Me-Made Rejects #2

I try to regularly edit my wardrobe. I have noticed the more confident I have become at sewing the easier it is to pass on any home-made garments to the charity shop. My first few hand-made garments, despite their imperfections were saved from the charity shop bag on several occasions for sentimental reasons.

As I am getting better at fitting clothes for my body shape I feel happy to pass on my hand-made garments for somebody else to enjoy or at the very least get re-cycled. Also, having a blog means I have an electronic record of my achievements / learnings / disasters which makes the process much easier.

Here are the hand-made garments that hit the Cancer Research Charity shop last week:

Free-style Circle Skirt

Previously un-blogged on account of the fact I never wore it. I made it in a splurge of industrious sewing in April 2016 before this years Me-Made-May. I pretty much just free-styled the cutting of the circle skirt by folding the fabric down the centre and re-folding from the corner and cut out a circle. I then guestimated the waist-line cut too and attached to an elastic waistband.

The elastic waistband was re-claimed from a circle skirt I made in 2007 for a school pantomime performance and the fabric was a stash-bust polyester affair I bought from Goldhawk Road. The remainder of the fabric (about 1.2 metres) made it to the fabric swap on the 4th June and was picked up by Tamsin from Pimp my Curtains so watch that space for another make from this abstract fabric.

Hand-sewing the full-circle hem was a nightmare, even though I left it for two days to drop. It's a bit wonky in places! Hopefully somebody will find it and have a bit of fun wearing it this summer.

Black & White Scout Tee

As you know I LOVE the Grainline Scout Woven Tee but this version was made without really thinking about the weight of the cotton I was using. I think when you first start making your own clothes some of the most obvious things (like comfort) get over-looked when we fall hard for an amazing printed fabric. I adore this abstract monochrome print but as mentioned earlier it is much too stiff (even after lots of washes) and restrictive as a comfortable top. I had to say adieu.

Matisse Dolores Pocket Skirt

This was lovingly made as part of my art-work for a course at the Tate Modern during the Matisse: Cutting into Colour exhibition. I was inspired by his bold lines, architectural shapes and colour. I wore this on the final evening of the course when we had a group exhibition showcasing our art-work inspired by Matisse. 

You can read more about the construction here. The pattern was machine appliquéd with hand embroidered elements to pick out delicate details. It was such fun to make but I have not worn it for two years so it was time to share the love!

Tilly and the Buttons Mathilde Blouse

My Tilly and the Buttons Mathilde was a hard one to give away. This blouse was a result of a weekend workshop at Ray Stitch taught by Tilly herself not long after her debut on the BBC's Great British Sewing Bee in May 2013. It symbolises my renewed interest into garment sewing after a 20-year hiatus after art college.

Last year I re-fashioned the sleeves to make it more versatile as I did't wear it with the original blouson sleeves. Even that didn't help!

The main reason this lovely little top didn't get worn was again, due to poor fabric selection. The rather heavy-weight cotton just didn't drape and was too heavy for a blouse. A lesson learnt! I really should re-make this top in some lovely light voile or viscose.

I have passed on my me-made garments to the Charity Shop with a hope they may be re-worn or re-cycled into something more useful. Previous me-made rejects blogged about here. To date I have passed on or refashioned 16 me-made garments.

Have you given away or re-fashioned any of your me-made clothes?

Dolores Pocket Skirt Summer Stash Bust & Tate Modern exhibition

Wow! What a crazy two weeks. First let me introduce you to a new skirt pattern that will be available for PDF pattern in the not-too-distant future called the Dolores Pocket Skirt. It's from the lovely Beth at Ready Ruthie who asked for pattern testers for the Dolores. I was excited at the prospect of being a pattern tester and the basic requirements of having sewn PDF patterns before and being close to the skirt sizes and to be able to feedback your experiences in the space of a month were the only requirements. I happily received an e-mail with links to the PDF soon after I e-mailed Beth.

At the same time as agreeing to pattern test Beth's skirt I decided that the final art-piece for my 'Cutting into Colour' Matisse collage course at the Tate Modern would come in the form of an appliquéd garment - killing two birds with one pair of scissors! Oh, and I also used ALL stash fabrics, so I have stuck to my self-imposed fabric buying ban for the Summer Stash Bust 2014!

Onto the skirt.... You have seen little peeks of the decoration in my previous post, so here is the full skirt.

The skirt was quite intuitive to sew together and I think when it is publicly available as a PDF pattern it would be a great basic wardrobe staple to add to anybody's pattern stash.

The only thing I need to practise for my next version is the slight angles on the waistband which I haven't really managed to achieve very crisply.

Overall I am pretty happy with the applique and hand embroidery on my abstract decoration inspired by my work based on Matisse's cut-outs. I used bonda-web to adhere the fabric shapes then sewed a machine zig-zag and also some simple hand-stitching around the blue shapes.

Machine and hand-embroidered applique decoration

I also hand-stitched the pockets for decoration and to ensure the lining doesn't peak out either.

hand-stitched pocket detailing

I finished the Dolores Pocket Skirt in time to wear to the Private View of the collage course 'Cutting into Colour' at the Tate Modern inspired by Matisse's Cut-Outs. I can now say I have exhibited my work at the Tate!...OK, it was 'only' in the Cloires Gallery in the basement of Tate Modern. But still... it's the TATE!

The final evening of the course entailed us creating an exhibition space to showcase our work. We all brought nibbles and refreshments and were allowed to invite friends and family (unfortunately my f&f were otherwise engaged so could not make it). It was a fun evening and I enjoyed wearing my Dolores / Matisse skirt as part of my exhibition. Below are photographs of my exhibition space and a picture of me in front of the group inspired lire-size collage.

My Matisse inspired Dolores Pocket Skirt in front of the group Matisse inspired collage.

The Private View exhibition for the Cutting into Colour art course at the Tate Modern 13th July 2014

My art exhibition at the Private View. I created a free-standing mount to display my 3D paper sculptures.

I was pretty happy with the fact that I 'almost' finished a whole sketchbook of Matisse inspired collages in 5 weeks!

More Matisse inspired collages

I bought some fab Japanese Washi tapes from the Tate Modern shop in insanely bright colours that spurred on the next collection of Matisse inspired collages during the Tate workshop on Monday.

I have been abstracting and simplifying the peacock feather motif then moved away from that entirely towards a more linear direction in a fresh new palette of red, yellows, green and black. I used quite a number of the 'left-over' sections of paper to create this new collection of collages; which is something that Matisse did himself to create a wider range of negative images and motifs.

I had made the decision that I would make an item of clothing using my Matisse sketchbook work as inspiration for some applique / embroidery decoration. Last month I volunteered to pattern test the Dolores Pocket Skirt by Beth from Ready Ruthie. I am going to share the full write up next week because I need to send Beth my comments and findings by the 20th July, so you will only be able to see some sneaky peaks at the work-in-progress and the collage that partly inspired the design is top left of the photo montage below.

The added bonus to this current skirt is that its made entirely from stash fabrics including all the coloured appliqued sections too!

Matisse inspired mobiles

At the Tate Matisse Cut-Outs course this Monday Sarah (Tate tutor) set us the challenge of creating a 3D object or mobile inspired by the work of Henri Matisse and the sculptor Alexander Calder.

Alexander Calder's kinaesthetic sculpture 1960's

Whilst I got my head around what I wanted to do sculpture-wise in the workshop I completed a couple more collages in my sketchbook. I wanted to continue with the loose theme of birds from the images at the start of the sketchbook and used a peacock feather as inspiration for the following collages.

After completing the feather collages I knew how I would tackle the 3D challenge - I chose to collage onto both sides of a square piece of card then cut out a 'square-spiral' a bit like the below diagram:

And then you get this!

I created on larger stand-alone hanging sculpture then created a second more complex version by producing four mid-size square-spirals and attaching smaller square-spirals to those with fine wire.

Its amazing how quickly time goes when you are having fun!

Matisse art course at the Tate Modern

I am half way through a six-week art workshop at the Tate Modern that is based on the current Henri Matisse Cut Outs exhibition. During the first session we (30 fellow Matisse lovers on the course) pretty much had the full exhibition to ourselves to look at the amazing collage work of Matisse's later career.

We were then set the challenge of creating a collage of our own using three colours based on image that we had been given. I selected the bird-in-flight image below left.

For homework we were given a list of themes to work from and as I had selected the bird image in the first session I chose to continue with the bird theme and produced the collage below using five colours this time.

We have been encouraged by our tutor Sarah to ONLY use scissors to create the collaged images. Not having to use a pencil has been quite liberating and I have found I am being more accepting about the shapes and textures I have created.

The following week we worked into our sketchbooks building on the images, shapes, colours and motifs from our previous works and I explored a range of quick 10 - 15 minute collages below.

On Monday we got another change to look around the Matisse exhibition to specifically engage with the larger pieces of work he produced to get ideas and inspiration for a large scale group piece based on the word 'cornicopia'.

I was initially a bit retiscent about working with others because I had really got into my own artwork, but I need not have worried because it was lots of fun working with the group that included cool chaps like Bryan, bubbly Robyn, Jessica, (another) Caroline and Juliette.

Below is the large scale artwork we created - to get an idea of the size, the top of the paper was about 6 feet from the floor! To get our creative juices flowing and to share out the work load we swapped sketchbooks to see what motifs, shapes and images we liked in each others work. We came to a general consensus so that each of us had an equal share of the images. We all agreed on the blue background fairly quickly. So onto the artwork....

 Who did what?

In three weeks time we will all exhibit our work in the Cloires Studio at the Tate Modern and we can invite guests along! I can't wait. 

What do you think?

Do you like Matisse's work?