My parents’ old peg bag has seen better days; the handle was too long and the bag itself too deep so I made them a new one from my 2CV fabric.
Luckily I had a length of cream canvas tape stashed in my sewing kit which matched the canvas 2CV fabric perfectly, so I used it as a handle and to bind the edge.
A super quick and simple craft project that’s made hanging the laundry out a little bit more fun.
I’m jolly pleased with my horse dress; the result of my latest adventure in home sewing. It’s a variation of the first dress I ever made (a shift style sewn from my dragonfly fabric) and since I mastered the use of bias binding on that project I decided to make an external feature of it this time; embellishing it with contrasting stitching.
The horse motif was inspired by the extraordinarily beautiful hand painted artwork I saw when Carter’s Steam Fair visited Maldon in Essex.
I made a pencil drawing (left) using my photos for reference, taking a morbid turn by adding the skeleton of the horse as part of the decoration.
I vectorised the drawing in Illustrator, used Photoshop to colour it and make the repeat pattern, which I then had printed onto a light cotton by the lovely folk at Woven Monkey.
The dress feels lovely on, here’s me posing about in it on my 50th birthday.
Could it possibly be said that I’m flogging a dead horse? You bet!
This fabric design evolved from a stencil project I started in 2012,
since when Mr Cockerel has adorned numerous hard and soft surfaces.
Last year I spent many happy hours in the Photoshop turning the original image (above) into several repeating patterns (below)
the last of which got made into a baby cushion in light cotton canvas.
I’ve been really keen to make myself an item of cockerel clothing ever since, so I ordered custom printed fabric samples in several cottons until I was totally happy with the size and colour of the design, and then got cracking with sewing an A-line skirt.
It’s had a very enthusiastic reception and I’m cock-a-hoop!
I recently finished painting one of my plane tree patterns on a wall plastered with mud in my friends’ straw bale house.
Simple lines in white emulsion paint are very effective on the beautifully coloured and textured mud, which still has straw poking through it in some places
This is the digital version of the design, you can see its evolution here in one of my previous posts
About seven years ago I painted the mural below in the same house, also on a wall plastered with mud, it was then visible in the main living space.
They’ve since built the new internal mud plastered wall to create another room for their expanded family so the first mural is hidden inside the new bedroom.
I enjoyed the whole experience of painting in white on mud so much (and I’m also a bit vain and missed seeing my art work from the living room) so it was lucky that my friends happily agreed to my proposal to paint a mural on the new wall and we settled on a theme of leaves.
This is the bare mud wall
I made this plan for the mural in Photoshop, using the cut out, inverted line work of my original pattern
I then ‘Photoshopped’ it to the photograph of the bare wall to check on the layout before transferring the design to the wall
I started by projecting the image onto the wall and drawing the outline in white pencil but ran into technical difficulties with the electrical equipment. I had to resort to plan B which meant tracing the pattern using chalk on the reverse surface of a printed template and then penciling over the chalk lines, which was far more messy and time consuming but ultimately effective.
This is a detail of the pencil drawing
Here is the partially completed mural
and a head on view of the completed mural without the added domestic decoration
This was a really enjoyable project, completed in many short sessions over a period of several months, combined with delicious lunch visits to my lovely friends.
It also fulfilled my ambition to complete a painted version of one of my digitally designed patterns on a real life wall.
This little cockerel cushion is the latest addition to my ‘textile range‘, made from a fabric sample printed with one of my cockerel designs.
I made the baby cushion as a gift for the recent arrival who lives in the house where I sketched the original cockerel, which turned into a stencil
which has since adorned many walls….
and even a few items of clothing……
I was a bit sad to find out recently that despite his regal appearance the cockerel I drew was firing blanks and was put up for adoption, but he died of shock just before his new owner turned up to claim him….just shows, a cocky exterior hides a multitude of insecurities….
Here’s an update of the 2CV pattern I made earlier in the year, it’s inspired by classic Citroën colour combinations
