Should you wish to listen to this blog post, please press HERE So now you have the basics of sewing a little book under your belt... it is time to talk about paper. Hopefully you followed my suggestion of cutting different sorts of paper - and perhaps you noticed that sometimes a piece of paper cuts, or folds, more easily in one direction than the other. This is because paper has a 'grain' (rather like wood). I don't want to disappear down the very large rabbit hole that is paper-making, but it is useful to know that whatever base material is used for making paper - wood-pulp, plant fibres, mulberry bark, cotton or indeed old paper - it is broken down to its basic fibres and mixed with a lot of water to make a slurry, which then finds its way onto some sort of fine mesh. The way the fibres are aligned in the paper-making process produces the grain. One direction will always be easier to fold on a piece of paper than another. That is called folding along,...
As usual, the spoken bit's HERE This time last year, at the beginning of the first lockdown, I made a list of all the things I wanted to achieve. Amongst a wide variety of stuff was learning to crochet. Now there are many thousands of good people out there in You Tube Land showing off their crochet skills, some of them are even quite good teachers. I was fairly ruthless in my elimination - some folk have annoying mannerisms of speech, some I simply could not understand properly (there are some American accents I find almost impenetrable I'm afraid - I am British, after all!). But in the end I had a nice selection of channels who gave out good information and explained things to my satisfaction. Among several, there were Bonny Bay, Hooked by Robin, Olga Poltrova, Fiber Spider and Mikey from The Crochet Crowd. In the process of all this learning, I found myself downloading patterns where I could and learning to read them (thank y...
For the spoken version, please click HEREABOUTS ... BLOG CATCH-UP I feel a slight apology is in order - not that I imagine there's anybody out there looking at this any more! I hit a couple of 'tricky' spots with the banyan, not the least of which was trying to sort the hem out. There was no way I had the space to lay things out here, so I ended up using Martin-at-Pennell's wonderful cutting table - my goodness it's useful having a friendly local haberdashers! The garment is 90% finished I suppose... The last hurdle is to sort out the sleeve length: I have left them over-long as I want to turn them back to form a cuff... but it means a bit of unpicking - not difficult with a hand-sewn garment, just tedious... so it gets put aside. Now I have a small kitten (of which more later) which means the banyan has been bundled away until there's less danger of someone's claws shredding the silk damask... In the meantime, I have made myself several more items of ...
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