tiny happy

summer moon

We've spent the day making and gifting shortbread, eating apricots, wearing our sunhats outside and stringing up lights: must be proper summer here now, and holiday time.

I'm having a blog break because we're heading to the South Island for Christmas. I plan to be back here in this space in mid-January. 

Thank you for reading this year even though my blog has been erratic at times. I really treasure the interaction and community to be found here.

Wishing you a very happy Christmas, and a peaceful New Year.

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flowery

This lovely old flowery fabric was given to me several years ago by Helen. I have admired it for a long time, not daring to snip into it. But I finally decided to, and made this dress for summer. 

The pattern is this one, and the fabric is a vintage drapey rayon/cotton type. With a good, serious floral pattern. The best things about this dress include: the useful pockets, the length (I often find the dress patterns I use are a little too short in the end, but this one is just below the knee on me) and the drapey, assymetrical bodice. I am looking forward to wearing this with sandals over summer and with a fair isle cardigan in the autumn. After all, why stick to one busy pattern when you can have two?

from robe to robe

Do you remember this Japanese fabric I mentioned the other day? I gave it a gentle wash, and realised it was a very long length of fabric indeed. Long enough for a dress, but not really strong enough, if you know what I mean. The fabric had worn patches, holes mended with loose hand-stitching and darning.

I imagined sewing a delicate, drapey dressing-gown from the silk and wrapping it in tissue paper for an especially dear family member at Christmas. So I set to work, immediately regretting cutting into the fragile and slippery fabric and realising the width was too narrow for any of the pattern pieces, so I had to sew pieces together like patchwork to achieve the width necessary for each piece.

There are quite a few places where some very old rows of hand-stitching are prominent, such as along the back of the gown, which I like. As if I've collaborated with a mystery silk-preserver.

But I've decided I didn't do a good enough job of the sewing for it to be a gift: it can be my summer dressing gown instead. Upon reflection, I should have lined the entire thing in a fine cotton lawn or similar, to protect and hide the interior seams. Next time..!

a small floral

This is what I've been working on over the past couple of days: a small floral design. It's just free-form embroidery on natural linen, in an all-over pattern. The colours were inspired by a pair of paper fans from Japan on the mantlepiece at a friend's house. I was sitting at her kitchen table the other evening when I noticed them and set aside the threads to match. White, turquoise, red and light pink. 

My plan for the finished piece is to sew it into a keepsake pouch for a family member, as a Christmas gift. She doesn't read my blog so I think I'm safe in writing about it! I'm only making a few of my Christmas presents this year. How are you going with yours? Are you making anything? 

sticky experiment

The kids and I had a spare hour to spend so we tried making marshmallows. They liked the idea of including them along with some other little treats as teacher gifts.

I have been thinking about making them for ages, since seeing this post over on Angry Chicken one Christmas. We used rosewater to flavour our batch, and squeezed some blueberries for colouring.

But our marshmallows were not very good: they were much too soft and didn't hold their shape well (not the recipe's fault but maybe we skipped a step or didn't have quite the right ingredients.) So we won't inflict them on the teachers after all.

They were fun to make, though! The kids are showing quite a lot of interest in mixing and cococting these days and they even have a few dishes they can cook independently, even if they are variations on scrambled eggs.

Anyway, we also had fun thinking about the packaging of potential edible gifts. I found some polka-dot cellophane bags a while back and Keira and I spent quite a while last weekend folding origami boxes + lids from the pages of an old gardening magazine (instructions here).

Sometimes the process is better than the result.

textile prints of the past

Here are some old fabrics I found last week. At the top is a very old kimono silk in a narrow strip- I bought it from here (Wellington people- they are moving to Auckland after Christmas so you might want to visit before then.) I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet. I offered to make Keira a dress for summer and she said 'I'd rather have a pencil case made from it'- she's not really into dresses these days.

And the fabric above is an old barkcloth curtain with a print of native NZ flowers. I'm really fond of it!

I hope you had a lovely weekend.

woven heart

Here we have a stack of Scandinavian-style woven hearts- some are tied with ribbon to the Christmas tree and others are strung into a garland with baker's twine.

They kept Keira and I busy after school today. We used old pages from a book, brown card and some wallpaper scraps. 

Next up (probably tomorrow after school): another stack to slip inside Christmas cards for her classmates. 

I only found this great tutorial after we'd finished making these, but might use it next time.

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Silver & Gold, a beautiful Christmas song by Sufjan Stevens.

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sweets

The Christmas sweet-making has begun: first off we have the tried and true chocolate fudge (this recipe) and these favourite apricot truffles (from here.)

Not a Christmas seems to go by without a batch of these packaged up and gifted to teachers, etc. This year, they're for the other journalists in my office as a little token 'thankyou' before I shut down my computer and put away my office coffee cup for the last time in 2013 (this Friday.)

More ideas I hae for December sweetness:

homemade nutella

chocolate cream pie

homemade black licorice (!)

turkish delight

old/new acquisitions

I love old things. Especially household items. Here are two of my most recent finds, mostly acquired for their labels, if I'm being perfectly honest. 

- an old Fanta bottle. It's made from really thick, heavy glass and I found it last night walking home along our road. Council workers had cut back a lot of overgrowth, and it was peeking out of some clay. 

- Naval sheets. Not sure what is 'naval' about them exactly, but they are soft brushed cotton sheets still in original packaging complete with paper label. 

*** unrelated but happy news: Felicia has announced the dates for the next Craft Sessions, to give people plenty of time to make arrangements. Looking forward to it already. ***

prints and patterns

- Honey-scented South African flowers on the windowsill, for this amazing man. Also, a link to this beautiful song, with some sweet N.M dancing. 

- Colourful vintage fabrics that I sewed into pouches and bags over the weekend. I'm having a renewed interest in old prints. 

- Happy new week, dear readers.