainly the 'Lympics (Para- and O-). Some bag making for my sisters birthday. Spending time with very good friends. Trying to abduct their cat Molly (unsuccessfully... this time around). Watching my gorgeous godson walk into school for the very first time. And some other stuff. Good and bad.

Meeting up with some awesome ladies at the V&A Ballgowns exhibition organised by the lovely Karen of Did You Make That was a highlight. Karen even took a picture of the gang post-exhibition/pre-pub. See if you can spot me.

The ladies inspired me to get going on making a dress - a "proper" one, not one made of jersey (Because it's forgiving. And it stretches if I've messed up some of the sewing) but a "real" dress.
Now that I've written it all over the internets I will have to do it.
There.

Choir performance

Our last concert before the summer break. Rock Choir at the Byfleet 147th parish fest singing the beginning of "Somebody to love".

Beach Bag - Nautical style - Stripe heaven

Well, so we have friends whose daughter turned 16 - and we forgot her birthday! Eeeek!
So I decided to make her a bag - like, 16 year old girls like bags, right? I mean any girl likes a bag...
So I bought this gorgeous stripy fabric which I believe is meant to be upholstery fabric for £11/meter (Don't tell Julian!) but they only had 70cm so it wasn't too bad, bought some lovely white piping, dug out the blue fabric which I bought some years back with the plan to make a dress with it and took out my pattern for Verypurpleperson's reversible bag. Voila!

I prefer the stripes on the outside and frankly, as far as I'm concerned both sides could do with an anchor or ship applique but figured some 16 year olds prefer to blend in than to stand out so I didn't go that far.

Garden Fairies at night

This is not a tv test card

Although I do admit that it might look like one... Remember them?!

We need to get new sofa covers as the armrest and back covers have ripped and my other half didn't think about the lovely sewing machine currently cohabiting with us and threw it promptly away while I was gone for the weekend thinking that it's ripped, hence cannot be used anymore... But I'm not bitter.

So we need to get a new set.
After some research turns out that IKEA's options are horrendous.
Horrendously expensive or horrendously looking.
We decided to get another white version (which is filthy within days of washing!) and dye it.

I bought four different colours to see which one we like best. I went for iDye, which the lovely peeps from Younghouselove used (successfully!)as described in this post.

Colour number one was Crimson.

I'm totally underwhelmed. The red didn't come out anywhere near as I was expecting it to. It's totally washed out and quite disappointing really. I was hoping for a stronger colour. I wonder if the salt that I used had anything to do with the way the colour looks. It's a different one to the salt I used with the other three.

 As a complete opposite I present you with (get the sunglasses ready) Violet - or so they call it. Really it's a ridiculously bright purple. See for yourself.

 I really don't know what to tell you about this one... it's quite BRIGHT and LOUD.


The next one I tried is Kelly green. I quite like it, nice apple green colour. 

And last but but no means least I tried Chartreuse, which is a limey, yellowy green. And I LOVE it. Unfortunately Julian couldn't hate it more... hehehe!
Admittedly having the whole sofa in this colour could require sunglasses and you might get a headache but BANG you'd totally wake up when you come into the room.

And as a special treat, here's all of them together as we're trying to decide which one to go with... Now does it remind you of a tv test card?!
(And yes, this is the width of our living room.)

What do you think?