Last year I had this brilliant brainwave of stencilling Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ on a dress for Christmas. As it turned out I didn’t like it at all when it was done. Needless to say, the dress got shelved in favour of another outfit.
But I had only stencilled the front and I still had quite a bit of the navy viscose/cotton left, so this year I decided to rescue the dress by cutting a new front. This looks much better, the fabric has a nice subtle lustre and I am too traumatised by the previous stencilling failure to attempt any more interference with the elegant simplicity of the plain navy. I’m wearing it here with silver beads, but I think a long pearl necklace would also look good. I have a nice baroque one, pity I didn’t think of that when I took the photos.
But keeping my fingers away from the paint pots wasn’t easy, so to distract me I decided to make a second dress from the same pattern where I could give free rein to my artistic impulses and throw paint at it to my hearts content.
You can see the pattern of the dress a bit better here, the ‘points’ are tucked in to give the skirt its shape.
The pattern used is the StyleArc Toni, heavily modified to eliminate the front seam and the collar, with a cap sleeve added. The fabric for the navy dress is viscose/cotton and for the tan cotton sateen, both repurposed from sheets bought on special.
Now the only problem is, which one to wear for Christmas? I am leaning towards the tan and black for Christmas Day. Mr Rivergum says the painting reminds him of reindeer antlers.
That leaves the navy dress for New Year’s Eve. But it’s anyone’s guess whether I will be able to resist making paint-based improvements if I have that much time on my hands. A bit of silver would look awfully good with the navy…
It is getting hot now, being an El Niño year, so I thought long, loose linen dresses would be just the thing to keep me cool this summer.
For my first one I chose a pinkish-grey-mauve linen, which looks lovely, sophisticated and cool. But unfortunately it soon became clear that teamed with black this colour instantly turns to anaemic and washed out. Too late, once the black ink is on the fabric there is no way back.
So I finished the dress and took photos, which sometimes makes me change my mind. But this time it only confirmed what I had feared, the two colours did absolutely nothing for each other.
There is no way to change the black ink to something lighter, but thankfully the base colour is easy to overdye and I have a whole arsenal of dyes with which to attack this problem. Not that I would want to use them all at once. 🙂
The idea was to deepen the colour, to make it hold its own against the black. Dyeing can be a gamble, but I keep notes on previous dye projects which help a lot, and also have a fair bit of experience now. I am really happy with the result. The main thing to remember with linen is that you need only a fraction of the amount of dye that cotton takes for the same colour depth. I used as much soda ash as I would with cotton and there was very little dye left unfixed. This is great because that way it is much quicker to wash the garment out after dyeing than if there is lots of dye left in the water, and it’s much less wasteful too. And in case you are wondering, the printing ink is not affected by the dye.
So here is the dyed version (enthusiastically photo bombed by Amadeus, the Siamese kitten).
The pattern used is the Tessuti Lily linen dress, with the elbow length sleeves modified to cap sleeves.
Has anyone else noticed how erratic the weather has been lately? The temperature changes are phenomenal. We have had 35C one day and 17C on another, all within the same week. Ok, it’s spring, so some variation is expected, but really?
So here is a dress for the freezing cold. The fabric is ponte (Romanit) and the double layer cowl keeps me nice and toasty. The light colour isn’t particularly low maintenance, but it’s a comfy outfit for a more dressy lunch. Not that I go to many these days, sigh.
This is the shape of the skirt part. The pointed bits are tucked into themselves to produce the tiered shape. You could leave them out to dangle, but I prefer them tucked in.
And here is the close up of the cowl. The fabric is double to give it more body so it will collapse into itself in a pleasing manner instead of hanging off my neck like a wet pancake. At least that’s the plan.
The top of the dress is a plain round neck and fitted shoulders, taken from a classic long sleeve tee pattern. The lower half is the StyleArc Toni Designer Dress pattern, heavily modified. Essentially I eliminated the CF and CB seam and merged it with the t-shirt pattern.
And for the super hot days of this crazy spring, here is a short sleeve linen number.
I have gone back to a more classic A-line silhouette for this summer. Much as I love the cocoon look, it doesn’t suit me, and slow learner that I am, I have a lot of dresses to prove it.
The fabric is a repurposed Ikea curtain, 100% linen and specialled off at a ridiculously cheap price. I bought a lot of these curtains and have found that they wear really well. Which is a good thing as I have made quite a lot of garments using it. The pattern is the Tessuti Lily linen dress, lengthened by about 12 cm, and modified to have short sleeves. I skipped the patch pockets in favour of inseam ones.
P.S. I forgot to mention that the black motifs are done with American type freezer paper stencils and black screen printing ink. The freezer paper has a shiny side that sticks when ironed onto the fabric and can be peeled off again, after you apply the ink, without leaving a residue.
Iron-on vinyl is making things possible that just aren’t with the freezer paper, mostly because it has a backing. This holds the ‘floating bits’ of more intricate designs in the position they are supposed to be, so you don’t get the distortions you get from flimsy paper, especially once you have cut multiple holes into it. With vinyl the edges are absolutely sharp too, no leaking here and there. I am mostly able to touch this up, but it can still be a problem in some instances. The vinyl works particularly well with the abstract art I’m into at the moment, which is more intricate than the Marimekko type stuff.
It has taken me this long to get enthusiastic about the vinyl because I had some bad experiences with the shiny kind, that just made the result look cheap.
But the matt kind is lovely and I have been playing with that with great results. It doesn’t have the colour graduations of the original art work, but it’s still pretty good.
The vinyl also works in combination with using freezer paper for the simpler parts of the art work, and then the vinyl over the top like this tee below. It is my interpretation of a Franck Vidal painting, almost the same but not quite.
As always, there are horses for courses. The vinyl is good for intricate lines and small areas of colour, but not for overall colouring of a garment. Why not? Because it does leave a coating, not enough to make the garment uncomfortable in small doses, but a total cover would be like wearing plastic.
The other limitation is that the vinyl is opaque and there are no colour graduations. Not like the luminous colours and subtle blending of hues when working with dyes.
So even though the dyes are so much more of a headache to work with, they still have their place.
Most people who follow this blog will know that I love minimalist abstract art. For a while now,I have wanted to make something with the line drawings of faces you see on some garments online.
An all-over design like this is a bit too ambitious for me technically, and a single motif is enough in any case.
I liked this drawing in particular, plus it had the landscape aspect I like for a tee. I decided to make the lines thicker though for more impact on white fabric.
Unfortunately the drawing was far to intricate for my usual method of making a stencil out of freezer paper and painting with screen printing ink. It was a case for iron-on vinyl, which I have used before, although not often and not always with great success. This time I followed the instructions (always a good move!) and it came up really well. The cutting was done with my Cricut cutting machine.
The fabric is a nice beefy viscose jersey and the pattern is the Tessuti Mandy with a round neck instead of the boat neck in the pattern, and shortened to upper hip height.
Just a few lines from my hotel room in Porto to sing the praises of hemp fabric. I have travel-tested it for the last two weeks, either in my suitcase or wearing it, and it is fantastic.
No, you won’t get high when wearing hemp and its association with cannabis has been a misfortune for this fabulous fibre. Australia banned cannabis in the 1922 and other nations did the same in the early and later 20th century. Hemp fibre had been very popular for centuries for all sorts of applications, until nylon hit the market around 1940, ushering in a whole new era of synthetics. Between the new competition and the war on drugs, hemp production was pretty much finished.
But recently hemp has been making a comeback, mostly due to its eco friendly properties. Hemp crops need only a fraction of the water of cotton, don’t need weed killing chemicals and have a short growth cycle from seeding to harvest. A dream crop, one would think.
Nevertheless, hemp fabric is still rare because of the unfortunate link to cannabis, and it is therefore very expensive. There is a cult following prepared to pay the high prices and I know of one shop in my area that sells exclusively hemp textiles. If you are thinking rough fibre ropes or sacks, that is not what devotees are prepared to shell out $$$ for. Hemp fabric is hard to tell apart from linen, except it doesn’t wrinkle nearly as much and becomes soft with wear very quickly, making it beautifully drapey despite its relative thickness, reminiscent of bottom weight tencel.
I was lucky enough to buy some hemp sheets at Aldi, on sale at a good price, with the intentions of using the fabric for garments. This outfit is the StyleArc Bob pants and my TNT (Tried and True) pattern for a summer top, the Tessuti Mandy with cuffs instead of sleeves.
Hemp sews up easily and takes my dye nicely for painting. It is a good alternative to linen, and also very strong and durable, so basic items like white pants will probably be part of my wardrobe for a long time. Anything more trendy like the top has naturally a shorter lifespan, but I can imagine cutting off the sleeves and turning it into a couple of tea towels when the style is no longer current.
This outfit has been in a suitcase for two weeks and then been worn for a couple of days on my trip in Portugal and still looks pretty good.
I have some notes on what not to do when making white pants which are on PatternReview.
And below is a quick video. I am moving my legs a bit to show the drapiness of the hemp fabric. Hope this gives you an idea and doesn’t just look very silly. 🙂
For this top I used the Georgia top pattern by Elizabeth Suzann Studio. The fabric is linen and the flowers were stencilled with thickened dye for the blue and screenprinting ink for the grey. As a general rule, I use dye only when I must for the vibrant colour and the soft hand of the fabric, because it is a pain to work with. When I can get away with it I prefer the ink.
I used an Ikea curtain for these culottes, a heavier weight cotton with a nice herringbone weave. It was a creamy white originally, now dyed blue. The pattern is a variation of Vogue 8712 and the details are on PetternReview. The top is an older one, hand painted with dye.
Very happy with this grey linen top, love the geckos. Although I am always careful when using animal motifs, trying not to make them too cutesy, I don’t want to look as if I am working in a childrens ward at a hospital. (No offence intended to nurses, we are all very grateful for what they do.) BTW, this is straight off the clothes line, no ironing!
For the next couple of projects I am using a set of linen sheets, bought at a steep discount which worked out at $8/m. Great price and allows for a relaxed approach with my experiments. I do like the colour, a sort of muted pinky greyish mauve, but king size sheets yield a lot of garments and I can’t see myself with a whole wardrobe of this colour. It is also not that easy to combine with another colour either, grey is all that comes to mind, both for outfits and for painting. I tried to think outside the square with using pink, but wasn’t impressed with the result.
Not that great. I am really fussy, if I don’t love it I won’t wear it. I then tried to save this by dyeing the background purple, but let’s say that it was only a very modest improvement. The photo is actually kinder than the reality.
The purple turned out far darker than intended, and again, this is likely to languish at the back of my wardrobe. While it doesn’t look too bad, what do you combine this with? Pink pants? Purple pants? I tried black and didn’t like it much. I think I will continue to experiment with this top, removing the dye with a discharge agent. There is nothing to lose at this point and I might as well get some experience with discharging.
But I did learn something valuable from this disappointment: it seems that this linen, and possibly linen in general, takes the dye much more intensively than cotton. I have not done much immersion dyeing with linen, usually I paint on thickened dye with a brush. But with this immersion dyeing I used 3 teaspoons of dye powder, a third less than recommended in the recipe I have been using for cotton, and it turned out way darker than anticipated.
So I dialled the dye back a lot with my next project and that was sooo much better.
This time I used a plastic baby spoon to measure my dye (repurposing what’s left from when the grandchildren were little rather than throwing more plastic into landfill). The baby spoon is much smaller than a teaspoon and I used only 1 spoonful. That small quantity over-dyed the original colour really quite spectacularly. Dye is transparent, so when you dye you expect the original colour to show through and influence the result. This is why you can’t dye a darker colour lighter. But the fuchsia is really quite clear and untainted from the rather murky original.
I am too traumatised for now to try purple again, but I have already tried light blue and that was successful too, a nice mid blue denim colour.
Good to know as I work my way through many metres of this linen, although for a change I left the original colour intact with my next project.
But surprise, I used a new pattern! Doesn’t happen very often, but the Assembly Line, a Swedish independent pattern maker had a sale and i bought their cuff top. Normally they are too expensive for me and i would have just altered one of my patterns to reproduce the style, but their discount tempted me and I thought that I really need a new style for my tops. The Athina is great as a canvas for painting but we all need a change now and then.
There will be more of these tops and I might even make a skirt to go with this one, the top seems to be asking for it. Maybe a box pleat number? Or an A-line? This is what the pattern maker suggests, looks like a quarter circle with a gathered waist.
The sewing details for the Cuff Top are on PatternReview .
Rust might not be everyone’s favourite colour, but I’m sure I will be making lots of lovely rust-coloured garments this summer. All Ikea’s fault, because they specialled off their rust coloured linen curtains for a ridiculous price. Was there a palace revolt of bean counters against the designers or was it just some sort of embarrassing mistake? Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help but go berserk and buy several packets. Each pair of curtains is 5m of linen, which makes …. uhm … let’s not do the maths, too embarrassing! Suffice it to say that I love the colour (which is just as well), and the price of around $8/m allows me so much more freedom to experiment than if I had to shell out the usual $25-40 in the fabric shops. So it’s a win-win, Ikea gets to get rid of stock they clearly don’t want and I get to get rid off my fear of ruining expensive fabric when trying out new ideas.
I started making inroads into my stash of many meters of red-brown linen with a tunic painted with a super simple abstract in black. I really like the colour combo even if it is not particularly spring-like. But with the long sleeves it will be just the right weight for the change of season and in any case, autumn is sure to come again. 🙂
The pattern is the Tessuti Athina, what else, this time in the longer length, meant to be worn over loose pants. The motif was painted on with a brush with screen printing ink and the signature had to be stencilled as such fine lines are hard with a brush on the rough texture of linen. Too easy to spoil the whole thing at the last moment with some gluggy blobs. I used screen printing ink because I was too impatient to wait the 8 hours or overnight you need with dye before being able to sew this up. In all my impatient enthusiasm I forgot to peel away the newspaper under the fabric while the ink was still wet, so now I have bits of newspaper permanently stuck on the inside. Serves me right, but I could always claim that it adds to that ‘artisan look’. 🙂
I modified the Athina slightly by installing slits at sides, to about high hip level. Makes more sense with something this long and allows easy access to my pant pockets.
Next in my line up of rust coloured linen garments is a calf-length tunic with short sleeves, again split at the sides to the waist.
This could be worn over pants or possibly even a skirt. I have tried this look before with a knit and long sleeves in winter, but when you need a jacket over the top to keep warm the super long tunic can look awkward. So short sleeved for summer, when jackets are not necessary, is probably a better idea.
The pattern here, surprise surprise, is not the Athina but the Georgia dress by Elizabeth Suzann Studio. More about the sewing details and modifications are on PatternReview.
The stencilled motif is an old favourite, one of the Matisse cut-outs, stencilled with freezer paper and this time I took my time with thickened dye, to preserve the soft hand of the fabric.
I had a brief flirtation with using these giraffes, but I am a bit wary of animals on my clothes.
Too cutesy? Maybe not if it is sufficiently stylised and the safari theme suits the colour. I might still try it if I find I like wearing this new silhouette of a long tunic with split sides over pants. Apparently we are in for another cool summer on the Australian east coast, so I won’t be wearing sleeveless dresses all that much.
After my Henri Matisse phase I now have a decided crush on a Japanese artist, Samiro Yunoki. This is the second time I have used his art, this time more of a copy than mere inspiration. I hope he doesn’t mind.
I repurposed a top which is quite a few years old and the style was looking dated. But the fabric is an absolutely wonderful crinkle linen I bought in Europe, the type you can do anything you like with and it won’t ever look rumpled. Far too good to get rid of even if it is almost 10:years old.
So I re-fashioned the top to something similar to the Tessuti Athina, to make the style more current. Then I stencilled it and here we are.
Japanese artists are often minimalist, which is right up my alley., and Yunoki definitely is. Here is another one of his paintings which absolutely speaks to me.
I hope he doesn’t mind my appropriation. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
The pattern for the second top was the Tessuti Mandy, with added funnel neck.
Stencilling notes
Stencilled with black screen printing ink, this time NOT supercover. Works better for black, not as gluggy and easier to apply.
Blue is white supercover screen printing ink, tinted with blue acrylic
This bird didn’t really remind me of a turkey until I had stencilled a top with it all over.
Not a problem really, I like turkeys, except I happened to have arranged my birds badly on the available space.
Can you see the hole in the middle? I started with the large version, as is logical, but then had problems how to arrange the smaller ones nicely.
The back is better, but not much. What was I thinking?
Idiot! I should have modelled this on Photoshop first. Now I have a big empty space in the middle.
It’s worse when worn on the body and not great from any angle.
The pendant helps a bit, but not that much. Certainly not on the back. 🙂
There are only two options, learn to live with it as it is, or put something into the empty space. Plants? Smaller turkeys? I was really unsure how to fix this.
In the end I thought I would try smaller version of the birds, but cut out two pieces of paper of the size I was aiming for to try out placements. Once you have done the stencilling it’s too late to change your mind.
That made me more confident that I could fill the empty space without making it look even worse. I am much happier now with the look of the shirt.
Stencilling Notes
The large and small turkeys are stencilled using freezer paper
The medium birds are block printed using adhesive foam on a perspex backing.
The ink used is Permaset screen printing ink, black
The fabric is cotton/viscose sheeting
The ink was initially cured for 30 mins in the dryer
For the birds I added later I used a hot iron to set the ink