one down, two to go

it took me most of the day to figure this out. i combined two ikea fabrics from my stash and made a reversible pillow for the new lounge area in the covered terrace that husband has built this summer. i bought a pallet cushion as the base and so this is basically a cover, though i have sewn the buttons on, so i'll have to clip them off if i want to remove it. 

i spent quite a long time fiddling with the zipper. i was pleased with myself for finding a long zipper for only 10kr. in the local secondhand shop. maybe i won't bother with the zippers in the next ones since i'm sewing the buttons on. it makes quite a difference to have them there - it keeps its shape much more nicely.

i really love how the buttons look. i don't love the sawdust that i got on the brand new cushion because i couldn't resist trying it out in position and husband was still sanding the bench in preparation for painting it. 

prepped the buttons for the next two. i'm really pleased with how they turned out. and they look cool and i think they'll be quite flat and not uncomfortable to sit on them. at least these rainy weather is good for such activities. 

getting creative with springbok

a couple of weeks ago at the fabulous leather store, i bought a dyed purple springbok hide with the intention of making a purse similar to one i bought in cape town ages ago. it took awhile to screw up the courage to cut into it, but yesterday, i took the plunge.

i let the natural shape of the leather determine the size of my purse, so it's rather long and skinny and i suppose i'll easily lose things down in the bottom of it, but i'm so happy with how it came out, that i don't really care. i lined it with super soft kid leather, also in deep purple and it has a pocket for my phone (i haven't found a good way to photograph that, so i can't show you). i used the same soft leather for the strap and because it came out a little long and i didn't have a buckle to make it adjustable, i just tied a knot in it.

so as not to let the scraps go to waste, i sewed up a very simple little wallet as well. again, using the natural nap of the fur on the hide. i love how it turned out too.

i have boots that match this, but i need to get the zipper repaired and haven't gotten around to that. i'll have to do so now.

the leathers i'm working with are so soft that i can use my ordinary sewing machine and a sturdy, thick needle made for top-stitching. a denim needle works too. it does make me think that i eventually need a real leather sewing machine, tho', as then i could get even more adventurous.

i had a few other scraps from a previous project and i made another little wallet in another version, for business cards. i wish i'd had enough left for a case for my iPad mini, but alas, the scraps are too narrow for that. maybe next, i'll make a little keychain of some of the other scraps. amazing how your mind starts coming up with more and more ideas once you just get started (i should really try to remember that).

messenger bag in a morning

 

i work best under pressure. sabin declared last week that she wanted me to make her a new gym bag for school.  she even got out a stack of fabric she wanted me to use, but do you think i started the bag?  this morning, she declared that i was going to be in a lot of trouble if i didn't finish it in time for her to use it tomorrow. and suddenly i was motivated. i got straight to work, making it up as i went along, using bits and pieces of natural linen and bright echino fabrics and here i give you the end result. a sort of messenger-style gym bag. i only used the fabrics she selected for the lining on the inside - i hope she won't mind! if she doesn't like it, i'll definitely use it myself.

what's interesting is that making it feels like it cleared out a creative block i've had, feeling a bit stuck on my cut out & keep quilt project.  while i was sewing this, the back of the cut out & keep quilt popped into my head, fully formed. i've had about six different versions of it laid out, but none of them seemed right, but now, i know exactly what to do.

i'm going to remember this the next time i'm stuck...i'll give myself permission to work on something else. sometimes i deny myself that pleasure because i have a tendency to be a serial project starter and a bit of a reluctant project finisher. but it seems my creative process needs multiple projects and quick wins. like a messenger bag in a morning.

getting out of my own way

i've been mulling these little dresses over for awhile now. they're very simple and they're reversible. and they're made of the beautiful organic cloud 9 cotton (this is from heather moore's gorgeous cut out & keep line) . this is my prototype, but i've cut out more fabric and i'll be sewing all weekend - making some modifications, adding vintage buttons, pockets and maybe something that's only a vague notion in my head at this moment.

i have a friend who has a toy store and she also sells children's clothes, so they'll be available there, as well as on beecharmer. and i'm even pondering turning a little room at the front of our house (currently where we house our couchsurfers) into a miniature shop (saying it here because writing is the new praying).

if anyone is interested, i'm happy to make whatever size you'd like. sabin wants one too, tho' this prototype is for a 2-year-old. (note to self: find a two-year-old to model it.)

the wind was blowing, can you tell?

this is one of the many things i've been procrastinating, waiting for precisely the right picture to appear in my head. today, i just got out of my own way and got stuck in. i'm pretty happy with the result. and working with these organic cottons is like a dream.

i should do that more often.

(thank you, michelle, for our chat last night, it helped.)

*  *  *

by the way, this is awesome.

macbook airs have feelings too

the macbook air was a bit jealous of the iPad's case.

so i made one for him too.

or is my macbook air a she?

now i'm not sure.

in any case,

it's one well-dressed computer.

i love sewing with leather. 

it talks to you much more than fabric does.

and you really have to listen.

finishing friday

if you hang around here at all, you know that i've been on a creative roll of late. this week alone, i sewed two dresses for myself, made my first batch of stitched up photos, mended a couple of sabin's shirts, made bread twice, and worked on adding finery to some clarity birds. our dining table is so covered with projects that we can't actually use it.  so i have declared today (and every friday henceforth) to be finishing friday.

i'm doing a handmade market april 9 together with jude and elizabeth, so it's important that i have some finished products to sell at the market. somehow i just don't think people will be keen on buying half-finished works in progress. so today, i will not start any new project, not even this, which is very tempting. especially because it's still really cold outside.

i have no less than 3 quilts to finish and one of them (the sherbet cupcake quilt) you didn't even know about because i hadn't shown it here yet. so, i've been busy. busy starting things and not so busy finishing them.

i leave you with one more shot of the basket of unfinished garlands, tea cozies and clarity birds, just to remind myself that i need to get to work...

* * *

i'm enjoying the photos here. 

and also the photos here and here.

sunday sewing (plus a little on monday)

it's cold outside and i'm feeling a need for spring, so i got out fabrics old and new and traced off several patterns from my latest japanese pattern book acquisition. i hadn't made anything for myself since last year at precisely this time, so i traced off two dresses and got everything all cut out.

lila helped

 the cat was very helpful when i was trying to cut out the pieces.

i chose a rather upholstery-weight, rich and beautiful, jewel-toned fabric that i bought several years ago for the dress (see mom, it IS ok to buy fabric with no purpose in mind - the purpose will come). it's super simple and will look great with a pair of bright tights and some fab heels i bought in manila - as soon as the snow melts.

i'm going to adjust the pattern for finishing the armholes and i have yet to hem it, but here it is so far. i'm madly in love with this fabric.  and i love the rather retro a-line style.

with the tunic dress, i got a bit fancy and made a patchwork fabric for the bottom part - using the wonderful mid-century modern reprints from the victoria & albert museum collection. i hope to wear it at the market that i'll be selling handmade goods at (with elizabeth and jude) in sønderborg april 9. because you should wear handmade when you're selling it, right?

it can be a little bit difficult to find your way at first, but this tutorial really helps and because the drawings are so good, you'll soon be sewing merrily along even if you don't know japanese. i usually make one size bigger than i think i should because the japanese patterns tend to run small, but i have to say that i wish i'd made the large and not the extra large, especially on the dress below. so if you should be tempted to acquire this everyday clothing book too, just go ahead and make it in your regular size, as the sizes are much more generous than they usually are. i maybe would have realized that if i'd measured, but instead, i decided to just wing it.

here's the patchwork dress in its finished state:

it looks less like scrubs on top when you actually have it on, i assure you.

sew and sew

i'm on a roll. i started another quilt today - as we "speak" (11:05 p.m.), the blocks are all finished and just need to be laid out and sewn together tomorrow. i remember when i was a kid, my mom always said she had to be inspired to sew and i'm finding that i know exactly what she meant. i'm definitely inspired at the moment. and while i'm sewing, so many ideas come to me, i had to grab a notebook to scribble them down. i don't know if it's the new year or being free of the soul-crushing job or the winter light or what, but whatever it is, i'm running with it.

so funny, all that angst i had last year at this time over the whole slow cloth thing. it turns out that while i love other people's slow cloth work, i'm more of a fast cloth kind of girl myself. i get kind of a high from seeing quick results. and definitely a sense of accomplishment being able to make something beautiful come together very quickly. it appeals to my aries sensibility, i guess. and it feels GOOD to finish something and move directly on to the next something - i feel it feeding my inspiration. i'm still following a pattern from malka dubrawsky's wonderful new fresh quilting book on this second quilt, but i can also begin to see glimmers of my own ideas bubbling up...i'll soon be forging off on my own, without a pattern.

here's hoping you're feeling in flow, whatever you're doing this coming weekend.

cheerful christmas birds

from the spool birdie pattern

i said i was going to go make some.

the fabrics are the riley blake be merry line. purchased here.

i made 9 of them (not sure if there's deeper meaning in that).

and they're #94

i'm going to put some on a wreath, let sabin use some for her tree and decorate some choice packages with them.
might have to do up a few in purple for the tree.

evidence of creativity update (46 - 52)

welcome all of you new commenters (commentators?) who came out of the woodwork on the last post! i guess those flowers learned more than i thought they did at plant school. :-) i'm pleased you all hopped into the fray.

as some of you know, thanks to molly, i am attempting to do and document 100 creative things during 2009 and am sharing them here. i'm up to #45, and so it's time to do a bit of a catch up, since i haven't actually updated this list since april 13! thankfully i take a good 100 photos every day so i can go back in my iPhoto and figure out what i've made since #45.

#46 - a kickass fresh strawberry lemonade. this counts because i invented the recipe myself and didn't look at any of my 600 cookbooks.

6 lemons, squeezed

1 pint of strawberries

1 tray of ice cubes

1/2 C sugar (more to taste if your strawberries aren't super sweet)

whizz it all up in the blender, pour it into a pitcher and pour in one bottle of fizzy water. serve and enjoy the ooohs and aaahhs. add vodka or rum or tequila for grown-up fun.

#47 - a bunch more helleristninger, which i will count as only 1.

#48 - coffee cozies for blog camp

#49 - quite a lot of cakes made with rhubarb of which i will count only 1. recipe for this one is here. you can see that it was good because it was mostly gone before i could take its picture. we've got rhubarb coming out of our ears in our garden. from only two plants! it's apparently an excellent year for rhubarb.

#50 - artistically arranging rocks in baskets. i know this sounds a little suspect as evidence of creativity, but i travel to the far reaches of foreign countries to collect the stones and then spend an inordinate amount of time on arranging them just so and they look pretty when i'm done, so i'm counting it.

#51 - blog headers. i make and change my own frequently, but i recently branched out and made one for amanda and one for VEG. the ease of making fun headers is just yet another reason that i love my mac. because i do them in pages, mac's answer to word, only way better for handling photos--resizing, dragging & dropping them to exactly where you want them. it's all really easy. with free fonts from dafont.com, i can have endless hours of fun.  so it's definitely evidence.

#52 - just today, i made a mattress cover and two pillows for the iron bench in my upper garden. you just gotta love ikea fabrics. so bright and cheery.

bearing in mind that it is a holiday here, i'll give you three guesses as to how i spent the rest of my afternoon...and the first two don't count.

those kind of suspect-looking slabs in the upper left are where husband was at one time going to place the pizza oven, but it's going to stand somewhere else now, in fact, that's what husband was working on all day today. there's nothing you can't do if you can find directions online.

this was the view from where i was, just in case you still haven't guessed...

it was, in all a glorious weekend. hope yours was too.

* * *

a couple of other notes before i leave...

hermit book club - the next read is haruki murakami's hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. i'm rereading it so i can lead the discussion on friday, june 12. if you're not already playing along with us, please do join in, there's still time to become a murakami addict like me.

trans-atlantic learning adventures - if you want to see what we did on saturday at the local tivoli (or more accurately what sabin did, trot along over to sabin & addie's blog and have a look. while you're at it, stay awhile and check out their project.

we've begun the countdown to blog camp I--june 19-21 right here in denmark! come and check out the latest madness on our minds over at the blog camp blog. i'm going to get my act together and try to get a bit of a schedule up so you can know when you can find us live online via stikam (if i can figure it out) at blog camp, so that even if you can't be here, you too can participate! if you're new here and don't know about blog camp, check this post to see how the idea was born (husband is pretty brilliant sometimes).

sabin and i are still working on the questions from friday, but never fear, you'll see the answers sometime this week. if you still have a burning question on your mind, please leave it on that post and we'll try to include it.

p.s. i found my rock. :-)

sewing our way to happiness.

since i most often complain about the service (or lack thereof) in denmark, i thought that today i would present another side of the story. because i recently had a truly excellent service experience and it involved danes.

last week, i decided it was time to buy a new sewing machine. i'd been limping along with an old husqvarna that i bought at a flea market back in 1999 for 250DKK (about $30 at that time). it was ok as long as you were just sewing simple straight seams and it served me well (mostly because i didn't use it that often) for nearly 10 years. i've been sewing more of late, making pillows and quilts and things. and i'd come to a bit of a standstill on some of those projects because the old machine simply didn't handle the layers of a quilt very well. the tension got all messed up and it bunched the layers as it fed them through.

so i googled sewing machine stores and found a number of them within driving distance. several of them appeared to be owned by ancient folks who i wasn't sure would be particularly open to the foreign girl who spoke danish but didn't really know any of that sewing machine terminology. or at least that was my perception. i also found one that looked like it was pretty big and had a wide selection. i had in mind that i wanted a used machine again, just a newer one than the one i had. i figured a large store would have a larger selection of traded-in used machines. so headed off for the storkøbenhavns symaskine center (greater copenhagen sewing machine center). it was strangely placed in a really industrial area, but i found it after driving by a couple of times and went in, tho' i suddenly wondered if it was a sewing machine factory rather than a store.

right away, a man around my age came and asked me if i wanted help. i was a little surprised it was a man, because i had a perception of sewing as a woman thing. but, i told him that i was a beginning quilter and that i was looking for a used machine and he showed me a couple of the ones he had. they weren't really that much better or newer than the one i already had and he could see on my face that i was a bit disappointed. he said, "i wish i could show you a new machine." and because the room was filled with row upon row of new machines, i caved in.

sewing machines these days are pretty amazing. they can do a lot of complex stitches. they have slots for cards where you can insert elaborate embroidery patterns and set them going on their own while you walk away. in other words, they are really smart. and rather of overwhelming. i've been sewing since i was a kid and would characterize myself as a pretty good seamstress, but i wasn't sure i needed a machine that complex. he seemed to get that immediately and led me to the pfaff row, where he showed me the 2134. i was a bit dazzled by the 100 stitches and the alphabet it could do and how easy it was to make a buttonhole. it had a zipper foot. as well as several others (the purposes of which are still a mystery to me). it was smart enough to tell me which foot i need for the stitch i've selected. and if i wanted to do all of the fancy embroidery stuff later, i could buy the attachment for the machine and be able to do it. he knew the machine well and very smoothly showed me all it could do, making it look super easy. and then he gave me what he presented as a really good price on it, as well as including a service agreement that means free servicing for five years! so, i agreed to buy it.

i was anxious to get home and get started, but then i learned to my dismay that they didn't have any in stock. he said they expected to receive them the next day, but i wasn't going to have the car the next day because husband had to take it to a meeting over on another island. then, he immediately offered to send the machine to me as soon as they got them in the next day, so i'd have it by thursday, the same as if i picked it up myself only without me having to drive all that way. and, he didn't even charge me for this service.

i had mentioned to him that i had trouble finding bobbins for my old machine, so he gave me a dozen or more bobbins for the machine as well, also for free. it did make me wonder whether the price he'd given me was really so good, but then i got home and did a bit of after-the-fact research and found out that it was an excellent price, even with all that VAT. and it was delivered, as promised, on thursday morning. service that really made a difference for me and which other danish businesses could definitely take a lesson from.

and i've already quilted together my quilt-in-a-day (which turned out to be quilt top in a day, but which i didn't finish due to the limitations of the old machine) and on the weekend, husband's oldest daughter, k, and i made this pretty, sunny little lap quilt:

and we even did the binding! tho', she has to do the final hand sewing the next time she's here. and as for me, i'm off to do the binding on my quilt, so more pix once it's done.  sabin's home sick today, so perhaps she'll help or sew something herself and we'll thereby get the next generation sewing as well.