Tag Archives: design

Sewing as Therapy

22 Sunday Jul 2018

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Embroidered beads in the making

Yesterday I went to a meeting of the WearTo? Group of the WA Embroiderers’ Guild, and tried my hand at making beads from fabric. I’ve seen this done before, and the results can be fantastic, mine have a little way to go! The idea is to embellish small strips of fabric with either hand or machine embroidery, then glue them on to strips of felt which are then rolled up to form tube beads. I started with some small odd shaped scraps and stitched them together crazy patchwork fashion first, then did some embroidery. That was as far as I got, I need to get some felt, and possibly figure out how to make the beads without glue, when I try to glue things I’m generally not very successful. All in all a fun day, and very different from the useful and rather mundane shopping bags I have been making lately.

I got to thinking on the drive home about creativity as therapy. The others in the group are all ordinary people, with the difficulties and challenges that we all face, but it seems that we all put those things aside for a few hours to focus on being creative, and taking some time for ourselves. As a result, there is lots of positive energy in the room, and that can’t be a bad thing.
I have to admit that what I’m going to say now can be applied to other creative arts, painting, knitting, woodwork, making music or model aeroplanes, but sewing is my thing so that’s what I focus on.
I believe sewing can be therapy, and it seems plenty of other people feel the same. Sewing and other creative pursuits have been shown to reduce stress, increase positive feelings, improve immune function, and even to protect the brain from diseases like Parkinson’s and dementia. When you are absorbed in creating something there is less room in your consciousness for negative or depressing thoughts. When you learn how to do something new you improve communication between different parts of the brain and may also improve the function of your memory. When you succeed in creating something you receive a boost to your self-esteem. When you wear something you have made and somebody compliments you on it the boost is even bigger. When you make something beautiful for yourself you are nurturing yourself, and we can all use some nurturing. When you make something beautiful for somebody else you are nurturing them and strengthening your relationship.
I don’t need to go on, do I?! Sewing is a great hobby (which is not to say that it’s better than any other creative hobby), but I and so many other people I know get wonderful satisfaction out of being creative and making something from fabric and thread. What are your thoughts?

Tilted Star – a quilt for a new family member

12 Saturday Aug 2017

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I don’t consider myself a quilter, I’m not nearly passionate enough about it for that, but I have been known to knock out the odd quilt when a special occasion demands one. Major birthdays, weddings and so on. So a quilt was definitely required to mark the arrival of an addition to the family.

I picked up a couple of books from the library with fairly modern designs, and settled on a ’tilted star’ block from a book called Vintage Quilt Revival by Katie Blakesley, published by Interweave.

I knew the nursery colour scheme was to be grey with touches of yellow and aqua, so I raided all the local fabric shops for those colours in prints vaguely suitable for a baby, along with a backing, border and white for the ground around the stars. I was quite pleased to find the white, since it has little baby feet printed on it, they are also white so don’t show up unless you look really closely, but I felt it was a nice touch.

The book suggests making this blog using a paper template and foundation piecing, but I looked at the design and decided that I could do it by cutting shapes and stitching them together, and it would be simpler. I’m guessing that the suggestion to use foundation piecing came about because lots of the joins are on the bias, and using paper adds stability and helps to stop stretching. However, by being careful and using the walking foot on my machine I managed to do a reasonable job. Some of the points of the stars don’t quite line up with edges of the squares, but the inaccuracies are within my tolerance range.

Quilt detail

One thing I did, which would have been less likely if I’d done foundation piecing, was to cut quite a few of the triangles the wrong way round. Some of them are symmetrical, and it didn’t matter which way round they were, but the longer ones are asymmetrical, and I have quite a few left over which I couldn’t use because I had cut them wrong. Also, because I bought more fabric than I needed, I have added to my stash of quilting fabric yet again!

I also changed the design a little, deciding to add sashing in between each of the blocks to make the stars more distinct, as otherwise I felt they all ran into each other rather.

Tilted star baby quilt

Since piecing the front of the quilt was quite complicated, I decided to make the quilting itself simpler (just to make things easier for myself really). I chose a cotton batting, which needed quilting only every 6 inches or so, so my quilting design is just freehand wavy lines drawn along the length of the quilt, about 3 or 4 inches apart. That part of the project went very quickly, and I think it looks good.
I wanted a wide binding for this quilt, I think that frames the quilt nicely, but in the past when I’ve tried I’ve got into real trouble with mitering the corners. This time I found a tutorial on Youtube which explains it well, the secret is that you need extra fabric to allow for the width of the binding. Sadly I can’t now find the tutorial, but I did take one photo to remind myself of the technique.

Quilt binding detail

Finally, I added a label to the back of the quilt, with the baby’s name, date of birth, and other details. I think it’s really important to add this information to quilts since it’s an important historical record for so many antique quilts, although I must admit that in these days of digital photos, social media and other information sharing and recording methods, it might be a bit of an anomaly. It makes me happy anyway, how about you?

Inspired by Koos van den Akker

18 Sunday Jun 2017

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This tunic is my first foray into recycling with stretch fabrics, which I find presents a whole array of new challenges! These are not knit fabrics, but stretch wovens, which I happily picked up in the op-shop because I liked the print on one, and the others went with it. I paid no regard to the stretch factor! This was a garment I started at the first meeting of the Wear To? group of the Embroiderers’ Guild earlier this year.

I more or less self drafted the pattern, and I say more or less because I actually cobbled it together from a couple of commercial patterns, and kind of filled in the gaps. I made a muslin, which fitted not too badly, and went ahead with the recycling.

I chose to make the tunic using a colour blocking technique, but instead of dividing the pattern pieces up using straight lines, which would be more usual, I chose to use curved organic shapes. I actually derived these from the shapes on the printed fabric, I just took a photo of the fabric, printed it out, and then sketched the shapes larger onto the muslin. Then I cut that up, and used it as a pattern to cut the sections of the tunic.

A combination of inaccuracy when cutting out, and the stretchiness of the fabrics, meant that when I stitched the pieces together the front of the tunic didn’t lie flat. Even when it was lying on the table it looked as if somebody was inside it. I held it up against myself and it looked even worse. It was largely the olive green pieces, for some reason they had grown, and I figured that somehow I needed to shrink them again. I certainly wasn’t going to unpick the seams and re-cut them, so what to do? Some others at the workshop came to study my problem, and the suggestion was made that I just stitch some tucks in that piece of the garment to take up the fullness. That seemed like a good way out, so I made the tunic as flat as I could on the table, and pinned tucks into it which reduced the lumpiness. Then I whipped over the tucks using a variegated embroidery thread to turn them into a decorative feature.

I continued to put the rest of the tunic together, but still felt it needed something else. I had an image in the back of my mind of a garment made by Koos van den Akker, with machine stitching in a random zigzag pattern over the seamlines. So I threaded up my machine with two different colours of thread at once, and went over all the seamlines with free machine embroidery. I quite like the result – I’ve tried channeling Koos’ work before with very limited success, but I’m happier with this effort.

Even though I’m reasonably happy with the result, I’m still not sure it’s a garment I would wear in public. I did wear it yesterday though at another workshop with the same group of people, but the great thing about such workshops is that people will comment with interest about what you are wearing, and don’t look at you strangely when you say ‘I made it myself’.

Origami Pockets

13 Tuesday Jun 2017

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I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of origami using fabric instead of paper, it’s just one of the many things I plan to explore further one day when I have more time. (I’m not sure when that day will come, but never mind!) So at a recent meeting of my neighbourhood group of the Australian Sewing Guild I took the chance to make a sample origami pocket.

Actually, as folding fabric goes, this is pretty simple. Check out the work of a guy called Jeffrey Rutzky, author of the books Shadowfold and Kirigami. I couldn’t find his website, perhaps he doesn’t have one, but there are plenty of images of his work online and they are amazing.

Our pockets were basically a welt pocket with a triangular opening, and three lips to fill that opening, all different shapes and angles. Mine looked like this:

Origami pocket sample

I wasn’t careful enough about the placement of the pieces, not realising at the time how important it was, so mine has a hole in the middle, all of the lips should actually meet. But, I could turn this into a design feature by making my pocket bag to go behind it from some contrasting material, and make it look as if it was intended to be that way!

I did a quick Google search but I couldn’t see a tutorial for making these particular pockets. I think originally they may have been in a Threads magazine article. There is a YouTube video of a guy called Arif Khan making what looks roughly like the same thing, only he uses knit fabric, which I think adds another layer of difficulty. There are also lots of other ideas for decorative and original pockets, room for yet more experimentation and play. What’s your favourite?

Long story, short message

15 Tuesday Mar 2016

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A book arrived in the mail this week, I had quite forgotten ordering it. Actually it was one of two, the first I remembered, but I had forgotten that since shipping would be as much for two books as one, I had sneaked the second into my order!

More about both books later, but the one which starts today’s adventure in the sewing blog world is called Artful Machine Embroidery by Bobbi Bullard. I don’t have an embroidery machine as such, so it might seem a curious choice, but having looked at some of the book on Google books I thought it had a good deal of content about general design, placement, colour etc., which would be useful for all sorts of garment creation, not just embroidery. Those things are the part of the creative process that I sometimes struggle with.

This is a really long and complicated story, but we are getting there, I promise!

I looked up Bobbi Bullard on Google, since I hadn’t seen her work before, and came across some pictures from another blog, Thunderpaws Threads. There were several pictures of garments made with Bobbi’s designs, and I spent some time reading, until I came upon the subject of this post. (See, I said we would get there eventually!). It’s the pattern at the end of the link above, from Hot Patterns, another indie pattern company I’ve not heard of before. It’s called a Blouse Back T, which is like a tee shirt in front, but with a panel set in just under the shoulders at the back, cut wider than expected, which can be made out of woven fabric, hence the ‘blouse back’.

This quite appeals to me. I’m not normally a wearer of tee shirts, not in their simplest incarnation anyway. I like a little more structure to my clothes, and also a vee neck rather than a round neck, which most tee shirts seem to have by default. I have often wondered about that, whether it is simply because a round neck is easier to put trim around, with a vee you always have the problem of how to get a really nice neat join at centre front.

It’s already added to my list of ‘someday projects’, which sadly keeps getting longer and longer. Or is that sad, I wonder? Would it be worse to have nothing that one wanted to do? It’s also a cassic example of how a little ‘blog wandering’ can lead to all sorts of possibilities. There is always something I haven’t seen before, something which sparks an idea.

Transfer Dying Workshop – the sequel

02 Wednesday Mar 2016

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As if to prove that prior preparation and planning cannot always be relied upon, the result of the workshop was a little mixed. There were, as always, variables which I had not foreseen.
The first of these was that the colours are very hard, not to say impossible, to predict. We first did a test strip, using the neat dyes, about 8 different colours. We painted a small circle of each color on a strip of paper, and hurried off to test it on our fabric. Not too hurriedly, the dye must be dry on the paper before transferring it to the fabric. My results:

test strip of dyes and colours

Test strip

As you can probably see, the colour of the dye on the paper is quite different to the colour on the fabric. And I think that on a different fabric it would be different again, so there is no substitute for trying the colours you want on the fabric you are going to use. We then did some more tests, this time mixing two colours together:

test strip of mixed dye colours

Mixed colours

Again, the result on fabric is not very much like the dye on the paper!

We then went on to experiment with different ways of creating designs, and it seems I didn’t take any more pictures. However, I did get some dye put onto fabric, which possibly might end up as a garment at some point. I also came home with some sheets of paper with dye already applied, which I should be able to use somehow.

There are lots of ways of getting colour onto fabric using these dyes, some of which I would not have thought of. You can be straightforward, and paint a picture or design onto the paper, and transfer it onto the fabric. Naturally if you do this the image is reversed, so care is needed if  you are using text.

Alternatively, you can cover the paper with dye, then cut shapes out of it to create a design on the fabric. You could create sheets of flat colour, or mix dyes to a greater or lesser degree to add texture and depth. You can cut out a single shape, like a stencil, or build an image using multiple shapes like a collage. The shapes can be a single colour, patterns or textures. Then you can always print over the top of an existing print with another. A second print made from the same paper will be less bright, but can still be attractive. When you have exhausted the possibilities of transfer dying you can move on to painting with regular fabric paints, or stitching. Really, there is endless scope. The only thing not endless is the amount of time available for all this creativity! However, always optimistic, I am getting together with some other members to buy some dyes, we are going to share them among us so that none of us is too overburdened by yet more stuff!

The dyes come from KraftKolour.

I’m sure I shall find a use for the dyes at some time in the future, apparently they keep for ages, so I have plenty of time. And I am never going to be bored!

Prior Preparation & Planning Prevents Poor Performance?

18 Thursday Feb 2016

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I’m excited to be going to a workshop on heat transfer dying with Angela Ferolla this weekend. Angela teaches at the Fremantle Arts Centre, among other places, and I’ve done other workshops with her before. This one is being run by my neighbourhood group of the Australian Sewing Guild.
In preparation I’ve been trying to come up with some designs to put onto fabric, with the idea of being able to use the fabric for something afterwards. I find often that going to workshops results in a bunch of samples of different techniques, but I tend to bring them home and put them in a drawer, and never end up doing anything with them. I’d really like to be able to come home with a piece of fabric that would be useful, to go into a garment, although to be fair that’s not what the workshop is designed for, it’s supposed to be an opportunity to learn new techniques. However, I think that if I put some thought into it beforehand, I ought to be able to use the new techniques to create a coherent piece which I can then transform into a garment. I’ve sorted out two or three potential bits of fabric from my stash, all a metre or two long, although the requirement list says ‘A3 or bigger’. This in itself was a bit of a challenge, since the dyes only work on synthetic fabrics, and my stash tends strongly towards natural fibres. I had one piece in mind which I was unsure about, but when I did a burn test I’m pretty sure it’s natural, probably rayon, which is no good. I’ve always found the burn test difficult to carry out successfully, I’m not sure why, but there was a definite smell of burning paper, which doesn’t seem like the fabric is synthetic.
I also spent some time playing with some images, although I chose to focus just on shapes rather than colour, because I didn’t have any of the dyes to practice with, and I’m not sure how their colours will relate to watercolours or acrylics, which I do have. I looked out some photos I’d taken at my daughter’s property, and found this shot of old fence wire, which I think has potential.
coils of old fence wire
There was also this, a just-opening agapanthus flower head.
partly opened agapanthus flower head
It remains to be seen whether I actually use either of those images, and whether I manage to come home with a usable piece of fabric!
Another shot from the country
sheep and puppy

When a Workshop Doesn’t Seem Like Work

25 Monday Jan 2016

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I’ve never really understood what an artist’s sketchbook was, other than the obvious concept of a book in which somebody made a rough sketch of a church, landscape etc., took it back to the studio and transformed it into a finished artwork. Apparently it can also be a place for an artist to develop ideas, create designs, play with possibilities. And you don’t have to be an artist in the sense of somebody who paints or draws pictures. Artist is a broad term, someone who creates in whatever medium.
Now though, I have a better understanding. I took an online workshop entitled Developing Sketchbooks, by Dionne Swift. And I have a sketchbook!
OK, so it’s not that great yet. But I did gain a lot of tools for developing ideas, even for coming up with ideas in the first place. My difficulty when I want to create designs for embroidery, embellishment etc., is coming up with an idea. I can’t draw well enough to use realistic images, flowers etc. But I struggle to find abstract ideas. Dionne gives you lots of ways to come up with those ideas, and develop them into usable designs.
Here are one or two of my sketchbook pages, some I am happy with and some need more work. But I have made a start!

sketchbook pages

Sketchbook pages

single sketchbook page

Single page

bowl of Christmas baubles and single line drawings

continuous line drawings


One of the exercises was to do continuous line drawings of a subject, both whilst looking at the subject as well as the drawing, but also without looking at the drawing. This leads to some really weird looking objects! But it can also be a starting point for some interesting shapes to develop further. Dionne’s comment that a drawing doesn’t necessarily have to look like the subject was very liberating!
Our neighbourhood ASG group is doing a workshop next month on heat transfer dying, and I’m going to spend some of the time between now and then working on my own design to use. Watch this space!

Illustrating a murder

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Early last year I took a course called Introduction to Fashion Design, or something like that, at Central TAFE in Perth. I had been going to do Fashion Illustration, but there weren’t enough enrolments for that class to run.

So I ended up doing fashion design. Only a short course, one evening a week for 8 weeks I think, but it was very interesting. It was intended as an introductory course for people who actually want to become fashion designers, and covered things like branding, trends in colour and design, and how to present your collection on a story board, which is where the drawing came in.

I find it very difficult to draw realistically, but in fact for fashion illustration that doesn’t really matter, many of the best illustrators have a very representational style, if that’s the word I want. A few lines and splodges, and they can convey enough about a garment that you can picture it in your head. Like this for example. Each student developed their own style, and they were very varied. In line with my very down to earth character, mine was pretty simple and straightforward. I also had a problem with the conventional figure that fashion drawings are based on, you know the skinny one with the extra long legs. Real women don’t look like that for heaven’s sake! I did download some templates from Fashionary, but I ended up not using them and drawing my figures in more realistic proportions. In fact I used photos out of a magazine to base them on, so I know they look more like real women.

I have to admit though, that they do look a bit dumpy, but I’m telling myself that’s because we are all so conditioned to seeing figures with endless legs.

Also in the course, we designed our own logo, having first come up with a brand name. I thought of mine, A Murder of Crows, because one morning when I was leaving home to go to work there was a murder of crows in the front paddock. I afterwards thought of the connection that since I was designing a collection for ‘mature’ women, these clothes might also help them to forget (murder) their crows’ feet. A tenuous connection I admit.

The final part of the course was to put our drawings together on one or more story boards. I have photographed mine, but I took the photos really early one morning, outside, and although it was what I would call daylight, I think it really wasn’t. The photos all have a blue tinge to them, which I can only assume is due to the quality of the early morning light. In some circumstances it could be lovely, but it wasn’t what I was looking for here. I have tried to fix it, but with very limited success, I will have to take the photos again sometime. Here they are in the meantime:

Fashion illustration story board

Fashion illustration story board

Fashion ilustration - flat drawings

Fashion illustration – flat drawings

I found the flat drawings much easier to do than the people wearing the clothes, or even the clothes on people. Probably because I know how clothes are put together, and also because they are two dimensional. All in all, it was an interesting and worthwhile course, I think not least because I was giving myself permission to just play around with drawing.

Sewing competitively

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

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Now that I have finished a few other things, I am thinking about a new project. Another motivator is that summer is coming, it will be too hot to do much outside, so I find myself doing more sewing and crafting during the summer than the winter.

I’ve been looking at entering competitions again. Competitive sewing is something I’d like to do more of, although the opportunities are a bit limited, particularly in Australia. One avenue of competition is the various agricultural shows held around the country, and although most of them are in spring, the Sydney Royal is held over Easter. After my experience last year, I am decided on two things. First, I will get my entry or entries finished and mailed in good time. Second, I will make something which is easier to mail!

I downloaded the schedule, from here, and have been studying it. It’s a bit disappointing though, because just as I am reviving my interest in dressmaking, or at least garment sewing, there are only three classes in that category. There are options for garments in some of the other categories, like embroidery, beading, felting etc., but I know my skills in those areas are nowhere near up to the challenge. And of those three classes, one is for a mixed media article, I’m not sure that really counts as dressmaking.

However, I do have an idea for the ‘wearable art of original design’ class. I acquired some odd pieces of what I think is actually a lightweight furnishing fabric last week, and I think I can collage or otherwise combine them into something. It will mean burrowing deep through the stash to find some other bits to go with them, but I’m sure there must be something suitable in there somewhere. I need to figure out when the entry needs to be finished, and create a time line back from there so that I make sure it can get in the mail soon enough.

I wonder what other opportunities there are out there for competitive sewing?