The Wedding Bracelet comes to life!

EVENTUALLY got the stuff from the Bead shop! Had to wait till the weekend to put it all together, but it was totally worth it... I did this without thinking much about it - in retrospect i would have taken the memory wire coil and made a mark on it with permanent ink in a straight line from the one end of the coil to the other (to mark where the loops end / begin) because it's very hard to keep it all together all the time!

First thing to do is make a small loop at the end of the coil to stop the beads. I used my girl's small computer pliers - the memory wire is relatively easy to bend.

First bead is on! I started with a loop of white seed beads, and threaded them by using the open end of the coil as a hook to pick them up - sort of made me thought of a sugar bird funneling nectar down its beak :). Yes - that is my foot holding down the bottom end of the coil - i'm sure there are appropriate tools, but i don't have patience or money enough for that!

Next came a loop of silver-lined glass beads that I picked up from the local market on Saturday after having a sudden panic attack about not having enough beads!

After that I added the cat-eye semi-opaque, semi-grey beads - these were cool to work with because they slipped down the coil by themselves, instead of me having to push them down. Again in retrospect, i discovered that, by stretching the coil apart upwards (forcing the loops further apart and more vertical), even the smaller beads slipped down effortlessly :)

All ready for the aisle!

The Wedding bracelet - hunting

Love is a river, ties you to me... also with beads and memory wire.

I trawled the internet for the bracelet in my head, but to my great indignance, NO-ONE has thought to create it for me to buy. So, with 2 weeks to go, and nothing forthcoming from House of Fraser, Debenhams, Accessorize, bloody Any women's shop, I've decided to make it myself.

I found this awesome online shop - imaginatively called The Bead Shop - in Manchester (http://www.the-beadshop.co.uk/) and almost every bead I could conjure up in the wedding accessory of my dreams. Guess what? I don't have to settle for pearls! I don't have to add 20 years to my age in the process! And I can STILL look stylish! How bizarre.

This is what I've bought:

All arrives hopefully early this week...

The first thing I did when I arrived in the UK

Of all the things I suddenly realised once I had relocated to London back in 2006, the fact that I missed sewing was the weirdest. It's as if I became aware, through having the luxury of a workspace and hoards of hobby shops taken away, how very much I wanted those things. I hadn't even considered that it would take a long time to set up the connections, the space, the tools and the material store I had built up over many years back home, and one of the first things I noticed about London was the distinct absence of art and hobby warehouses I was accustomed to having around the corner.

Anyway - this is what the first few months of creative-withdrawal symptoms caused me to create: A fold-up Backgammon Board. I think the desire for sewing was stirred up by a donated sewing machine from my fiance's mom - thanks Aunty Liz ;-) - and I liked the idea of incorporating it into the final product.

I used two fairly large pine picture frames for the base and frame of the board, removing the glass / perspex completely:

Sanding down the corners with sandpaper, and varnishing the wood to get rid of splinters:

Fixing the two frames together with hinges so that the 'board' opens up for playing and closes for storage:

I then went down to the local haberdashery and bought a meter of dark blue denim fabric and a meter of white denim / canvas fabric. The light blue backside of the blue denim served as a third colour for the board.

Sewing! I cut the big panels of dark blue denim to cover the hardboard piece that comes inside the frames, and then cut 12 light blue triangles and 12 white ones for the backgammon play area, finishing their edges off with white zig-zag stitching:

Fixed these to the main denim panels, and stitched the edges down with a broad, dense stitch to cover any fraying bits. Instead of trying to hide the stitching, which is difficult with denim, I made a feature out of it.

I cut two extra bits of left over white cloth to match the main panels, then stitched them to the back of the main panels to create a sort of sleeve out of the two panels, to pull over the picture frame hardboards. Then i fixed the hardboards back in place. The pic on the left is the back of the frames, the pic on the right is the front, with the panels in place inside the frames.

The last bit to do was the counters or checkers. Backgammon requires 15 checkers of each colour, and I needed something with unusual texture to complement the denim texture of the board:

The checkers needed to be a little thicker than the 2p and 10p pieces I had in mind, so I doubled them up, sticking them back to back (with the queen's face showing on both sides) with normal adhesive (£3,60 in total :)

Munny Munny Munny

Halloween Munny for a custom Munny competition held at They Walk Among Us in Richmond...

I made a whole apple with Fimo clay, but broke out the bite chunk before baking it to get an authentic break texture. After baking I painted it with normal acrylic, then glazed it with about 6 layers of clear acrylic nail varnish.

The bandages are made from narrow strips of frayed canvas soaked in white PVA. This was a mistake, as the paint takes forever to dry - but I'm not sure what I would use instead. Possibly acrylic could work. The idea is to wrap the wet strips around the Munny and let the drying paint act as a glue.

Dried out red capsicum pips (baked in the oven) mixed with cotton wool and orange acrylic paint.

Fly on by sweet angel

Weekend project number 1. Or actually it's number 12 or so, but this is the first one I'm blogging about. I'm trying to renew some of our old t-shirts to get more life out of them, while at the same time saving money on new ones for these ideas in my head. Using old T's also takes off the pressure of getting it right first time...

So I wanted wings on my back. I've been thinking a lot about this two-tshirt thing, with cuts in the top layer to show the colour of the bottom layer. I'll post my first experiment in this department soon, but I want to get this one out now. I rummaged through our cupboards and found a brown T neither of us has worn more than twice, and a white T that was always too small. Perfect for the bottom layer, in other words.

I start by sewing key points of the two T's together. This is essential with two different brands or cuts of shirt, to ensure they sit properly on one another. With two T's from the same range I only sew the line from the neck to the shoulders. It is important to sew only on the seams to avoid the material pulling funny or showing the sewing. That rhymes.

Next I drape the shirt over a chair to keep the shape while i trace the wings on the back. I looked for the perfect pair of wings on Google, and photoShopped all the inside detail out, so that i had only the outlines. I chose wings with an expressive outline, because the material doesn't allow for much detail once cut. It's more important to get the overall shape right.

Then I print them out on A4, and cut out the inside to create a stencil.

This gets pinned onto the back of the T, and using a laundry marker i trace the outline onto the shirt. From previous experience I now know to trace it a little smaller than i need it to be, because the idea is for the material to pull back and curl over a little.

Now i simply hand-stitch all along the marked lines with small, close zig-zag stitches that show only very minimally on the front of the shirt. This stitch has a name, but I don't know it in English... The stitching catches both layers of T-shirt.

Then comes the fun part - cutting out the inside of the wings from the top T-shirt layer. I cut about 2mm away from the stitched line, to give the material room to curve over.

And that's it - I have wings on my back... :)

Prego rolls, veggie style

How to follow  a recipe without following a recipe at all. Which turns out, at first, pretty much as bad as one can imagine it would! But I'm not abandoning the recipe because i think i know better (tried that) - i just didn't have the right ingredients, so i improvised...

Here is the recipe I used: http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/Portuguese-Garlic-Steak-Sandwiches-prego-No-Pao-95392. We don't eat meat, so I used Quorn's Seasoned Beef Style Strips. My first mistake was to disregard the fact that they were already flavoured (and spicy at that). For some reason, we also don't have onion in the house, so I used dried chives... dried garlic too - but those would not have made so much of a difference.

My second mistake was to try and 'incorporate' another recipe altogether (I don't get it! my gran does it! My mom does it!) so i added some oregano (and accidentally spilt some, so there was WAY too much). This is also where I added chilli flakes.

Anyway - it all smelled awesome while i was making it. I heated some butter, added the steak and garlic to it and fried it just enough to seal in the moisture and taste). Then I added the red wine to some more butter and the chives and it smelled even better. At the same time i was baking some rolls (Possibly my third mistake - I used long hot dog rolls instead of round sandwich rolls) but they were smelling beautiful too. My girlfriend said it smelled like a restaurant.

All good! Then i burnt the rolls. So i had to make more, which meant the beef strips were standing in the pan too long, with most of the moisture cooking away (i was trying to keep it warm, you see). Then the one place i did stick to the recipe let me down: it didn't say to butter the rolls.

So the end product was a little dry, because there was no sauce and no butter, although it tasted ok because Quorn's stuff is actually quite hard to dry out when you're using liquid like wine etc. It was also way too hot and, yes, i could taste the oregano all over it... I will make it again though. improvements on the way.