Tag: handmade

Mollie Mondays: Fabric Flower

Here I am with the second edition of Mollie Mondays! You can read up about this little project of mine on the original post HERE. Basically after years of reading Mollie Makes magazine and collecting the little free projects that come with each issue (because I never found the time to make them!), I was able to sit and make a bunch of them last year while bound to my couch for 6 weeks due to a severe ankle injury. I’m sharing the results here on Mondays!

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After teaching Kanzashi Flower making at FACTS (Fashion and Creative Arts School) in Blyth, Ontario last week, I’ve got flowers on the brain. This is the first little fabric flower brooch I ever made and it’s spawned a love for fabric flower making – there are so many possibilities from brooches to garment and hair decorations to bouquets and so on! Isn’t this one a charmer?!

Til next Mollie Monday … stitch well.

Harriet the Venn-Toting Matryoshka

I have been busy as the busiest bee, designing and sewing up a costume-storm for dance and theatre productions these last few months. However, I still happily make time for felt Matryoshka commissions when I’m able to spare a day for doll-making – it’s a great way to catch up on some TV while creating a new little dolly-friend to send into the world.

Harriet the MatryoshkaMeet Harriet, the Venn Diagram Matryoshka! She’s science meets craft, and it’s a beautiful thing! In the 4-to-5-ish hours it takes me to make a Matushka Matryoshka (one of my larger matryoshka dolls), I feel like I get to know the little lady and then I have a bit of a hard time letting go!

Harriet the Matryoshka compliation

And Harriet was no exception — though I can trust she is bound for an appreciative home. I love her mix of purples and I added a wide, shallow herringbone stitch in a dark salmon pink to jazz her belly up just a wee bit. I like that her Venn diagram has no details, Harriet will allow you to demonstrate almost anything with her unmarked Venn!

Speaking of herringbone stitch … I plan to spend my summer cottaging days working on this sweet princess-and-the-pea sampler from Nicole of Follow the White Bunny. Time to increase my stitch vocabulary!

 

She-Ra and The Mother Mary go Matryoshka

I may or may not have received the best Little Felt Matryoshka order yet last week: to make She-Ra, yes I do mean the Princess of Power herself, and the Mother Mary, yes, that Christian matriarch of matriarchs. Together. One order. So awesome! And they are beautiful. And funny. Especially together.

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As a not-Catholic person, I didn’t know about the myriad of symbols for Mary and in researching this gal, found out about the pansy/trinity symbolism. So I used that for the belly instead of the sacred heart, which could have worked, but I like the metaphor (I always go metaphor if there’s a choice, let’s be honest!).

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If you want to order a custom felt matryoshka brooch or doll, you can visit my Etsy shop! Just let me know, the possibilities are endless … as you can see here. So much fun! Truly, they are my favourite thing to make these days. And I dare you to find a more awesome pairing then these 2 ladies!

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For more examples of my Little Felt Matryoshka brooch ladies, click here.

Finishing with an Ochre Wedding Dress

For the past few weeks I have been swept up in a delightful, merciless whirl of sewing gigs, family cottage time and motivation-crushing heat, but right now I do believe it’s time to catch you up on the wedding dresses!

Ochre wedding dress by S. Kendal

In my June post Starting with a Navy Wedding Dress, I shared a wedding dress I was working on and mentioned another one I was about to start. Simplicity 1614 50s Bateau Neckline DRESS Full SKIRT & EMPIRE midriff Vintage Sewing PatternThe second dress, the ochre dress, started with a Simplicity pattern from the 1950s with a bateau boat neckline and an empire waist. We found the fabric, drapery fabric if you can believe, loving how it complimented the navy silk with pearl-white illusion top on the first dress. I carved the high, bateau neckline down a bit to reveal the bride’s collarbones and a little shoulder blade at the back. I also added a ruched waist, but kept the high, curved empire line of the original pattern, a nice architectural element for a bride who’s an actual architect by trade. Because of the wonderful pattern on the fabric (yes, it is total put a bird on it fabric, cue the jokes, I can take it) we bought extra yardage so I could place a bird over her chest, like a designed-in corsage, and across her shoulder on the back.

By now, both dresses have been made and each has done her duty well: adorning their respective brides down an outdoor aisle on a family farm in one of the most profoundly simple and sincere marriage ceremonies I have even been graced to witness. What a lovely, secret pleasure to see my work walk and swirl the night away on two beautiful ladies so truly in love. I am grateful for the honour of dressing my friends Ann-Marie and Leah. I even got to do the hair, a secret pleasure of mine (seriously, if you ever want a french braid or a bun, call me!) and Leah fashioned her fascinator with perfectly matched ochre French netting. Look how they radiate adoration for each other and how well (if I do say so) the dresses stand beside one another, so different yet complimentary.

Williams-Scherk wedding dresses & hair

Since I was also a guest at the wedding, I needed a gift. And I knew just what to do. There was enough fabric to piece together a quilt from their wedding fabric. And since Ann-Marie and Leah are the handmade-appreciating, sentimental kind of folk, obviously my favourite kind, I knew they’d enjoy the effort. So in between making their dresses I put together this wedding quilt. I’m a total quilting novice, but I loved every minute of it, learning to mitre corners, quilting the pattern of the ochre fabric so that it appeared in relief on the flannel back, stitching hope and love and perseverance into each seam.

20130717-190619.jpgAltogether the most satisfying commission I have ever receive as a designer and seamstress. And two long-time acquaintances because wonderful bosom-buddies through the process. You cannot beat that.

Stamped and Sewn: This Year’s Card!

Every year I try to make my own cards. I have a weakness for letter pressed cards and could buy them til I’m clean broke! But barring total financial irresponsibility, my irrepressible need to create, and my genuine belief that homemade cards are awesome, I managed to do it this year amongst all the rest of the madness. It was a glorious solo late night pursuit, my favourite kind : )

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For the tree bodies, I used these gorgeous scraps of Nigerian fabric from my dear friend (and fellow sewing/fabric nerd!) Jen’s travels in that country. I cut out little pine trees and sewed them down the middle, easy as can be and so pleasing!

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I discovered about 2 years ago that one could carve stamps from erasers and have tried it a few times since. So for the trunks I carved a wee eraser-stamp and l-o-v-e how it came out. IMG_9583I find carving incredibly satisfying. I guess I’ll have to tuck that into the drawer of “things I really want to do,” along with pottery on a wheel, letter pressing, silk screening, stained glass, soap making etc … sigh  🙂

Rearview Fridays: Double Spine Art Book

Another Friday, another long-ago project to share. About 11 years ago my friend Lindsay Zier-Vogel taught me how to make hardcover books. I’ve made a lot since. It’s surprisingly easy (to make small, carfty, arty books that is, I am definitely not a professional book binder!) and I’ve made diaries, recipe books, poetry books with kids, art books. Lindsay continues to makes gorgeous art/poetry books, you should check them out here.

One of my most ambitious was a book I made in 2005, it’s two books in one with a double spine. A zig-zag book! I was researching Achromatopsia, a condition of the eyes that my mom has where her eyes see in a spectrum of grey, black and white, no colour. I was curious about how her eyes work because it’s hard for me to imagine not seeing colour, and I was working towards a conceptual dance work about seeing in black and white literally and figuratively.

I had read Dr. Oliver Sacks’ book The Island of the Colourblind. I has also written some poems about the content I’d gathered. I’m not particularly a poet, not publically, but writing poems can be a great tool when distilling technical info and autobiographical narrative towards a work of art, in this case the choreography, costumes and soundscore I was working on. I had a bunch of favourite quotes and my modest poems and thought they should have a home, so I made them a book, quotes on one side, poems on the other.

Here are a couple of favourite quotes from Sacks’ book:

What, I wondered, would the world be like for those born totally colour-blind? Would they, perhaps, lacking any sense of something missing, have a world no less dense and vibrant than our own? Might they even have developed heightened perceptions of visual tone and texture and movement and depth, and live in a world of heightened reality – one that we can only glimpse echoes of in the work of the great black-and-white photographers?

He is intrigued by the range of words and images other people use about colour and was arrested by my use of the word ‘azure’. (‘Is it similar to cerulean?’) He wondered whether ‘indigo’ was, for me, a separate, seventh colour of the spectrum, neither blue nor violet but itself, in between. 

And a couple little ditties about my lovely mom:

Her eyes lack cones

(they say)

so she sees in texture

instead of colour,

a world where red is equal to black

and dusk reveals the neighbourhood.

Crayons were responsible for her early reading skills and the betrayal of her eyes. She learned to recognize their names through necessity: red, brown, blue, tangerine, aubergine – whatever that might be.

She generally steered clear of the exotic ones, to avoid being the lone pre-schooler who drew purple palaces sporting taupe moats and devastatingly beautiful green princesses.

She had been informed of the concrete facts by Miss Jamison 3 months into the school year: only dragons are green, dear and a moat is filled with blue water  just like the river, see?      

Aflutter Over the New Quilt

I finally finished the bird-patterned quilt I’ve been planning and working on over the past few months. This was the project that kept getting bumped aside for other more pressing matters and crafts. But its time has come! I present the Birdie Quilt and Burping Pad Combo.

I plan to carry this set on my Etsy store when I’m up and running in the summer, so the next step is to make some more sets. I am so happy with how this design came out. I like the big, chunky blocks and have always been attracted to baby stuff made with strong colours and a pattern that’s not so common.

Unfortunately in my photos you can’t really see the leaves sewn into the black blocks on the quilt, but they’re there! I am slowly increasing my photographic skills because of this blog, but the black fabric stole the light and I couldn’t find it. Will experiment more, am open to suggestions …

On the simple, flannel side of the burp pad and the blocked side of the quilt I used green thread so that the quilted leaf design would stand out. It’s fun to quilt this pattern free-hand on the machine, reminds me of painting or sculpting. Probably my favourite of the process!

The busy side of both pieces is stitched with white thread. The leaf quilting almost needs to be felt to be seen amidst the birds and foliage. I hope the detailing invites fingers to touch and baby cheeks to rest peacefully.

I’ve been reading and thinking about pricing and perceived value. Burping pads, my speciality, are just not that cost effective. The ones I make are relatively labour intensive but there’s a limit to what people will pay for such things and it’s not a lot more than a super fancy latte! I see a lot of sewers undervaluing their work on Etsy, burping pads for as low as $2.50 with a median of about $8 per pad, which I find totally ridiculous and frustrating. I think it may be one of the great failings of such a platform, that value gets diluted with uneducated or timid artisans not really understanding how to value their work. Because mass-produced brand names versions often go for close to $20 per pad! Anyways, I’m slowly working on the math to find the sweet spots for pricing my work.

The idea to pair a pad with a quilt is something I’m going to try since consumers seem to be willing to pay more for a quilt; perhaps the overall square footage of the item persuades them?! And I like the idea of these 2 items together, perfect for a new baby gift. My slow advance on cottage industry continues …

PS: I wrote this entry with a sleeping 8-month-old draped across my arm and lap. My wrists have been performing acts contortion in order to type! Insane perhaps, but I find that getting my blog post ready the night before is more enjoyable and practical for the most part. It’s just too hard to get a long chunk of time at the computer amidst the littles and isn’t fair to them. And I really am enjoying blogging, it’s helping me keep on some kind of task creatively I am surprised by how much I enjoy the act of writing and sharing here. Over and out.

Rearview Fridays: Wedding Recipe Book

When I married Adam in the fall of 2003, I knew that I wanted to do something handmade and and not too kitschy. I decided recipe books would be sweet and doable for 70-odd guests. My friend Lindsay Zier-Vogel had been making hardcover art books for a while at that point and taught me how.

We filled the pages with recipes from a lot of the important women in our lives, moms and grandmas, aunts and godmothers. And it was very appropriate since we had a potluck wedding, which was best borrowed idea ever, cost effective and perhaps more important, it lent a real sense of community to the event, people went all out and made beautiful contributions for the dinner.

I had a great time with myself, picking out paper and working late nights in our cozy basement apartment, typing, paginating, measuring, cutting, stitching and gluing while Adam coached basketball. If he didn’t know before, that project must have showed him just how serious about handmade-craftiness his lady was!

Almost 9 years later I still use our wedding recipe book regularly, it sits on the shelf with our other recipe books and boxes. When I open it I see the names of women near and far, here and gone who are dear and essential to us and I can conjure them by cooking up a little goodness from their own kitchens.