The Contents of Miss T's Bag

In 1975, when I was 6 years old, it was normal for little girls to have at least one pretty party dress which was long to the ground, colourful, frilly, and preferably with a few or more ribbons attached so that they would flow around or behind you whilst running, twirling or dancing in a ring. I had two such party dresses that I can remember, but unfortunately for me at the time, as my French mother had total control over my wardrobe, my dresses were more fashionable than girly, and they were both brown. (Are there any other girls of the 70's out there who to this day, will not wear brown clothes?). I remember well the way my mother used to proudly state that these were in a word "libertyprince" and so like them I jollywell would. Even though they were brown. It wasn't until only a few years ago, that I realised what she was saying all along was "Liberty Prints" and that indeed, these are very beautiful and tactile. However, I am still trying to reconcile the memory with the reality. Other girls of my age had flowing cotton dresses of yellow, cream, pink, or even one which I remember in particular which was red and floaty with tiny white polkadots. For myself, I was thinking much more along these lines:

But this isn't a little girls dress, and it is much more than (nearly) 40 years old. This dress belonged to a lady known as Gertie, and she would wear this when she went cruising on a ship. Gertie wanted to see the world, and she did so by booking the cheapest sharing cabin always, and wore this dress when the occasion required something special. There is a label which I can't help but say in the manner of the Little Britain "ladies".

But this label, despite its comic connotations now, is evocative of a time when designer labels weren't everything. When couture was the preserve of the very rich and not always famous, and when clothes with an "English" label, were really something and sought after.


I have some more of Gertie's gorgeous dresses to show you. My model Madge the Material Girl is wearing a corset and petticoat. The dresses would not fit without!


This dress is home made. The fabric is linen and so pretty! I love the style. So fun and flirtatious, I can imagine a girl wearing this dress for summery pickniks by a river!

A slightly more conservative dress, also homemade, looks very "40's".


Practical, comfortable, attractive, more mature than the picknik dress, and yet still not complete without a perfectly coiffed hairdo and some red red lipstick.


Gertie was obviously always a snappy dresser with an eye for pretty fabric in lovely fresh colours. This is the dress she wore to Miss T's wedding 10 years ago.


When I saw this dress, I had a Twiggy's Frock Exchange moment. I'm thinking take the sleeves off, shorten, lose the lace and add a belt ...

This fabric makes a shirt

And this is a cotton dressing gown


Gertie was Miss T's Grandma who sadly passed away recently only a few weeks after her 100th birthday! I am honored and most grateful that when sorting out Gertie's clothes, Miss T saw these and thought I might like the fabrics to make things with. And so, though I can hardly bear to even hold a pair of scissors in their presence, I took some fabric from the back of the cruise dress, and made something for Miss T in appreciation, and also to remember her grandma's dresses by.


A Ladies handbag with vintage buckle, and fit for a cruise!!

BootyFull

It's been a busy few days in the MarmaladeKiss household, I wont bore you with the details but suffice to say that last week Jimmy was suspended from school for a day and so a severe "emergency rehabilitation" programme has been imposed and he's been grounded for the whole of half term (this has changed my plans for the next few days somewhat!).

Previous to the newly established "boot camp" however, whilst blogging around, I had discovered the very talented Pink Feather Paradise and her post on "scrapstore". Have a look, she provides a full explanation. I couldn't quite believe the wonder of the concept of it, but immediately googled to see if there was one by me, and hurrah!! THERE IS!!

Friend R does a panto every year for the kids of the staff where he works. He writes the script, makes the scenery, co-ordinates the rehearsals and directs the whole thing, so a scrap warehouse is his idea of paradise! And he needed some garden tools too. So off we went. And this is some of what we got (for me):

A HUGE 'ball' of Italian yarn ..


These cones of 100% cotton yarn - still wrapped ..


Three large bits of leather to play with - the very pungent leathery smell reminds me of the old Kensington Market. There was a whole bucket of this!


Lots of little scraps of silk! Big enough for bags, purses, linings.


Lots of little zips!


Perfect for finishing my now 100% salvaged purses..


Not photographed:

Fabric paint - 2 bottles, a buckle, some other odd bits of yarn. All of this, fitted into 1 carrier bag which according to the Orinoco staff is "the standard unit of junk". How much? ... Ladies, don't bother to lock up your purses .. this entire haul cost a death defying, £2.00!! And there were other things - rolls of fabrics, rolls of bookbinding materials (we are in oxford after all), more yarn in all colours, more paint than you could shake a brush at, publishers blank books, rolls of vertical blind making stuff .. the list goes on .. and on ... and on ... .... and on ....

We also managed to salvage a garden fork and spade for Friend R, for the grand sum of £1.50!

I love saving the planet .. just think, all of this would have gone to landfill! Unbelievable!

Exciting Times

You know sometimes when you get home from work feeling a bit "bleurgh" for no apparent reason, then when you walk through the front door, you find that the postman has been, and left you a nice pick-me-up.

It's like paper tonic - you can feel your spirits lifting as you pick up the envelope from the mat recognising the handwriting. Well I got one today!


A card from my bestest friend of nearly 20 years, who we shall be visiting next month. As you can see, where she is it's hot hot hot and, judging by her parting words .. "i'm off to buy an extra large pair of sunglasses" (well she is in Italy) .... it's also VERY SUNNY!!!! Which is a relief I can tell you, as when we went there last year, it was "Thunder in the Mountains" and not much else, which would have been ok, if we had packed more suitable clothing.

Here's a view from her garden if you look down the hill ....


and the view when you look up the hill ...


Its lucky she doesn't have any neighbours because if you look behind you might just see two lunatics prancing around the portico playing very loud music and pretending to be pop stars....


It's a true (and very sad) fact that before she left this country 4 years ago, we did give a "farewell concert" to her sofa (the only other thing in the room at the time).


That's a drunken haze you can see there!

Meanwhile, on this side of the Mediterranean, I have mostly finished my beautiful butterfly ... Still need some soldering practice!


and dissected several pairs of jeans for serious re-purposing ... Watch this space!!

27 Dresses (or more)

As my little girl dress pattern is multi size, from age 3 to age 8, I can't very well cut out an age 6 portion as otherwise, I will have to wait until Tuala, Lily, Indi, and Connie are all 6, and that may perturb them somewhat when they see the glorious creation that will be Niamh's birthday dress. Niamh will then lose out on 2 further years of couture, and the next oldest, Lily, is still only 4, which means i'll have to wait at least 2 years before making the next! As you can see there are at least 9 different combinations to try from this one Project Runway Pattern. Times that by the number of girls I have, and then by the number of years that I can make dresses for them, and that's a lorra lorra dresses (luckily they are not all related!).

So I figured I have to make a Master Copy then trace each pattern as each occasion arises.

I had a "jumbo" sized roll of wrapping paper left over from Christmas which I thought would be idea to glue all the pattern pieces onto. I used re-positionable spray mount to glue the ironed pieces to the paper. Very messy but worth it for the nice (dry) finish and it makes for easy smoothing of any little air bubbles and creases.

I then cut out each piece leaving quite a wide border. The border is for taping the pieces to the table so that they don't move about when I'm trying to trace them, and so that I don't have to tape the pattern itself. I used a sheet of white tissue paper - the crinkly sounding kind - to lay over the original pattern peices and also secured that to the table with tape (leave enough space around the tissue paper for unanticipated snags and rips). When all nicely and smoothly secured to the table you can trace your pattern with a black felt tip, not forgetting the marks and instructions and ofcourse the size. This is age 6. So now I have one complete age 6 dress pattern.

I can see I'm going to have to use the next piece of tracing paper to draft up plans for a large workroom to store all these patterns in!!

Bagging the Blogspot

Yikes! I have landed on the list of UK Craft Bloggers at number 485!! Now I know what it feels like to be Victoria Beckham with a new song - wondering if it's going to go up or down the charts, or just fade away due to lack of interest! Ofcourse, I don't know what it is like to be Victoria Beckham as far as her lifestyle goes, but I do know i'd rather be poor and happy with my lovely sewing machine, in my lovely garden room on a sunny day, than rich beyond my wildest dreams and forever pursued by a permanent wall of photographers... Imagine never being able to nip to the shop for a loaf of bread wearing nothing but scruffs and mascara? A nightmare if I ever thought of one (or looked like one for that matter). So, fingers crossed that I get some traffic and crawl up the blogging charts, perhaps even one day, to the dizzy heights of the top 40!

So here is the place, at the back of my house, where I spend my sewing and blogging days.



After a busy Valentines weekend - I DO celebrate it, but in a very non-commercial way - it's just fun after all, I haven't made anything of note in the last few days - not even a cake, and am just about to embark on a bulk order for tarot bags. So I thought I'd post some pics of my pre-blog bags.

This is my gardening bag. It's made from an old coat which I bought in a rare "hippy moment" years ago, but it was always too big for me - they didn't have my size - and so after a few years of trying but failing dismaly to look good in it (moments which I'm sure are very sparse in the life of aforementioned Posh Spice), and loathe to throw it away or donate it to charity because it was sooooo pretty and velvety I made this bag! I needed something to carry bits and bobs to the Allotment - gardening gloves, plant labels, pens, phone, water, reference book, sketch pad, paints etc., (not all at the same time, I hasten to add - it's not that big!). I sewed a lining with pockets into the inside, and added a few little pockets on the side gussets, and some beads which you cant see in this picture. Infact, the coat was big enough for 2 or 3 bags, this is just the first one! I found the front pockets and a portion of the back the other day much to my delight, when I was clearing out a cubboard.


This is a purse which I made for my friend at Christmas. Despite being in her late 30's, she still has a delightful childlike passion for all things Disney and the purse frame, called "mini" was just begging to be dressed up like Mini Mouse! I learned how to use purse frames from Lisa Lam's fantastic tutorials on U-Handblog (thank you!).


These are bags which I made for my Sister in-laws from a job lot of remnant velvet which I found in a shop years ago. It was cheap as chips, and i've still yet to find better velvet anywhere. I think it's silk velvet! The linings are all recycled bits of fabric, from clothes and underwear (washed of course!) and the inspiration for the style came from ... yes you guessed it... U-handbag again - cheeky wristlet tutorial, but i customised it to fit with the materials and fittings that I already had in stock.





This bag, which was ridiculously easy to make, is also courtesy of U-handblog, and was for my mother-in-law who loves all things oriental - well she spends enough time in those parts, so it's hardly surprising. Do you recognise the fabric?


This is my day to day handbag. I love leopard print and corsets, and I wanted this bag to have an underweary feel about it (don't ask me why, it was an odd moment!), without looking like a pair of knickers, or the pride and joy of Bet Lynch (i'm not sure I succeeded with that one)! The body is made from a velvety material called velboa and the gusset is made from corset coutil and there is a closure made from lace.


Here is a corset I made from the same fabrics


Now that you have seen the place where I spend my days, and considering that I'm still suffering from the after effects of weekend revelry, here is the place where I shall be mostly spending the rest of the evening ...

Spring in my Steps

There's nothing quite like the satisfied feeling of muscle worn exhaustion which comes at the end of a good days work in the garden on a crisp and sunny pre-spring day. This weekend the weather has been glorious - warm in the sunshine, chilly in the shade, icy early morning puddles, and a dusting of frost on the rooftops. There are buds heralding the coming of spring on every branch and twig, shoots peeping through the mud everywhere, the very first flushes of tender fresh lime green hawthorn leaves and even a sprinkling of confetti-like blossom daintily peppering the gardens and hedgerows. Soon those hedgerows will be thickly ablaze with the fat white and fluffy blackthorn blossoms which precede the more delicate but no less glorious beauty of the barely pink hawthorn flowers. Everywhere we look, the earth beneath our feet is infused with the stirrings of new life - if you stand still for long enough you will feel it's energy humming through you. This and the growing light fills each second with promise and potential and so after the dark days and cold nights of midwinter, it is easy to find inspiration by the shovel-full. This time of year was known to the ancients of Britain, our ancestors of blood and of the land, as Imbolc, a word in their language meaning "ewes milk". It acknowledges the quickening bellies of the ewes, the fact their lambs will soon be born and spring will be well and truly, irriversably here. If we can see nature reflected in our own lives, this is a time of new horizons, inspiration and growth, ideas formed at the winter solstice and taking shape now, yet vulnerable still - this abundance of growth could so easily fail should a harsh frost get in the way.

And so with this amazing weather, work in the allotment has at last commenced with gusto along with a declaration of war on the unnaturally swollen rodent population who have moved in (and bred) following floods last summer and again this winter - we are only a small bunny hop away from the Thames which keeps bursting it's banks just where we are. There were enough mice as it was last year to finish off my entire crop of beetroot - laughing at me as they sated their appetites right under my nose while I weeded the neighboring beds oblivious to their theiving ways .. I would find freshly gnawed roots there and then, glistening wounds bleeding purple juice into the soil! And so taking into account the increased density and variety of rodent habitation, I reckon, along with my fellow allotmenterios, that there will be nothing left for us if action is not taken swiftly! We started by moving the half rotton shed, patching it up with recylced odds and ends, and displacing a small mouse city in the process. We moved some planks (more houses destroyed), dug over some beds (still more) and disposed of a whole load of rubbish, including the equivalent of a hollywood mansion (an old trainer which had been converted into a very des res indeed). We could well have had the rodent population of Tokyo within our 10 rods of space, but hopefully many of them will have moved on to newer, greener pastures, or even back to the river bank for now. I hate to put poison down but our entire village is suffering from a rat epidemic and so I think I will have no choice in the end, unless we find a Pied Piper! We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I am thinking of some nice ways to brighten up the shed with paint, and i want to build a firepit too.

Six Degrees of Marmalade

For the last couple of days, I have mostly been making Marmalade. It's a curious type of marmalade, based on a Cladia Roden/Nadine Abensur recipie which appears in the brilliant Cranks Bible, but made with a Delia Smith method. I will know next time, not to mix the two. Working from two recipes also led to another fatal hitch, which meant that I used 2kg instead of 2lbs of oranges! So during my maverick marmaladeing session, my musings went a bit like this ...

According to the English dictionary, MARMALADE is a fruit condiment, similar to jam, not necessarily exclusive to oranges, but usually citrus and always cooked with peel. However the word originates from something else entirely. In Portugal, Marmalade (pronounced Marmalada), is what the English would call quince jelly. The word is derived from the Greek Marmelo which means "quince". My marmalade this year is black! I tried a different recipe using soft brown sugar. I also added a pound and a half of honey. It tastes and looks very treacly with orangy bits, not unpleasant but most certainly "adult" in flavour. I used bitter oranges which are extremely tart and grown throughout the Mediterranean region. They have a thick dimpled skin and are higher in pectin than other sweet oranges. They are commonly known as Seville oranges, but they are not restricted to growth in that place. Seville, is a city in southern Spain, the capital of Andalusia, located on the Guadalquivir River. People from Seville are called Sevillianas, and the province of Seville, is called SEVILLA. There is a hotel in Old Havana, Cuba, named after this Province in Spain. It is one of my favourite places on earth, i have been there twice and hope to go again soon. When it opened its doors on March 22, 1908, (100 years ago), it became for a while, Havana´s leading luxury hotel, a playground for gangsters, their molls, the rich and the famous. One of those stars later on, was JOSEPHINE BAKER, the American born entertainer who became a French citizen in 1937. Baker was most noted as a singer but in her early career she was a celebrated dancer. She was given the nicknames "Black Venus" or the "Black Pearl" in English speaking circles, while in France she has always been known in the old theatrical tradition as "La Baker". Josephine Baker, apart from being one of the first exoctic dancers to use feathers in her costume (and therefore giving rise to the popular image of today's showgirl), was at one time in her early career, a friend of my GREAT GRANDFATHER who owned and ran a restaurant near Paris where she would perform. In return for letting her dance there, she gave him a Limoges coffee set painted with 24ct gold rims which is still in the family today. Later in his life, my great grandfather, who was a chef and pattisiere bought a cake and sweet shop on Buckingham Palace Road, London, where one day, one of his regular customers came in, and offered him the Royal Crest to go above the doorway. Unbeknown to him, he had been supplying pastries to Queen Mary! My great grandfather had 5 children, the youngest of whom was my GRANDMOTHER, Antoinette. My nana is the person in my closer ancestry I take after the most. I look like her, i'm built like her, I cook like her, she sews and knits, and organises things, just like I do. I like the same things as her and have the same temper and temperament. She is one of my greatest inspirations, and the happiest times of my childhood were spent with her. Her favourite thing, even at nearly 90, is to bake cakes and make jam. I'm not sure if she ever baked a muffin, though she worked for the Americans in France during the war. Last week, my American born friend Susan (who has just become a British citizen) had a small breakdown. She told me that she resembled a "loosley held together mess". After administering all the relevant words of support and reassurance, I added that she shouldn't worry too much because after all, Muffin Mixture is also a loosely held together mess, which, with a little TLC, soon turns into something delicious, as I was sure she would again be soon. She liked that idea lots, and today through the post, I received from her as a thank you, a box of muffin cases, 100% recycled and biodegradable, along with a fat wadge of muffin recipes from her favourite recipe book. Included was one for MARMALADE MUFFINS with slivered almonds. So for Susan and all the other women out there who suffer terribly from monthly muffin madness, here's to muffin magic with marmalade kisses to help us all feel better.