Two Afternoon Tea Tops (and a dress)

Having found the pattern for the Afternoon Tea Top on BurdaStyle, I have gone overboard and made a couple (and I plan on making more).

Here's the first two:

I'm going to enter the first one into the Spring Top week vote as I'm really pleased with the way it turned out.

I then realised that it would be fairly easy to modify the pattern into a dress. In order to do this I laid out all the pattern pieces as normal, with the exception of the main front and back bodice parts. These pieces I laid out with an existing skirt pattern I had lying around (the skirt from the Sew U book). I then drew around this smoothing out where there was any overlap, and I extended the dart from the bodice to go down to where the dart on the skirt finishes. Once I'd put it all together, the dress had quite a 50s effect, so to fit in with this, I made the straps into halter ties.

Here's the finished dress: The first time I wore it out, I was complimented on it and asked where they could buy one from, so I'm pretty happy with that!

Floral bag, twirly skirt

I have finally managed to finish off and photograph a couple of projects which I started quite a while ago.

The first one is a bag which I made from a tutorial on the Heart of Mary blog.
I'm quite pleased with the way it has turned out, but for myself I'd like a longer strap and different fabric. Due to this, I think I'll be listing it on my etsy site.

The next is a skirt that I mentioned in an earlier blog entry that I've done entirely from my own design. I based it on a skirt that I bought from Primark a while ago by just creating 8 identical panels, sewing them together and then creating a band to go around the top. I then hemmed it and put a zip in between 2 of the panels. It was kind of an experiment but I'm really pleased with the way it turned out and shall definitely make another at some point....and an action shot:

Sock Knitting: Part 2 (and Craft Off)

This time I learned how to turn the heel. I've learned the short row shaping method and it's pretty fun! It looks properly 3D now. Here's the back of it (you can kind of make out the sock shape):

Here's my picot edge, I'm particularly proud of that!


Unfortunately, the first thing I had to do on my own after the class was to pick up stitches from the side and I think I picked up the wrong part of the stitch, thus resulting in a ladder effect. I think I've worked out what the problem was, but if anyone has any advice on this (or any other aspect of my sock) then please shout up!

Laddered bit:



In other crafty news, a couple of friends and I went to an event at the Malt Cross in Nottingham to celebrate the launch of the Spinsters Emporium website. The event was a "Craft Off" with the theme being cheese. We created a pastiche of the "Now That's What I Call Music" albums with some cheese puns on existing song titles as the tracks. Here's the cover (we also made a vinyl record to go inside, out of cardboard).

Sadly, we didn't even get a mention for our beautiful work!