Hanging Threads

Printing (and sewing) a fabric pattern at last.

Things that get in the way of achieving personal projects include: myself, teaching, (gratefully received) illustration jobs, paralysing thoughts on the absolute state of the UK right now and the financially crippling winter that awaits us all… But brushing all those aside, there is the odd day here and there where I manage to actually make something.

You may remember that in the last installment of Patchwork I had sent off my fabric pattern design to be printed (I used a company called Contrado, they were good but any other top tips would be very welcome), and after some nervous waiting it arrived.

I’m happy with the fabric overall, although I definitely learned some (fairly pricey) lessons. The pink background and skin colour are a little too close in tone to each other, and the thin white outline I used to seperate them isn’t really cutting the mustard. The colours are also a little too hot in real life, I should have toned everything down a bit (and probably have taken the boring, sensible, time consuming, expensive step of printing a sample before ordering a full 3 meters).

When the fabric first arrived I couldn’t really tell whether I liked it at all, and promptly abandoned it to jaunt off to Scotland for two weeks.

There I focussed all my holidaying efforts on working frantically on illustration jobs, thankfully interrupted by regular seal-spotting walks to the beach.

These seals have never seen an illustration and are perfectly fine with it.

After a couple of weeks back in London I managed to spend a day in the studio, finally facing up to the task of turning my fabric into something.

The process of cutting the pattern was a little tense as I was trying to match the fabric pattern across the garment without being too massively wasteful of the cloth. The pieces only just fit but I’m quite pathetically proud of how well the fabric design lines up across the (un)finished robe.

The robe in progress, full of hanging threads, pins and unfinished hems.

This is the first of many decorative garments* that I’m hoping to make in the coming months, so more on that soon.

In the meantime I’ll be stitching up the loose threads and figuring out whether some black velvet ribbon is needed on those hems…

* just what everyone needs in a recession