A lull in sewing tasks gives me the chance to make some more bath puppets. I don't have any in stock and there will be another market at the end of the month. I should have finished this crocodile yesterday but there was a thunder storm and I didn't want to risk having my sewing machine affected by a lightning strike. I'll finish today. We had 30mm of much needed rain with the storm, so that's fine.
Once word gets out that you're willing to sew for others, you can find your self doing all sorts of things. Over the weekend, I hemmed three tablecloths:
The job wasn't quite as straight forward as I'd expected. One of the fabrics was very fine and refused to sew a smooth seam. Eventually I had to settle for 'this is the best I can do', after changing stitch length and tension, and wielding the iron before and after sewing.
This morning I've been embroidering a monogram for someone else:
It's not very expertly done. Perhaps I could call it rustic? Oh, and I'm still drawing the line at replacing zips in trousers!
Do tree tomatoes grow on trees? Yes, they grow on a small tree:
Jack is standing with his hand like that not in a ballet pose, but to show the height of the tree - where his hand is is about 6 foot, so the tree is about 8 foot high, nearly 2.5 metres. The tyre tower is where potatoes are growing, in case you're wondering. Here's a picture of the fruit on the tree:
We have two tree tomato trees, the other one is perhaps a little smaller:
While I'm showing fruit trees in our garden, here's a picture of the orange tree, so laden with fruit that the branches have to be propped up:
Unfortunately, the propping wasn't done soon enough and the trunk has split:
In spite of being bowled over by the Refashionista blog, I'm not a fan of doing alterations. I'd far rather make a garment from scratch than alter an existing one. But I did agree to turn an XXL dress into a Medium one. I'll give it a go, I said, I might learn something. "Just put some darts in the front and back", my friend said. Mmm, no. The pockets would be in the wrong place, the shoulder seams would be in the wrong place, it would be a mess.
I removed the sleeves and the pockets (much easier said than done!) and then laid the dress I'd used as a pattern for her other dresses on top:
Here's where reading Refashionista came in handy - as I took a deep breath with scissors in hand, I thought, if Jilly could do this, so can I. After cutting the excess off, I reattached the pockets and sleeves.
I should have taken a before picture. But you can see I cut a fair bit off:
If this is alright, I might be able to skip making dresses four and five, which will suit me because I still have many curtains to make.
Well, the first sewing lesson went pretty well. I told my young pupil that if he learnt to sew by hand, he'd be able to sew any time, without having to have access to a machine. He liked that idea, so we were off! He learnt running stitch and back stitch. I was impressed with how quickly he grasped the principle of back stitch. I found some fabric with dots on to act as a guide. Next week we'll try chain stitch. He liked the look of detached chain stitch, or lazy daisy.
I 'inherited' a large bag of fabric scraps, along with the craft group job. I did the 'new broom' thing and threw half of it away - they were too small to be of use for anything. Some of the remaining scraps are also pretty small, but I thought they'd work for yoyos. I haven't made fabric yoyos before and it turned out to be less simple than I supposed. I read through this tutorial, which helped, but I had to experiment to decide on size and experience the various pitfalls. For instance, it's important to sew really close to the edge, otherwise the yoyo has a horrid lump in the middle.
