July 2019 projects

ctmidd
Aug 4, 2019
4 min read

This month I have been mostly making entries for The British heart Foundation Big Stitch campaign. The idea is you buy an item from one of the shops and upcycle it in some way.

I wandered around my local BHF for an age looking for something I liked, I was hoping for a dress a couple of sizes too big or something leather for a bag or something. I was not easily inspired, I walked around the shop several times and flicked through every rack. I finally settled on a long robe in a stretchy printed net fabric that I thought I could make a top with and a mens short sleeved shirt in a fabric I really liked.

I knew what I wanted to do with the robe so I started with that, I used a stretch top I have to draw a pattern from, then I unpicked the sleeves from robe. I used my pattern to cut out a front piece from the robe back. I cut the back in two pieces as there was not enough fabric left to cut it in one piece. I stitched the two back pieces together and stitched the back to the front. I had to add some fabric into the seam of the sleeve as it was too tight. I used my sleeve pattern to help reshape the top of the sleeves. I pinned one sleeve in and had to make the holes larger, I reshaped the sleeve and hole a few times before they fitted together properly. This is the first thing I have made with properly stretchy fabric, I was expecting to have some very puckered seams but it turned out better than I was expecting, and it fits.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with the shirt. I put it on and decided as it wasn't massive on me I'd have to be quite creative with it. I started by taking the sleeves off then measured drew out a square neckline. I cut out the neckline, pinned back the seam allowance and put it back on and decided to unpick the yoke sections on the shoulders and shorten the 'straps' that way, I also unpicked all but the top 4 inches of the side seams as it was snug on the hips. I needed to add in some darts to fit the top to my shape, with the top on inside out I pinned bust darts to the armholes and underbust and marked where darts needed to go in the back to shape the waist. I marked up the darts with chalk then unpinned everything, I took measurements and drew the side darts in properly then used my template to draw in the underbust ones. I tacked in the darts and tried it on, the side darts were fine but the others needed to be longer. I redid the darts, tried it on again, and it looked better. I shaped the arm side of the straps and pinned in the sleeves, they didn't fit too bad but I had to do some trimming and reshaping to get them sitting nicely, I also shortened them a fair bit. I then shortened the top, I measured up from the hem and kept the same shape. I used some of the fabric from the bottom to make sections to fit into the side seams, I stitched those in and hemmed around the bottom. I used fabric that I had cut away from the neckline to make facing and stitched that in. The last thing I did was change the plastic buttons for mother of pearl ones.

I was supposed to be doing something sensible one weekend and ended up getting stuck into the shibori project I had on the go. Over a couple of days I drew and stitched all the patterns onto the dress and gathered them. The circle is done with straight lines of stitching going in different directions, the swirls were done by folding along the pattern line and stitching below the fold. The stems were done by folding along the line and stitching over the fold always bringing the needle back to front. The circles were just stitched along the lines. I gathered one side of the dress securing it with large stitches and used pegs to pin around the armholes and neckline to create a resist pattern.

I mixed up some cold water dye using a blue and a green to get a shade of dark teal, then followed the instructions to dye the dress. I rinsed the dress to get most of the dye out then snipped the threads to release the gathers and put the dress in the machine for a quick wash. I sat and carefully unpicked the stitching and found way more holes than I would have liked, I guess the fabric was too soft and I might have pulled the gathers too hard.

The colour is not at all what I had in mind I have no idea why it came out beige and pale turquoise, but you can see the pattern and I don't dislike the colour. I might dye the whole thing again at a later date, after I've mended all the holes.