Dearest Sewing Community friends!

This week, I am going to Tell It Like It Is: sharing photos just in the order that they come out of my photo stash, documenting my past week in sewing... Scroll down to the middle of this post, to get a link to the podcast that I just published, around Making Clothes Magic Again...

Above is 'phase two' of a blouse project (which you can see the finished image of at the bottom of this post); a blue and yellow spotted blouse, which I was deconstructing and reconstructing. As you can see above also, the sleeve edges were quite ruined, and I decided to make new sleeves, as well as mixing up some other layers of dotty fabrics...

In the meantime, as it were... This is how I 'undesign': spontaneously picking up different garments and mixing them up, playing with them, repairing aspects and recreating new dimensions.

I took the lining out of this skirt, and added an old ribbon as tabs for hanging it more easily on a hanger.

I adored the ribboned edging, which needed a serious iron - and which still wasn't very ironed even after being ironed...

I remade the waist too: it needed a new elastic.

Back to the blouse I go: I cut the hem edges off the original blouse... and was musing over how to make the blouse more fabulous.

And at the same time, thinking about what to do with this black skirt, which I didn't like the under-netting on...

I like the layering of skirts, underskirts, overskirts, etcetera... and so took off the netting and now have a good general purpose black skirt, which I can add various skirts under - or over! The red skirt works as either, also, because I took the lining out of it, and it is light enough to be an underskirt. But also perfect with a white-petticoat layered beneath it.

INTERLUDE - PODCAST!

Please note that I made a podcast specifically around sewing and dressmaking this week - Making Clothes Magic Again - for your listening pleasure, on my Art Of Life podcast here on the Hive blockchain!

And back to the blouse again: I made the sleeves out of a cute-but-impractical skirt - so now I had this part of the skirt left..

These are the sleeves, made out of the aforementioned skirt.

I love them, and wanted to incorporate more contrasting polkadots into this blouse...

But in the (next) meantime, I also was working on this beautiful mustard yellow silk blouse which had shite buttons on - horrible plastic things which totally did a dis-service to the epic blouse.

These are the plastic buttons, above - yuck!

And these are the glorious natural buttons, which I got very afforbably, at our big harvest market a couple of weeks ago. You can just see a bit of the splendid sheen on the natural buttons.

So I worked away on the buttons for a few hours, overall, as they needed much care, attention and precision to get them rightly in place.

Though maybe you will notice, below; I didn't realise that the wee bag of buttons I'd bought were in fact a few different sizes! Hehe - one cuff has bigger buttons than the other. I saw that I'd put a big one, a little one then a big one, in this row of three, on the first sleeve cuff... But totally didn't realise that I'd up-sized when I added the next three!

I love that quirk though! I love uniqueness of all kinds, and I adore when a garment is truly mine, because it is not uniform. It is not a uniform, either!!

Then I set some new buttons - and new button holes - on the neck and shoulder... Here, I'm marking the shoulder buttons with white thread before sewing them in - they had to be very precise - and you can just see the wee button holes that allow the neck to sit vertically, which I really love. It sat flat before. I added an extra button at the neck,and two new tiny buttonholes - I was really pleased to have a thread in my collection that almost perfectly matched this lovely vibrant yellow.

And back to the - semi-finished! - blouse... Here I switched it up a bit, adding a larger polkadot first, below the yellow dots, then adding the smallest polkadot at the bottom. It went a bit skew-wiff, so I have to re-hem it all...

These are terrible snapshots from my (not-terribly-)smart phone: but they give you the idea: this is the finished mustard silk blouse, which I might close at the front with a blue silk belt, as it is fully open - and needs to be tucked in or something, I think, to keep it closed... though it might not need it, as I repositioned the shoulder buttons to have the front of the blouse be more neatly-fitting.

A small harvest of buttons from garments I bought at the 50c stall, which I only wanted for buttons - however, I am wearing the grey wool cardigan that the darker ones came off of, right now, as it got chilly whilst I'm sitting writing. I don't often make an extravegant gesture of throwing any garment away, but treated myself to these buttons because they - especially the heart-shaped shell ones - are so beautiful.

AND FINALLY

This is a too-tight hat, which I HOPE to adjust with the stripey old shrunken woolen arms, below... I will let you know in my next post.

LOVE and all good things to you!

www.claregaiasophia.com