My 15-year-old daughter saw the musical, Wicked, last spring and decided a couple of months ago that she wanted to dress up as the character Elphaba this year for Halloween.  Although she’s mostly too old for trick-or-treating at this point, she did have a couple of parties to attend and so needed a costume.

It is true that not that many people even know who Elphaba is, and even fewer probably know the details of what an outfit of  hers might look like.  This is a long-running theme with my children.  Over the years, they have frequently chosen to dress up as obscure characters from books, super heroes of their own making, etc.  I enjoy doing my best to help them bring their visions to life as much as is possible, and being costumes, it really doesn’t matter if the sewing is perfect.

This year, Anna and I started designing her costume by looking carefully at the pictures in the program that she brought home from Wicked.  The main points:  a blue jumper with diagonal pin-tucks on the front panel and an asymmetrical  hemline, a blue school uniform type jacket with brown trim, and a blue crocheted hat.  We were able to find two Simplicity patterns (hooray for $1 pattern sales!) to use as a starting place.

This one  had the right general shape for the jumper with a few modifications:

This one was nearly perfect for the shape of the jacket:

We found some fabrics in the inexpensive wall bins at the back of JoAnn’s that were the right color and more importantly,  price,  for  costume fabric.

For the center panel of the dress, I took a piece of the fabric and drew diagonal lines about 2.5 inches apart.  I folded these lines and sewed them with  a  1/2 inch seam.  This became the back side of the fabric.  After pressing, I top-stitched the front side of the fabric.  I then added a straight piece of fabric at the top and for the lower skirt and cut out the front panel piece from this piece of fabric.

Here is a picture, which for some reason is very washed-out, but it sort of shows this panel:

I sewed the rest of the jumper pretty much as the pattern was written.

When it was finished, I cut the bottom of the skirt on the diagonal and hemmed it:

The jacket was sewn almost exactly as pictured on the pattern envelope with a few things added at the end.  I did slightly round the front edges to match  Elphaba’s  jacket picture.  The last step was to add pockets and brown trim, which weren’t part of the pattern.  The trim I used was brown cotton ribbing that for some reason I already had.  I cut it 1-1/4 inches wide and wrapped it around the edges of the finished jacket, sewing it with a zig-zag stitch which finished both the front and back side all at once.  Here is a picture of it as finished:

It does have only two brass buttons, and the one in the picture had three, but I could only come up with two and no one is going to be comparing it that closely to the pictures anyway .

I also crocheted a very simple hat.  I’m sort of  a new crocheter, so I used a pattern from the book, 24 Hour Crochet Projects by Rita Weiss.  I think more experienced crochet people could probably do it without a pattern, but I’m not there yet.  It’s here:

And the final result:  my daughter as Elphaba, all green-skinned for her party.  Our pictures didn’t turn out well, but you can sort of get the idea.  The glasses are from the dollar store.  We never found any boots that looked like the pictures, so she went with shoes  from her Converse collection, pretty much her fall-back shoes for all occasions:

And a picture her friend took at the party:

A few weeks ago when I was visiting my husband’s office, I saw a pile of file folders outside one of the other offices with a “free-take me” sign on them.  I’d recently gotten interested in making collagraphs and had seen a technique somewhere that used file folders to make them.

I made a couple of simple collagraph plates  right away using using drawings that were traced onto a file folder and then glued down to another file folder, with the intention of making some more complex ones later.  Here are the first ones:

Life sort of got in the way of making any more for awhile, but for the last couple of days, I’ve had some ideas going through my brain that involved circles- actually that’s been a theme to a lot of the stitched shibori I’ve done this summer, too.  Today, I decided to draw something with circles and make a collagraph plate from it.

I started by gluing two file folders together with a glue-stick, as my free folders are pretty thin.  I then drew on my circle images and scanned it so I’d have a copy to work from as I cut it apart and glued it back together.  Here’s my original and my scanned copy:

I glued the scanned copy to another file folder and then began cutting out and gluing the pieces to that base.  I used a regular glue stick for all of the gluing. Here’s a picture part way through the process:

It actually took me a couple of hours to cut this apart and glue it back together, but it was exactly what I needed.  I love to cut things out- for me there’s some sort of meditative thing about cutting and gluing.

I made a couple of quick images from my new collagraph plate tonight.  These are both on fabric, using Caran D’ache neocolor 1 water resistant pastels.  When I heat-set these with an iron, they seem to be quite permanent on fabric.

On natural fabric:

On some of my hand-dyed fabric:

I’m hoping to have time to make more of these soon, and also to experiment with using them on some of my other hand-dyed fabrics.

A few weeks ago, as I was googling and looking for something else, I came across the blog,  Resurrection Fern.  It’s a beautiful blog, and I found myself especially interested in the crochet-covered rocks which are frequently featured there.  I think this is the post that first got my attention: Resurrection Fern Stones .

After viewing this, I decided that I needed to make some of those rocks.  This meant trying again to learn to crochet, something I’ve attempted unsuccessfully several times.  I’ve managed to learn enough to put a simple edging on something I knit, but I’ve never made any further progress.  I set to work with a couple of books I have and a few free instructions from the internet and crocheted and unraveled several projects.  As I started actually getting the hang of it a little bit, I heard that Margaret Oomen of the Resurrection Fern blog had patterns for three of her rocks in the September/October  2009 Issue of Crochet Today magazine.  I was able to find it at my local Hastings.  Here’s a photo for anyone looking for it:

(And an aside- as much as I’ve always liked lacy crochet things, this cover sums up what I DON’T like about crochet.  Apologies to anyone who likes it, but I just don’t get things like crocheted fake clocks.   Of course, my son thinks my crocheted rocks are a little crazy, so I obviously can’t really judge:). )

I started in on the three patterns in the magazine and made them in this order:

I then bought the smaller size crochet hook that the patterns actually called for and made this one again- I think my crocheting had improved here, too:

For my next project, I made a small doily from a book I already had, MaryJane’s Stitching Room by MaryJane Butters.

I have always loved lace doilies and often buy them at garage sales, and I’m happy that I can make my own now.

And that’s the sum total of all of my finished crochet projects to date.  I’m sure I’ll be doing quite a bit more, but I won’t be making any crocheted clocks .

A few samples of recent work:

This is step one and two of creating this piece.  I soaked a piece of cotton in soda ash, line dried and then painted it with a few random colors of dye.  I then drew on stitching lines with washable markers and stitched it up.  This shows the dyed fabric with the stitching before I pulled it tight:

In this picture, I’ve pulled all of the stitching up tight. For some reason,  I really liked how it looked at this point, all textured and colorful:

The final result, after over-dyeing the whole thing with black dye.  It’s a bit more vibrant than this photo shows and the sections that appear white are actually more blue:

I really like the way this turned out and was discussing it with my probably-majoring-in-art college  student son.  I told him I liked it, but I didn’t know what it meant.  He thought for a minute and then told me it was obviously about the battle for water rights of native peoples around the world. The souls of those people are the colorful parts shining through juxtaposed against the dark background of the struggle.  This is, of course, not at all true  (although I do have concerns about water rights battles).  He’s just been immersed at his college in art in which the artist statement seems to be required to “understand” the work.  My son, my husband and I all tend toward the “let the art speak for itself” school.  My son encountered a lot of art last year that wasn’t in this tradition, where the statement seemed more important than the art, so it’s something we joke around about.  He did think that the water rights approach might be the way to go to get a grant to continue my work, though.  Um, yeah .

Here’s another related piece.  In this one, I stitched circles on white fabric, pulled the stitching up tight, and then dyed it in a weak solution of black.  After removing the stitching, I soaked it in soda ash, line-dried and then painted on a few colors of dye.  It’s also a little more vibrant than this photo shows:

This is an experiment with a result I love.  I dyed the base fabric orange.  I then used my sewing machine to baste irregular pleats into the fabric.  I pressed this flat, soaked in soda ash and then line dried it.  I then painted on sky blue dye thickened with alginate so it wouldn’t spread too much to create the brown striped areas, using my color wheel skills (I sort of thought everyone knew about the color wheel, but my kids and I have discovered this summer that it isn’t the universal sort of knowledge we assumed.  It’s way more important than times tables!  ;) )  Anyway, here it is:

On this second, similar piece, I took it one step further.  I placed an old lace curtain on top and sprayed on blue dye through that.  The sprayer developed a leak, so the bottom got saturated in a way I wasn’t planning (not that I usually have much of a plan…).  It’s interesting, anyway.  My son says it’s steam punk and he’d hang it in his dorm room, so it was successful on some level.  The photo is sort of blurry.

And this is a small round tablecloth that I got at a garage sale on which I poured random bits of leftover dye.  It will soon be happily on a table in my living room:

Lots of these will eventually be cut up, perhaps have printing added and who knows what else.  I tend to take advantage of warm summer temperatures for dye work and then play further with paints, scissors, etc., in the winter.

Summers are usually pretty warm where I live, and the last few years, I’ve come to prefer wearing skirts and sundresses during hot weather.  This spring, I realized that my summer skirt collection had gotten pretty worn out and that I needed to make myself a few more things.  In between doing some theatre sewing and tie-dye, I’ve managed to sew up the following (some of which could have used some ironing before photographing, but, oh, well ) :

This dress is a linen-cotton blend.  The fabric was tangerine when I bought it.  I did a little shibori stitching on it and then over-dyed it with bright pink dye to get this sort of rose color.  The pattern is an old one that I think is out of print now.

Here is a little more of the skirt detail:

Here’s my first skirt, made from some green patterned cotton that was supposed to be part of a quilt many years ago that never actually happened.  It had “aged” enough in my sewing closet that I decided it could have a new use.  It’s made from Favorite Things “Cute Skirts” pattern, one I’ve used a few times before.

This skirt is also from a pattern by Favorite Things, this time the Belle Skirt pattern.  The fabric is some I bought last August at the beginning of the semester at a local college.  During that time, there is always a vendor that sells posters and also various fabric pieces that students use as bedspreads, wall hangings, or whatever.  I have some I use as tablecloths.  I bought this particular one with the idea of sewing it into some sort of clothing, but had trouble finding a pattern that would work with and show off the different areas of pattern.    I really love how this one turned out.

This last skirt is one of my very favorites.  It’s made from an old tired-and-true pattern from Kwik Sew (#3336), which I’ve previously made in numerous ways.  I made the shorter version and did make one change, dividing the top section from two pieces into 4 to accomodate the unique fabric.  The fabric is actually two long-sleeved tie-dyed t-shirts that I’ve had for a couple of years.  I’d loved the way the patterning came out on the shirts, but they were sort of boxy and I never, ever wore them.   They are getting much more wear now as a skirt.

And in case anyone is wondering, the backdrop is my kitchen pantry .

On Sunday, our family was invited to a birthday party for a young friend.  On Saturday, I decided that I would try to make a stitched-resist t-shirt as a gift. There’s nothing quite like the last minute for inspiring me to make something .  

I took pictures along the way this time.  I started by drawing a simple flower design on a children’s size small t-shirt.  I used Crayola washable markers, which seem to wash out well:

Then I grabbed some thread and began stitching.  I’ve tried a couple of different threads, but keep coming back to this kind, Dual Duty Plus button and carpet thread:

I use this thread doubled and tie a double knot on the end.  Also, before tying the knot I use my fingers to smooth the thread from the eye of the needle down to the end of the thread.  I do this a few times and it seems to help keep the thread from twisting and knotting as I stitch.  

Here are some pictures of my first few stitches:

I use a separate thread for each section of the image.  I often switch around colors of thread which allows me to see better which threads I’m gathering up when I’m finished stitching the design.  As I finish each section, I trim the threads, leaving a tail of a few inches.  

Here’s a picture of the flower with all of the stitching completed:

Next, I began pulling the threads tight, one section at a time.  Because I used a doubled thread, I tie the two loose ends to each other in a few knots when the section is pulled tight.  I’m not sure if this is the “right” way to do this, since I’ve pretty much been figuring it out on my own.  However, it works for me and I don’t particularly believe in right or wrong ways of anything involving creative pursuits anyway .  

Here’s a picture of the first section pulled up tight:

And here is the entire image pulled up tight:

At this point, I dyed the t-shirt using blue-violet dye from Dharma Trading Co.  After rinsing and washing out the dye, I carefully clipped the knots and removed all of the stitching.  I gave the shirt one more rinse to close up any visible holes left from the stitching.  

Here is the finished shirt:

I’m mostly posting these pictures  so I’ll remember that I DID actually accomplish a bit of artwork this past week.  I’m trying really hard to do a bit of work every day, even if it’s only a teeny, tiny bit.

The following pictures are the result of my first experiment with deconstructed screen printing, as described in Rayna Gillman’s excellent book, Create Your Own Hand-Printed Cloth: Stamp, Screen and Stencil with Everyday Objects. Basically, various resists are placed under a screen and thickened dye paste is pulled across.  The screen is then left to dry and then plain print paste is screened across to transfer the design to fabric.  It’s not very complicated, but it takes some time for the screen to dry, for the printed fabric to cure, then to be washed out.  I did this over 4 days this last week.  I really think I’m going to need to make or buy some more screens, because just having one is limiting- I would have liked to play for quite a bit longer with the screening process and with just one screen, that’s not possible. All of these were screened on to fabric that had been previously dyed with a combination of pink and gold dyes.  I used a blue violet dye for the screen.

And here are a couple of small shibori stitching experiments  from this week.  This one is the same pink/gold fabric from above, stitched and over-dyed with black:

This one is a piece of bargain tangerine linen-rayon blend fabric that I bought, hoping it would be good for over-dyeing.  This was my sample piece, which I dyed with bright pink dye.  It’s a little brighter than this photo shows.  I loved how it turned out, so I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon sewing a summer dress out of the tangerine fabric.  This week (or maybe for longer!), I’ll be working on doing the stitched resist work so that I’ll hopefully end up with a very fun and funky one-of-a-kind summer dress.

Hopefully, I’ll have more to post next week- maybe sooner, depending on how much work and everyday life gets in the way of making art .

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve stitched up a few more mini-shibori experiments to use as studies for something larger that I have in mind.  I finally had a chance to dye them yesterday and am sharing the results here- perhaps mostly just to remind myself that I did them.  Once again, I didn’t take any pictures of these “in process.”  I still mean to do that, perhaps with the bigger piece that I have in mind for my next project.  I did find a nice little stitched shibori tutorial online that shows some of the possibilities here:

http://www.burdastyle.com/howtos/show/658

This one was stitched using  the stitch pattern from “step 1″ of  the tutorial above:

The rest of these were stitched using the stitch from  “step 4″ of the same tutorial:

Spiral

Heart

Curve

“Peace” on a scrap of an old t-shirt

Circles

This fall, I started watching a neighbor’s baby full time.  When I started, I didn’t realize how much that would change the time and energy that I have for sewing, knitting, crafting and all of that sort of thing.  As the baby has  grown and gotten more mobile, I’ve had less and less time for projects.  There’s been even less time for recording anything that I do  make, so this blog has been sadly neglected. I see that I haven’t posted anything since December, and I’ve decided it’s time to try to post a little more often.  We’ll see how that works out!  

Today, the little man that I care for turned one, and I wanted to make him a gift for his birthday.  I’d saved a link to a blog with instructions for making a fabric ball, found here:

http://www.purlbee.com/fabric-beach-balls/

I dug through some fabric scraps and decided to make the medium size:

I made one addition to the very-easy-to-use pattern:  I added three bells.  I made little fabric bags to hold the bells so that the ball’s stuffing can’t get wrapped around them to keep them from jingling over time.  Also, if the ball should come apart, it would make the bells a little bit more swallow-proof. Here’s a picture:

This was a very fast and simple project that I’ll be sure to make again.  My little guy loved this and I’m going to have to make some more of these in different sizes  and textures to keep at my house!

Today it’s another snowy day, something that is unusual in my part of the world.   We get snow a bit in the winter, but I’ve never seen this much or had it last for this long.  I cook differently in cold weather than I do in the summer and today decided to make one of my favorite winter-weather recipes for lunch:  Pasta with lentils.  This is easy, fairly quick, and always warms me up. It’s also made out of ingredients that I pretty much always have on hand.

Here’s the recipe:

Pasta with Lentils 

1/3 cup lentils 

2 -1/3 cups water

3 Tbsp olive oil

1 onion (chopped)

2  carrots (diced- usually 1-1/2 to 2 cups worth)

1 tsp. Italian seasoning

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. black pepper

½ cup orzo pasta (measured dry, before cooking)

Bring water and lentils to a boil.  Cover and reduce heat to a simmer.  Cook for 15 minutes. 

While lentils are cooking, cut up onion and carrot.  Heat olive oil over medium heat and add onions.  Cook for a few minutes and add carrots, stirring occasionally (and actually, I usually start cooking the onions while I’m cutting up the carrots).  When lentils are done cooking, add them and all of the cooking water to the onions and carrots.  

Rinse out the lentil pan and fill with water to cook pasta. When water is boiling, add pasta, reduce heat a bit and cook for 10 minutes.

While waiting for the pasta water to boil, add Italian seasoning, salt, and pepper to lentil mixture.  Reduce heat to low while pasta is cooking. 

Drain pasta and add to lentil mixture.  Cook together for a couple of minutes.  This makes about 4 servings.  

I usually serve this with grated cheese, but it’s good without it, too.  It also reheats well.  This is one of my very favorite winter lunches.