Sewing Gage

Continuing with the geometric origami design I went about researching a headpiece, and settled on re-creating this one; It took me a while to find the correct shape, but I got there and started by making it from paper; Once I was happy with the shape I then made it out of black and white card and made the final piece;

Club kids was the next theme at Cybil's House and at first I didn't have a clue what to do. But after a bit of research online I decided to go with some kind of geometric origami design. I don't know if this fitted into the theme but thought it would be interesting to do. Some of these designs were pretty complex so I settled on creating one like this; I had to take the piece apart mentally and created a miniature version of the pattern pieces so that I could get the correct shape. I then scaled it up to my measurements.  Miniature pattern piece The fabric I used was a thick white canvas type material Ultimate Craft in Camden. The material was stiff so that it would stand up (hopefully). It was also easy to cut out and sew together. I used my overlocker which makes things a bit easier going through layers of heavy material. However, it was at this point the overlocker broke. See more about this story in this post . It wasn't quite stiff enou...

Every third Saturday of the month, at a club not far from me is a club night called Cybil's House . It's an amazing party,  great music, a good variety of performers and a good mix of people in/out of drag. I don't claim to be any good at drag, but I enjoy the creativity, the dressing up, expressing myself and not giving a damn what anyone thinks. Every month is themed, and the next party was going to be musicals. I decided to do Norma Desmond from the musical Sunset Boulevard. A musical icon, brilliantly portrayed by Glenn Close. The look that I wanted to re-created was this; First thing was to source some fabric. Not far from where I live is a fabric store at Watney market. Prices are reasonable and there's a good selection of fabrics. The first fabric I found was (1) below. However, I felt the print was too big, although it was reasonably priced at £3 a metre. (1) I then moved on to Dalston to Dalston Mill Fabrics. This shop is amazing...

Two years ago, when I was running a Vintage shop on ASOS, I decided to buy a sewing machine to up-cycle clothes. Unfortunately, this didn't materialise as I decided to close the shop. Two years later, I dusted the machine off and made my first dress for a house party I was hosting (I occasionally do very unconvincing drag). The pattern I chose (Burda Style pattern 6708) was labelled as 'challenging', and the material I used (satin) was not the easiest to work with, but I accepted the challenge. Not knowing at the time that pattern sizes differ from off the rail sizes, I went for a size 14. Challenging was an understatement, I had never made anything from a pattern before, I didn't realise that some of the pattern had to be cut on the fold, so consequently I had to stitch two halves of the pattern together. The final result was too small, frayed like anything, and I couldn't wait to get out of it. Was I put off sewing again? Absolutely not. Diving in...