WARNING CAMWHORE ALERT!

Well...I was going to be a big lazy person and copy this over from Threadbanger but the picture links don't copy so I would have had to redo the post anyways.

I love yellow. Since I can wear yellow, and not many people can, I figure I may as well take advantage of that, and wear yellow.

So. I had a whole bunch of yellow satin and I made a pintucked, piped bubble skirt with pockets.

(yes for some reason I look like noel fielding in that photo..wtf?)
And I also had a whole bunch of t shirt scraps so I sorted out the primary coloured ones, cut them into squares and sewed harlequin out of them. I used the harlequin fabric and some pieces of a reconned blue top to pair with a terrible terrible failed recon tank top I'd made when I was a much worse sewer.

The green around my waist is silk I hand dyed with food dyes.

(I'm well aware my posture is horrible...I do have scoliosis so that explains it a bit)
none of my things were done with patterns.
Only problem is where can one even wear stuff like this?

Ok so I decided that I was going to make my formal dress for yr 12 formal (last year.) I was as sick as a dog when we went to buy my dress for yr 10 formal and so we got the first one that fitted and looked good - one that was a) black and black doesn't suit me, and b) some other girl had the same dress.
So..being a girl with new found sewing genius *coughcough* I've been sewing since around...may 2007? I said that I was going to make my formal dress. Well..originally I was going to go in drag and make a waistcoat out of ties and wear that but I knew my school would a) freak out and b) it would have been super hot.
Soooooo.
First I drew a sketch.

I originally wanted to have heaps of petticoats underneath but I decided it looked better without in the end. I'd collected a whole bunch of ties for my original plans of tie waistcoat, and they were all in blue colours so I used those for the bottom. Now...unfortunately ..the only fabric I had was this really gorgeous buttery yellow cotton satin...which looked horrible with the blue..and so I would have to buy more. LUCKILY in the remnant bin there was heaps of grey satin..and it was a fairly heavy not super shiny and disgusting fabric, it looked tasteful..so I got it, tried to tint it bluish (which didn't really work but oh well) and used that. I originally wanted silk (cause I had  bit of blue silk that I could use) but they didn't have any silk in nice colours. Gah.
First I made a muslin out of a sheet (the dress was originally going to be about this colour):

HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM..the dress makes me look like I'm as flat as a 12 yr old..this wasn't going to work. I had to get a STRAPLESS BRA. So of course I had to put off making the dress until I could get that bra. The ruching of the waistband also really sucked so I had to work something else out. This was all trial and error, people..I didn't use a pattern.
FINALLY I got the dress done around a week or so before the formal. It was fully lined (badly..wow, I hate lining things) and I'd had to unpick the zipper like..a zillion times so the bottom of it looked pretty wonky..so I had to make a bow out of a spare tie and pin it on there. In the end, I was really pleased how it turned out.

sorry about the washedoutness...the colours are fairly accurate though.
I've got hair extensions in my hair and I'm wearing high heels (ouch) as well as makeup (more ouch)

the back
and me at the formal.
Phew..it was so hard. I did, however, get a lot of compliments, my dress was the only one like it (I should have done a more out there one, this one's a bit conventional but oh well..) AND the best thing was..the dress only cost like $30..the fabric was out of the remnant bin (lining and all the grey stuff) and I got the yellow fabric for $5 for like...two metres by two metres. Really great buy I made the rest into a skirt which I will post later. The ties were all around $2 each..Ok that bumps up the price but I had bought them over a long period of time.
It wasn't very easy fabric to sew..it kept doing crazy things like puckering and shredding. But that's around it then.

(I didn't use any patterns..but I'm not really good at sewing dresses that fit well so as well as all the tweaking and fitting that I had to do, I used these tutes.
Tie ruffles: http://www.flickr.com/photos/outsapop/2051985019/in/set-72157603253925298/ (note, if your ties are polyester..be VERY careful when ironing them! I burnt the grey one!)
Adjustable ruched skirt: http://community.livejournal.com/steamfashion/791377.html (mine might have looked better with an underskirt but it would have a) been too hot and b) been too much effort)
Ruched sweetheart neckline: http://www.burdastyle.com/howtos/show/1153 (I also used princess seams to fit the bust, which has to be my favourite fitting technique ever. Princess seams are SO much nicer than darts!)

I hope you enjoy

Yeah. Title says it..really..
I found some AMAZING f***ing fabric at the disaster relief thrift store for $1 and said YES YES YES! It was this spandex sort of fabric..not very much of it...perhaps 80 by 60 cm or something? Maybe less?
It sat there in my cupboard for ages and suddenly I realised I needed to make amazing gloves from it.

They're handsewn, and the pattern i made from a pair of wrist length leather gloves I have (Although since they were leather, they had a lot more gussets..I left the gussets out of these cause it's a devastatingly stretchy fabric) the machine probably would have gone crazy and eaten this fabric so I had to do it by hand.

so yeah..that's about it. They're pretty damned useless..but I think I needed something this crazy in my wardrobe.. I love them.

Chip butty and smalahove!

Enjoy it while it's warm!

Food colouring, inktense pencils and black pen

Help meeee
recently whenever I sew ANY kind of stitch on my mother's bernina Special 1000 it does this..
the top thread for some reason stays pretty much straight, as if it refuses to go into stitches, meaning the back thread has to do all the work with forcing it into stitch shapes.

the back thread goes all loose and bobbly, and crunches the fabric, as well as pulling threads out of the fabric.
I can't sew like this...it ruins the fabric and the stitching has practically NO structural stability if the top thread is too tight and the bottom too loose! Everything is set to the optimum tensions etc for straight stitch (I double checked in the book)
what is going wroooooong....

Ok..well I want my formal dress to look something like this:

I have a raw silk like this which will only be enough for the top part of the bodice.

the rest of the dress will have to be made out of satin/sik in some other contrasting colour. I was thinking of making the middle waistband out of zippers instead of cloth but anyway...

so I made a muslin out of a polycotton sheet. I am very happy with how the skirt turned out


but as you can see, the front makes me look flat! And the side zipper is pretty awful (I'm thinking that I will have to sacrifice invisibility for comfort when I make the actual dress.)
I used this tutorial to make the bust:
http://www.burdastyle.com/howtos/show/1153
But I don't know..maybe because sheets don't have much structural stability? It stays up OK (although if I'm moving around a lot it might slip.....) FYI I'm around b up top so I won't need a lot of support. Is there any way to do the bust so it doesn't flatten me out so much? I know the silk will be stiffer and thicker for one thing.
(oh and the pleated middle thing didn't work so well...how would you suggest doing a gathered waistband?)

Oh god this took me forever...

It's a4 size. Had to use up the last page of my sketchbook and wanted to do so in an interesting way.

Well..er..yes, I have knitted socks once before using Silver's sock classes which have excellent step by steps with photos and all. Then I (possibly overambitiously) decided I'd try the extra tall socks found here:
http://knitty.com/ISSUEwinter04/PATTverytallsocks.html

OK..well, I got the first bit about the casting on and knitting 15 rows of k1p1 ribbing..which is what I am doing right now, but when I look at the next bit, my head starts spinning.

"Work in stockinette st for 92 rounds.
Set-up Rnd: K22, place marker, k46, place marker, k22.
Shaping Rnd: K to 2 sts before first marker, k2tog, k to second marker, slip marker, k2tog, k to end of round.
[Work 3 rnds even. Work Shaping Round.] 3 times. 82 sts rem. (Rnd 106 just worked.)
Work 38 rnds even. (Round 144 just worked.)
[Work Shaping Rnd. Work 1 round even.] 13 times. 56 sts rem. (Rnd 170 just worked.)
Work Shaping Rnd once more. 54 sts rem.
Work 68 rounds even. (Rnd 239 just worked.)"

Ok...so, what exactly are stitch markers?
and when it says work in stockinette for 92 rounds, does it mean I do that BEFORE I start trying to follow all the instructions below or are they the instructions for the 92 rounds? And when it says k22 it means k22 stitches doesn't it, rather than 22 rounds? My head is spinning....
Has anyone knitted this pattern before or one like it? It would be great if  you could help...I like knitting but knitting patterns are so mean!

Ok..well I decided to do this challenge to fill in time. I walked down to the local shops. My budget was around $18 Australian ($15 US) but I wanted to keep the price low, because I'm poor.

I knew I wanted to do some sort of headgear, but beyond that I had no idea.
My items:

I bought...
- 1 kitkat (for personal sustenance, it's not my food item)
- 2 pairs XL black pantyhose
- 1 box of benino peppermint tea (my food item - my Mum hates this brand, it's weak and awful!)
- cotton twine
- a small face towel
- 10 boxes of matches (they cost $2..bargain)
- coffee filters.
All in all this was around $15.70...
Went home and began my EVIL PLANS.
First, I started brewing the tea to dye some string and my coffee filters.

But then, disaster struck! The coffee filters were unbleached, meaning they were brown! The peppermint tea was not going to have much of an effect. So..I cheated (forgive me...)
I got a couple of bags of rosehip tea and brewed them as well. Hey, they're not the main point of my project.

I put the string and some old sheet fabric into the steaming brews. The one on the left is the peppermint and has half the packet of teabags in it The kitchen smelled very intriguing after all of this teamaking.
While I was doing this I added a smoky flavour to some of my coffee filters and some sheet fabric.

I also fiddled around with my stockings

Then I started weaving the matches together with my string.


I made this fetching flower out of matches, coffee filters, the wrapper from the matchboxes and burnt fabric.

OK, after this, I sort of ran out of in progress shots. Basically, I cut the main body of the hat out of the face towel, and stitched these pleated dyed coffee filters around the edge. I also sewed on my bands of interwoven matches, and ruffles made of tea dyed fabric, burnt fabric and my kitkat wrapper. I disguised the edge of the hat with a stocking leg ruffle, and sewed the other leg inside it, to help keep the hat on.



I don't think it was completely finished in that photo.

Detail of the woven matches

coffee filter ruffles

I was trying to cultivate some sort of mysterious "I have no face" thing with the stockings, but..well, let's just say it didn't work. So I gave up trying to take photos of the hat on me, and put it on my soft toy tiger Jaga.


Ok, so it was finished. But I still had this little match doo-hickey that I hadn't used in the hat. So I decided to burn it.


Aww yeah.

And what about all those charred coffee filters and sheet fabric? Well, I suppose I could just burn them.



I still have heaps of matches left too!
Well, I hope you like my pyromaniac hat!

Well OK, I love the eye of providence, but I'm not religious at all so I wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea by me wearing a masonic symbol.
I was making a skirt covered in yellow and green scraps, and decided to embroider this bird on it. With an ocular twist...

Ahhhh isn't it evil?
In fact, I'm so keen on the eye that I want to make a skirt covered with eyes. Although that'd be REALLY weird.

Freehanded pattern, made up directly on the fabric (I sketched it out first with laundry marker..I'll probably get one of those vanishing textas some time but they are a little expensive.)