Having a well-earned beer after putting together a cape and 100 handmade flowers. The exhibition was amazing - there are some seriously talented people out there and I really hope those of you who participated keep at it (those of you who aren't pros already, that is). I almost felt embarrassed with my offering, which is much more functional than artistic. Indeed, I was surprised by the emphasis on art over functionality and a discussion ensued in our household as to why this is the case. Do people not make stuff any more? Have we divorced art from the functional and left art to elites? I have no idea.
The exhibition and an interview with Emma were on the news (here, at 23.50). The fabulous cape had its 0.5 seconds of fame (early in the item). A HUGE thank you to Emma for organising it all. Now that I see how much goes into it, If I do it again next year I'll offer to volunteer (I can hand out beer and orange juice as well as anyone).
I featured a number of other artists during the duration of the project and it was fabulous to see so many of them in the flesh. The website is good but there's nothing like seeing people's work up close. To everyone who finished, congratulations and maybe we'll see you next year (if there is a next year). And till then, au revoir.
Well one plus the one I fatally wounded tonight by cutting accidentally.
A process proving to be more painful and time-consuming than making the wretched things.
I don't have anything else to add today. So I won't.
Running late tonight because we had to take this guy to the vet. Who couldn't find anything wrong but charged a bunch anyway.
Here's our beautiful quince tree in full spring blossom. Poor thing got transplanted during the drought a couple of years ago and sulked thereafter. But this year there's been some rain and it's looking much happier with the world. Quince jelly...mmmmmmmm.
The day I have been dreading - buttonhole day. I had it all planned, though: I was going to do those funky keyhole buttonholes that I can now do with my fancy embroidery machine.
Except...that the buttons required a 4cm buttonhole and the maximum size the machine is capable of is 28mm. So onto Plan B: do them on the straight sewer. Except...the buttonhole foot for this machine is even smaller.
So this necessitated a rethink and I ended up doing them on the old machine, without the buttonhole foot to guide the fabric. In a lame attempt to add some zing - any zing would do - I used some Goliath thread as a gimp thread to give the buttonhole a bit of a lift.
So it ended up being a hand-guided buttonhole while trying to work a double layer of heavy fabric and making sure the narrow buttonhole stitch went over the Goliath thread. Plus I have a history of stuffing up buttonholes. What could go wrong? Quite a lot but in this case it didn't.
Now all that remains is sewing on another 95 flowers and hemming the whole shebang up so no one can see the mistakes!
Started stitching the flowers on. The blue ones to start with because there's fewer of them and I have some cool sparkley things I can use. The flowers are just anchored down with a few beads but with 100 flowers that's still quite a bit of additional weight (and the thing already weighs a bunch).
Here's the flowers pinned on. There's a couple of minor details like the buttons and buttonholes to do but after that it's chocs away! It looks better in real life than the photo, I'm happy to report.
The front panel has been hemmed and topstitched so now it all just needs a press and the flowers can get pinned and sewn on. It's not really the naff orange colour of the photo, by the way.
Flowers from our peacherine. This tree is by far the best of all our fruit trees - by the end of summer we're so sick of peacherines we let them rot on the ground. It pains me because, as my Mother's daughter, I hate to see food go to waste. Maybe ice-cream or a winter treat this year?
Today i thought I'd look at a couple of other peoples' projects. First up Gina who is doing 100 faces. They're way clever and there's a mix of the serious and the quirky. Here's a fortune teller, or Baba Yaga. Or the lady that sells weird jewellery at the local market.
And for something less exotic, one of Maggie's drawings. This is a tui singing in the kowhai. We have tuis that sing in the big oak tree near us, and one with a gammie wing that eats the chook food. Sing your heart out, little tui!
Cape mostly completed - collar stitched on and lining sewn in. Now just need to stitch 100 flowers on by hand between now and the exhibition, sew on the flaps, hem, and topstitch the front. No. Sweat. (I still have no idea if this will look OK or a complete mess.)
And just for a change of pace, here's another picture of Ruby, tucked up next to her Mum. All dogs love this. Here's a shout out for all the chained dogs in the world that don't get to tuck up next to anything even though they desperately want to.
Cut and drying out. Only two weeks to go!
Today's effort shows some slight forward progess on the cape - the collar is now pinned to the cape and facing. I have decided against trying to sew it on tonight because wine and difficult sewing are not compatible - in my experience. So I will leave evidence of having achieved something and bid you all goodnight.
PS Here is another of DianeRuth's cartoons. This is dedicated to our cat Rocket who, although small, knows for certain that he is a lion. At least in the fourth dimension.
I did my flower this afternoon before I went out but now I'm back and it's late and I want to get the spare cat out of the cold and go to bed.
In the meantime, here's a picture from DianeRuth's project. This is "An evolving exercise in telling a story of a walk, through drawing." We quite like the sly dig of "Art lunch in the leafy suburbs":
The reason it is good practice to keep the right side of the fabric to the inside when cutting out is that if you don't get to sew the garment for, say, a couple of years, and in the meantime the cat sleeps on it and someone spills something on it that washes out with neither water nor nail polish, then it's all on the wrong side.
And how come, when you do something you give a shit about everything goes wrong, but when you make a top out of polar fleece someone gave you, it all goes smoothly except for the bit at the very end when you run out of bobbin thread? Truly it is a mystery.
I tried to photo the top but all I got was a red mess. So here is a nice embroidered dress from the Oscar de la Renta 2015 Spring collection instead.
