ADAM AT HOME UK

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 ...

If you'd like to listen rather than read, then please do so HERE Sewing the silk outer layer of this project has been (well, still is!) an interesting journey... The fabric is incredibly slippery and I have to tack the relevant pieces together about 1.5" to 2" away from the edge before I can consider doing any proper tacking/sewing. The photo shows the outer tacking as well as a linen tape (part of an old sheet... tinted with tea, naturally!) tacked into place to enable the actual stitching.  Lovely silk thread from  De Vere Yarns , a real pleasure to use. I'm pleased to note (lower half of the photo) that I seem to stitch at eight stitches to the inch: in real terms, this means sixteen as it is a back stitch. Quite respectable! Whether this use of tape is historically accurate I'm not sure, but it makes for a stronger, straighter seam (in my view) and has the added bonus that the top edge can be sewn down to cover the raw, easily-frayed edge. Frankly, I was expec...

If you'd like the spoken version, clickety-poo   HERE So good people, it's back to the banyan we will go... The banyan project got rather side-tracked last year, partly by the desire to make a mannequin of myself first: Then, I don't know... 'life'... intervened, not to say the making of the 'Good Yule' cards! So, a quick re-cap is in order I think.  If you have followed my blog for a while you may remember I toned-down my lovely, hand-printed Indian cotton with some strong tea, just to knock it back a bit: Then I decided to interline said cotton with some well-washed curtain lining, to give it a bit of substance. This was a rather long and tedious process, familiar to quilters, no doubt, but involved essentially tacking the one to the other with a fine blue cotton thread that hardly shows on the cotton chintz: Next up was a sort of short inner jacket of the chintz padded with cotton domette, as an extra layer in winter. A very, VERY tedious process, of whic...

Should you prefer the audio version, please click   HERE As I said in my last post, I was somewhat  dissappointed when it turned out Manny needed a few extra pounds on him  <sigh>. However, once I finally got around to sorting things out, I realised it meant making him a padded waistcoat (a gambezon, basically). This involved first of all making a double-layed calico waistcoat to his current size - double layered so that I could glue the wadding in place without the danger of the glue seeping through... That in itself was quite a challenge.  Then the padding: mainly a layer of foam carpet under-felt. Very useful stuff incidentally - it is pretty good at deadening sound and formed a major part of the sound-deadening I installed between myself and my neighbours several years back. This was followed by several layers of thin wadding, with a final layer of calico to smooth everything down and make it look presentable. A certain amount...

To listen to the spoken version of this, please click   HERE Well now, an update is in order, which I am trying to do from my phone, as that's where all my photos reside! I even have a bluetooth keyboard, which seems to work quite well...  so here goes... At LONG last, I have finished my handsewn linen shirt, which I started back in the misty days of Lockdown. It's a very fine navy with a narrow white stripe and was lovely to work with; the dark blue piping is another linen, which I made into piping, with a fine piece of elastic inside to give it substance (elastic, simply because it was there). It's always a bit of a lottery whether a fabric will be nice to sew by hand, but this was delicious... It pairs rather nicely with my denim, 'broadfall' trousers, based on an 1890s pattern. There is another pair in the offing, with a slightly different cut but, for technical reasons, I have to hand-sew the button-holes - and I hate  buttonholes! ...