Posts from — Mai 2010

There are good sewing days and there are days that are just not meant to be. Today was such a day. No…wrong… the day was good, it was just 10 minutes that were crap. Those were the 10 minutes where I realized that sewing things to wear is not as easy as I though and as a beginner I should definitely have a pattern and a step-by-step instruction. I had a vision of sewing a simple dress that can be worn in 3 different ways.

That doesn’t look difficult to make but I fizzled by only cutting the fabric. I thought I’d only need the skirt and the top and the skirt I would get by cutting a circle. I read Rowena’s FAQ for how to cut out the circle and did EXACTLY that! I had this beautiful jersey which I’ve bought at the fabric market last Sunday. Didn’t cost much and I loved the colors.

Market the circle with the marker, cut. So far so good. I was anxious I must admit. Somehow the whole for the waist seemed so big…

BANG! That’s how it looks like when I hold it on my waist. Maybe it’s just me but just seeing this picture makes me feel like one of those matryoshkas. I didn’t bother to sew on the top. The skirt is too short anyway. I knew it before that it wouldn’t be that long (I can do basic math) but that it would look like THIS. Ah.. really… mabe it’s just me but I don’t like this at all.

Now I’m thinking what to do with this fabulous fabric that I like so much. Pillows for the couch or something. Or at least a tube top. I don’t know. Thought it couldn’t be that difficult since I didn’t find a pattern online. This is why I never considered sewing my own clothes. You’ll get it cheaper in stores and you don’t have the work and you don’t mess up while sewing. But that’s stupid, too. You could choose your own fabric, twist the pattern into your own style, make something nobody has. I see… in the next sewing class I will concentrate on how to make my own things to wear. Though I learned another lesson I don’t want to have this too often as even though this fabric wasn’t so expensive but that was just because I made an excellent deal. I wouldn’t dare to use something expensive. So I rather invest some time and money in another class. That’s fun anyway. And to overcome the hint of a bad mood I took a nice picture from our terrace because the sky was so nice.  NEXT!

This was one of the greatest weeks. So many ups and downs and so many happy things happened.

Basically – one thing I realized is – how could I ever be without blogging? I mean.. when I started this I didn’t think of what’s going to happen, if it will get me anywhere, who I will meet, what it will mean to me… I didn’t think of anything. For me it was just an experiment, a digital journal of my findings, creative outcomes, my sewing adventures, my crafty projects. I never knew it would open my horizons in such an incredible way, that there was such a community to share your thought with. I never thought in my dreams I would find like-minded people who would like my blog and I NEVER thought I would find friends. But that actually happened. And this week made that clear to me.

This week I received 2 handwritten letters from blogger friends. And last week I received a post card. The serendipity is they all sent flower themed cards. Ines – aka Frau Heuberg – sent a beautiful postcard with dandelions, Piper from One Sydney Road sent a card with seeds in the paper and Caro from sodapop-design sent flower seeds in a package. Isn’t this the sweetest thing ever?!

We are all bloggers, we all follow a passion, and we became friends.  This fills my heart with joy and happiness and I’m so freakin’ thankful for having met those girls. A big thank you goes to Holly Becker from decor8 who organizes this stupendous blogging class. She teaches about blogging and everything that comes with it. And now I realized she’s right about what she said and I thank her a lot.

Blogging brings people together and for me it’s a fabulous way to meet like-minded people, to share experiences, to actually talk to people about what interests me/us. I realized that I can help other’s, too. And that is a good feeling.

I might repeat myself every single Friday but I can’t stop mentioning that I’m grateful for making this experience and for every single soul that I get to know. I’m in Germany but I’ve met people from all over the world without setting foot into an airplane. Isn’t that awesome?!

I can recommend to everyone around who has a passion – write about it. You never know what it might do to your life. Or even somebody else’s life. It’s definitely worth every single minute!

That was my little ode to blogging and all bloggers in this world. Keep on rocking and have a fantastic weekend.

XO, Lou

Inspired by the fun SHAKE IT UP series of Piper’s blog One Sydney Road which I like much I promised her to jump in so she wouldn’t be so alone doing fun things that are a bitt less ordinary. And since I really spend a LOT of time in the office I thought I wouldn’t even go far and just take pics of my surroundings. All it takes is the iPhone and the Hipstamatic app and there you go!!

What I did was the “number walk 1 – 10″ and the “rules” are: find a spot where you want to walk and take pictures of things that represent each of the 10 numbers

Let me introduce you to my office :-)

1 Buzz Aldrin

2 paper stars

3 dolls (and I tell you it’s always good to have a voodoo doll at the office…)

4 drinks (you know that I’m on a mission)

5 moving boxes

6 layouts on a board

7 markers

8 little soccer players

9 unread emails

10 post-its

I enjoyed this as it was something so out of the blue and it sharpened the eye. I didn’t know that my office would be so fun to photograph. Sometimes you just have to be creative at work and SHAKE IT UP! I hope you have some fun time at your workplace as well.

Even though some of you think I’m a sewing rockstar I can definitely tell you I’M NOT. I fail all the time – just like yesterday. My intentions were good but the execution sucked big time. I tell you upfront: THIS is NOT a tutorial – I want to show you exactly what you shouldn’t do. (hm… when I think of it it’s a tutorial after all)

So I have this great shirt by Diesel. It’s plain white with violet font. But it’s too wide as I bought a men’s size M. I didn’t know they had the shirts for women, too so that’s why I bought it. Though I like my shirts a little roomier these days that shirt was just too wide and so I decided to make it a bit smaller. Couldn’t be that difficult and it actually isn’t. Basically what I did was fine and worked well but let me finish this post so you can see.

What you need to do is really easy. You turn the shirt inside out and pin the edges so that the seams are all straight.

Then you make the mark away from the seam according to how small you want your shirt to be. I tried the shirt on and thought 3 cm on each side is ok so I marked at 2,5 cm. You have to consider the seam allowance.

Then you cut the shirt in pieces. Here I made sure the needles were still holding the shirt together after cutting so that everything stays in place.

Until here everything was fine and all this took 15 minutes. Now that it came to sewing I made TWO big mistakes that I wasn’t aware of until I saw the result. First bummer was that I sewed straight. The problem here is the material. The shirt is (to be honest a very cheap) jersey – which is elastic – which the straight sewing stitch is not! After I sewed the first line I had this tension in the fabric and somehow it didn’t feel right. And what was even worse – I could see the fabric was having micro small holes right by the sewing line. I googled and found the solution. For jersey you need a zig-zag stitch so that the fabric stays elastic by the seam line. OK. I did use the zig-zag stitch on the other side and realized that was way better. BUT the holes would still be there. I googled. Again. And THERE was THE answer. Jersey needs to be handled with a jersey needle. Uff. I didn’t know that.

Now I learned my lesson. Next time – before sewing with a material I’m not familiar with – google FIRST. What needle, what thread, which stitch!

Here you might see… the shirt is tighter now. I wanted to cut the collar as well and make it a bit bigger but I couldn’t bother anymore after fearing loosing my shirt any minute. It survived a party though. Next time I pass by an american apparel store I’ll buy a good quality shirt and sew the design on the shirt. This actual t-shirt is a mess and I wouldn’t wear it at daylight.

But it proves that I’m stupid :-) Basically I didn’t actually fail. I just found a way that doesn’t work!  Next time I know better and now YOU know, too!

Happy Friday everyone. I hope you all had a good week. Maybe you remember that I was desperately waiting for my quilt fabric to arrive. The package that arrived last weekend actually wasn’t the fabric. This totally messed up my vacation plans and I had to rethink what to do and the outcome was the bag for the Nikon that kept me busy all Wednesday.

In last Friday’s package was a t-shirt by Diesel that made me laugh. They have this ad campaign at the moment about the smart and the stupid and I LOVE the philosophy behind it. It’s about doing things – not just thinking about doing it, living your life without regret, to be brave and to take risks to live life to the fullest. Watch the video and dance a bit while reading. It will put you in the BEST mood. My favorite sentence is: Stupid isn’t afraid to fail. Stupid knows there are worse things than failure. Like not even trying.

Did you enjoy? Isn’t this brilliant?!? These are 100% my thoughts. This will be my new bad-mood-killer video.

Enjoy your weekend and do something stupid. Take a picture of it and send it to me. I’ll make a collage of all our stupid things!

Xo, Lou