Friday, 15 March 2024

Sewing Zero Waste Culottes from The Craft of Clothes

 Behold! Fancy pants!

A pair of dark red culottes, being modelled by a white person with dark hair. The culottes are knee length and high waisted. There is decorative purple topstitching along the front leg panels. The waistband is plain except for two black plastic snaps holding it closed.


The pattern for these pants was one of my Christmas gifts. It comes from Liz at The Craft of Clothes, a zero-waste designer. I've really gravitated towards self-drafting and zero-waste sewing in the last couple of years, and this pattern has been on my list for a good six months, so I was excited to get into it.

Tuesday, 27 February 2024

How I Wet Finish Weaving Projects

How I Wet Finish Weaving Projects

This post is based off a reply I gave to this Tumblr thread asking about wet-finishing advice for handwovens. The Tumblrite above me gave excellent instructions for gently hand-washing items, a practice I respect but don't use myself. I've edited a bit for clarity and added a few extra things I didn't think of at the time.

My reply

What @crow-crafting said is a great approach for most weaving, especially if your yarn is prone to fulling (felting, but with spun fibres) and you want to be able to control that process completely. The only thing I'd add is that if you're hanging it to dry, it can really help to hang it over a thick bar or rod rather than just a regular washing line. Some yarns will take offence to the line and set a permanent crease if it's the first time they've been washed.

Personally, I tend to be more aggressive with wet finishing. I know I will never have the executive function to consistently hand wash whatever I've made, so I wet finish my weaving at least as aggressively as I expect its future washings to be. Which means I almost always do samples before getting into the actual project.

Friday, 19 January 2024

Operation Stash-Down

 

Last month, I spent a week thoroughly cleaning and reorganising my workroom so that I could actually get to all the shelves, and not have my back to the door. I even made space to fit a skinny bookshelf (I can finally have all my books out where I can reach them. It's been more than seven years since that last happened).

Last week, I watched one of my favourite YouTubers issue their now-annual "January is for working on The Pile" challenge. I considered my Piles (what a phrase) and decided this was an excellent use for the rest of January. I went through the mending pile, adding and subtracting as necessary, and updated the running list I keep of the things in there (it's the only way to stop things from disappearing into the aether). I tidied up the cabbage patch, taking the opportunity to go through a few boxes that were stored outside the workroom and sort their contents into piles.

Yesterday, I looked around my workroom (it had once again gone from clean and tidy with actual floor space, to One Big Trip Hazard within half a day), and decided that I have too much bloody stuff.


A shot of the workroom floor, which has been covered in boxes and piles of fabric, worn-out clothes and old sneakers. The top left box has been circled in green and labelled "for coleslaw". The middle two piles are circled yellow and labelled "cabbage once deconstructed". The bottom left pile is circled in blue and labelled "actual recycling". The bottom right pile is circled in red and labelled "rag rug bits". End ID.
This was almost completely clear twelve hours ago.
L-R, T-B: for coleslaw (green), cabbage once deconstructed (yellow), actual recycling (blue), and rag rug bits (red).

Friday, 5 January 2024

2024: New Year, (some) New Goals

An Unnecessarily In-Depth Explanation of How I Set Yearly Goals

It's a new year, which means that for me, it's time for a new set of annual goals. (These are NOT resolutions. Resolutions are fuzzy and vague, usually cliché things like "lose weight" or "be happier" or "achieve world peace". Goals are things that you can actually aim at, and with enough practice, hit.)

I started formally setting and tracking yearly targets a few years ago, and while I won't call it the cure to all that ails me, it's certainly been a helpful practice. And hey, 'tis the season for everyone's "how I set goals" posts, so who am I to rock the boat?

The TL;DR

I usually start this process sometime in December, whenever the urge to wrap up the current year and look towards the new one starts to itch me. (Incidentally, this is almost the exact same process I use when doing monthly goals, just with less introspection/review.)

It goes something like this:

  • Review the areas of my life and how things went over the last year.
  • Review last year's goals - what I hit, what I didn't, what needed changing part way through the year when it became apparent I'd picked an over-ambitious target/something I didn't actually care about, that kind of thing.
  • Do a brain dump of all the things I want to do next year. Delegate them by life area.
  • Refine the brain dump over a few days, until I have a reasonable number of targets to aim for over the coming year.
  • Break those targets down into the things I'll need to do to actually reach the goal I'm aiming for.

Saturday, 11 November 2023

A Flannel Pyjama Tunic

 I made this set of pyjamas back in March. (It is a measure of how well my year hasn't gone that I'm only just getting to posting about them.)

A tunic dress is pegged with its arms outspread on a corrugated iron fence. It has a keyhole neckline with a decorative facing on the outside. The body is a deep pink rectangle with triangular gores made of lavender fabric. The sleeves and facing are made of the same lavender fabric. End ID.

Friday, 27 October 2023

A Bevy of Woven Bands

I'm in the process of making myself a new shirt. It's square cut, which is my favourite type of shirt construction. I've had a fair amount of practice with this style of garment, what with all the t-tunics I've made for medieval re-enactment, though making a shirt is involves more steps. It's all measuring things and cutting out the right sized rectangles, so there's no fiddling about with pattern pieces (which I despise). Best of all, despite being a fairly simple construction method, there's a surprising amount of room for tweaking the design of the final product.

While I like the idea of the "pirate shirts" that are everywhere nowadays, I live the kind of life where Dramatic Sleeves™ are a drawback. So I wanted something that uses the idea of rectangular geometry, just with a bit less flamboyance. Conveniently, history provided.

Friday, 29 September 2023

Review: the Daedalus Falcon e-spinner

I confess, this is a departure from my usual "let's do things with the least amount of money we can get away with" style. In my defence, I strive to be frugal rather than cheap. I don't mind spending the money to get a good quality, durable product, if it's something I know will get a lot of use. An e-spinner definitely fits that category for me, for several reasons.

One, I fall well on the frog hair end of the spinning spectrum, something most traditional wheels just aren't designed to accommodate. I actually found it faster (and easier on my legs) to use a spindle for the kinds of fine, high-twist yarns I prefer to spin. But, there are limits to how fine I can comfortably go on a spindle - anything past about 50 WPI and I have to concentrate just on the spinning. Not good when you typically use a spindle on the go.

Two, I have a lingering knee injury that doesn't like the treadle action of most spinning wheels (something I find hilariously frustrating given I ride a cargo bike anywhere I can't take the train).

Three, I spin mostly to weave. Much as I love spinning, I like it to end eventually so I can move onto the weaving part of the equation.

After three straight months of research, the Daedalus Falcon came out as the hands-down winner for my goals of speed, fine yarn, and product durability.

Friday, 22 September 2023

In search of compostable clothing closures

Making clothes that are 97% biodegradable is surprisingly easy. Pick a natural fibre fabric, buy some 100% cotton or linen thread, and you're there. (You can even get 100% cotton overlocker thread - though you have to go searching for it.)

Those last few percent, though? That can be tough. One of the biggest offenders is closures. While there are plenty of clothes that don't need something to hold them shut, I confess I like having the option. Below is a round-up of various closures, and their compostability.

Note: for the purpose of this article, I'm treating metal closures as "compostable", in the sense that they're 1) easy to remove before you compost the rest of the object, and 2) infinitely reusable on other things, unless they break - at which point they're usually recyclable using our current commercial systems. And remember, re-using things that already exist is always preferable to buying new, "better" items.

Friday, 15 September 2023

Turning Bedsheets Into A Wardrobe and Other Second-Hand Thoughts

The Dilemma

When it comes to my clothes, I'm a remarkably lazy snob.

I want things that fit well. (This isn't an unreasonable thing to want, I feel.) I want comfortable fabrics that breathe, and don't end up smelling like a billy goat slept on them. (I swear, since starting T, I strip my shirts more often than I ever had to strip the cloth nappies.)

I want colours - black and white and grey don't count - that don't make me look dead. (When did all the t-shirts in the men's section become navy and olive?) And I want them to last longer than six months before they start a part-time internship in the mending box.

Clothes that need mending have been tipped into a rough pile on a striped blue picnic rug. There is an olive tank top, a navy t-shirt, a child's ombre blue skirt, a child's mid-blue satin-look skirt, a plaid long-sleeved shirt in red, blue, and white, a black t-shirt, a purple t-shirt, an olive t-shirt, and a child's pink long sleeved t-shirt.
The pile doth wax and the pile doth wane, but there's always a bloody pile.

This short list is surprisingly difficult to achieve, off the rack. Anything that fits my shoulders won't fit my chest, and vice versa. The armscye is usually either comically large, or too small to fit my biceps. And pants? Let's just not go there. (Belts help. Kind of.)

Friday, 8 September 2023

A Brief Overview of Alpaca Farming in Australia

The Royal Show is on this week. Being in need of free entry civic minded, I volunteered to help man the spinner's and weaver's guild stall.

This gives me half a day to wander the showgrounds, and half a day where I stand at the booth, spindle spinning for the public, and blowing people's minds with random facts like "This is how people spun thread for most of human history, the treadle spinning wheel was only invented in the 1500s" and "It took longer to spin and weave the sails for a Viking longship than it did to build the ship itself". Kids in particular love to see how thread is made.

My first shift this time was a morning one (I only slightly regret that choice, being that I Am Not A Morning Person). So of course the first thing I did when I knocked off was go and talk to the alpaca breeders. (They were easier to find than the sheep.)

I must have arrived at a good time, because I had a great chat with the rep manning the Alpaca Association stall in the building. I have a keen interest in the local fibre industries, for obvious reasons. So I always take the time to talk to anyone involved with it, in any capacity.


Two large cabinets with cubed shelves stand below a sign that says “South Australian Alpaca Fleece Championship”. Each cube contains an alpaca fleece that has been entered for competition. There are blue, red, and white ribbons draped across many of the fleeces. Fleece colours include black, dark grey, light grey, dark brown, fawn, camel, and white.
This is about half of the comptetion fleeces that were on display.