Next time, pick a standard size

Remember the dabbling I did with paint and fabric? When I penciled in the grid I used to keep everything somewhat lined up, I used 6 x 6 inch squares—10 altogether, two to a row with five rows.

Only 6 x 6 inches is not at all a standard size for frames. Nor is 12 x 12. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist but holy moly a non-standard frame can get pricey in a hurry.

I managed to find a 12 x 12 frame at Michael’s and with a 40% off coupon, the price was somewhat reasonable. Here’s what the final/final product looks like.

Next time I paint fabric to frame—if there is a next time—I’m going to measure and use a standard frame size for the painting.

Been dabbling

In paint. I’ve read some blog posts that describe painting fabric (often silk) for clothing, not décor, and I’ve been interested in trying that myself. But I sure didn’t want to spend the cash on silk only to have my efforts look like total amateur hour. So I got some cheap cotton cloth at IKEA, bought some paints with a bit of metallic in them that were billed as being suitable for fabric painting, and gathered up some other paints I had on hand for painting cards (you know, like Christmas cards). I had a set of cheap brushes and figured for this attempt, they would have to do.

I will say that if I go any further with painting on fabric, I’ll need better brushes. These were horrible—the bristles wanted to splay out and shed, which created texture I didn’t want. The paints for cards were OK, nothing you’d want to use on clothing fabric, but for this experiment they were adequate.

I penciled in a grid on the fabric, and then over the course of several weekends (and until today, only when it was sunny outside in hopes of better light), started painting random squares, rectangles and lines. I was going for a randomized stained-glass effect, so if you are trying to identify a pattern, you can stop. There isn’t one!

Today, I outlined each grid with black, and this is where better brushes would have helped. As it is, I console myself with thinking that it looks like the hand soldering you’d see in stained glass made by someone who is not an expert.

Oh yes the fabric

I finally got pictures of the fabric we bought in NYC over the 4th of July weekend:

Two sided knit, it's a very blue red
and will make a great top.

Top fabric is a polyester for a dress; bottom fabric
doesn't show the sheen, it's for Kent to make a jacket

Black ponte knit that looks like leather/pleather on
one side. I'll make a skirt/jacket out of this.

Gorgeous sweater knit, the photo doesn't do it justice.

Pics please

Here are pictures of the fabric we got in Italy:

Kent's orange/black houndstooth woven wool.

My lambswool woven wool.

It's kind of difficult to sew in our current place. I think it was easier in some ways to sew in our apartment in Boston, only because getting everything out was slightly easier and we both had a routine in how we got things done.

We will almost certainly use the front room in the new place as our sewing room. We use our dining room table to cut out patterns and the sewing cabinet will look nice in there, not like there's a sewing machine hanging around in the room at all. Plus the built-ins at the end of the room will hold all sorts of things, including fabric, supplies, equipment and so on. Kent's bummed we don't move until the middle of January because he'd like to get cracking on that shirt right now. Oh well.

Fabric

I had three goals while in London last weekend:

• Shop for fabric
• Eat Indian food
• See my sister and her daughters

On Saturday we checked off the first two. Let me tell you, we weren’t misled about the amazing fabrics to be found. We looked at Cloth House (two locations on Berwick, which were quite closes to each other—we found that a little confusing that there would be two shops within blocks of each other) and Misan, which also had two locations. I could have spent hours in Misan. We both were overwhelmed by the huge selections in all the stores. The prices played a role in that too, I’m sure, since so many of the fabrics started at £35 per meter.

Those prices were still better than what we found at the Liberty store. Those lovely cottons (cottons!) also started at around £35 per meter. Kent uses three yards to make a shirt, so he’d need just under three meters which would bring the cost for only the cloth to £105. I just used a converter, and in dollars that shirt would cost about $169. Oh but what a shirt it would be.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to get an old phone unlocked to use a prepaid phone card with data, so we couldn’t access the maps we’d carefully prepared. So we missed a whole group of stores we’d planned on seeing but that’s OK. We were both overwhelmed by everything we did see.

We had an early dinner of Indian food here in the Seven Dials area and then caught the train back to our hotel and crashed hard.