Happy Holidays 2016

However you celebrate this time of year, I wish you lots of joy and special time with the people you love.

My girl and I have been over-indulging in Christmas movies and looking at houses with lots of twinkly lights.  We've enjoyed hearing carols and ... well, SHE enjoyed the buzz in the city centre (I wanted to run, screaming towards the train home)... She particularly liked that I let her have chocolate pancakes for lunch at The Pancake Parlour (highlight of the year!).  And since we set up our portable swimming pool, we've had an endless stream of friends for play-dates and outdoor dinners. 

Basically, we've been hanging out, enjoying the Summer holidays and the magic that Christmas inspires in a sweet 10-year-old's imagination. 

I have been feeling grateful for a year that has brought lots of opportunities and (for the first time in ages) no major upheaval.  I have been grateful for health and a roof over my head, and for the peace that we enjoy in this country.  I have been grateful for good friends, family and being able to make a living from the work I love doing.

I have been grateful for cheap Korean restaurants on end-of-year school nights when I can't be bothered cooking dinner (we did this twice).

We are very lucky people, indeed.

Teacher gifts were no surprise, really... The latest inkjet printed pencil case design is very Manga-inspired.  (The two in the background are my own pencil cases, made using her 3 and 4 year old drawings. They make me smile every day.)

Holiday activities have also included the transfer of a board game she drew in pencil into a fully packaged, laser-printed affair. I'm very impressed with the clear instructions and the level of complexity she developed in the game.  All done without a scrap of help from me.

You might have noticed that I've dropped the diminutive "een" from the end of my "girl".  In the last wee while, she appears to have grown nearly as tall as I am (which isn't actually that tall) and on that  train trip to the city the other day, I realised that her (kids size) boots are the same size as (adult size) mine.

And so, the summer holidays stretch before us.  I will have a kid-free week in which to catch up on some book-writing, and then it'll be back to juggling work around holiday fun.  

We will probably have more dinners on the trampoline.

Wishing you all the best for the happiest of days over the holiday period and a wonderful 2016.

Happy Holidays

 It's that time of year again (hurrah!).

 

 

And so the tradition of the cardboard Christmas tree continues.... 

 

This year, the girleen broke away from standard flat-tree format and went all 3-D.  She also (making use of a feature in the recycled ballot box that we were using as base material) incorporated a secret door in the design....

 

We fashioned a secret shelf in the middle of the tree, making it a cupboard...

 

...in which to hide the handmade Christmas crackers (another emerging tradition of ours, it seems).

 

 

The last week of downtime makes all the madness of the previous few weeks seem like a million miles away, as it should. 

 

(Here's a bit of design college humour from the last few weeks at work.)

 

 

It has been a time of winding down, going to craft markets and kicking back with my girl and with friends. It's a time of al fresco dining and drinking and talking.

 

 

Sometimes, we've even managed an accidentally-colour-coordinated theme for the evening.

 

 

The garden is rewarding us with harvests of spuds and salads and vegetables. There have been apricots (and there is now a larder full of apricot jam).

 

 

My Christmas surprise this year was the arrival of a copy of The Better Bagmaker in French!

 

 

To celebrate both birthday and Christmas this year, I broke with tradition and bought some fun red shoes... because a girl sometimes needs to step outside the practicality of functional black sandals for summer.   

 

I wish you all a very happy holiday season, whatever you may be doing to celebrate or relax.  See you in 2015.

 

To One and All

 Every Christmas, since my wee girl was very wee indeed, we have made a cardboard tree. 

 

This year, as we were about join the two tree pieces in the traditional cross-intersection to make it a stand-up 3D tree-like shape, the girleen came up with a brilliant new structural idea.

 

The stash of glitter and glue - hidden away since the great "Oooooh....It looks like MAGIC...!" glitter-throwing disaster of 2009 - was brought out and used with great control and design sensibility.

..and even so, two weeks later, I'm still finding glitter all over the backyard and house.

 

And so, let me present This Year's Tree! 

The space between the two sides of the tree was the "perfect" place to stash our hand-made, Lindt-Ball-filled crackers. 

We also finally made the "Gorgeous Gingerbread" recipe from the Mary Poppins book that the girleen read (and copied the recipe from) mid-year. 

I'm thinking it was more miraculous than gorgeous... We had named it "Gingerslop" as it went into the oven.  The mixture was so runny that we didn't believe that it would ever bake into anything other than thick custard.  But it was ok!

 

The first few days of school holidays passed with preparations for my family Christmas lunch, which we celebrated at my house on Saturday.  And since then, the girleen and I have been on a go-slow.  We have goofed about the house, baking and sewing and doing nothing in particular.

 

We decided to play with the paper dollies she was given as a birthday present a few weeks ago.  She wasn't interested in the outfits that the dolls came with - she wanted to design her own (*proud mama's heart skips a beat*).  

 

She then suggested that we make a real doll's dress, based on the paper design.  (*cue simplified, Barbie-doll-size design analysis and patternmaking lesson*)

It was a collaborative effort, involving both Elna-Mini and Fancy-Schmantzy-Bernina, the box in the fabric stash labelled "Shiny, Drapey & Sparkly", and a paring-back of design details (by the youngest collaborator...when it was all taking too long). 

 

Barbie will indeed go to the ball!

Wishing all a very safe and happy Christmas and New Year, and happy holidays with the people you love.

Crafty Christmas

The garage/playroom is the centre of all things Christmassy at Studio You SEW Girl.  Right in the middle (right where everyone can trip over it) is a fine, tall, cardboard xmas tree. 

The wee girl and I seem to have developed our own little tradition with this particular part of the Christmas crafting season.

 

These little hands have been very busy this last week, crafting up a Christmas bonanza of handmade love ....and warming the cockles of this old sewing-obsessed heart. 

(Eeep!  Those confident little crafting hands.... gets me every time....)

There has been a bit of a shift in the young one's approach to sewing, which includes looking for design ideas and occasionally accepting help (if it means that the job will get done faster or better).  Books have been consulted.

And yet - designs are interpreted, not followed.  She made lavender-filled softies for the teachers.

This owl is made from felted jumpers, not the proscribed fabrics, and the scale was tiny.  We used fusible pattern pieces, fabric glue sticks, fusible webbing and basting spray  in the process (anything to make things stay put until they were stitched down). 

I machined the blanket stitch around the eyes and tummy, but only after the girleen had given it a red-hot go, herself.  She managed the outer blanket stitch, and with the help of my new button foot and fancy-schmantzy button-stitch, machined the buttons into place (with helicopter-style supervision on my part).

The "Square Bear" was not so square, because there was a bit of an oversight in reading the "enlarge 200%" bit for the body pieces.  We thought that the curved limbs gave the bear a bit more character, anyway. 

Since we realised that the Christmas stocking was at her Dad's house, and that Santa would be visiting while she was with me (and mostly because it was a scorching hot day and I was scratching around, looking for indoor/air-conditioned activities), we whipped up a new one from a bit of cotton sheeting.

And then she designed a dress. 

 

All on her own, she sketched an idea and presented it to me.  "I want to make this".

 

So we did.  (Go on....ask her what that arrow on centre-front means...).

Again, she was happy to delegate the tricky bits (setting in sleeves and putting the binding on), but she happily sewed up the straight seams on the overlocker (serger) and wondered why "some grown-up ladies are scared to do overlocking."

Such a sombre, understated design for a 7-year-old, but this is exactly what she wanted. I think it was designed around the shoes... as you do. 

 

We had to go out to buy white knit fabric for the binding yesterday - no other colour would do. (I had just about every other colour in the stash and did my diplomatic best to inspire a change of design).  The hemline had to be "wavy", and I don't have a rolled-hem or babylock on my very basic overlocker, so we went even more basic (small zigzag stitch).  

 

She wore it all day yesterday and is wearing it today.

 

She's already showing signs of a creative career (although I think that Corporate Law or Politics would be a better use for her finest talents). 

 

At a xmas gathering of my friends, she held court, and then started drawing portraits of those sitting around the table.  (Warning: evening light and iPod-quality  photos follow.)

Someone gave her money, and then others started comissioning portraits.

I loved the details... (That's a jug and a glass of beer, below.  Others had bowls of nuts in front of them or sunglasses on top of their heads.)  

 

As we walked home, she was excited and a bit incredulous about the $5 she held in her little hand. 

"People thought they were worth MONEY... but I just thought they were worth bits of paper."  She would have given them away.

 

And yes - the fruit hasn't fallen far from the tree.

 

Wishing you a safe and happy Christmas with the people you love.

 

xxx

 

 

 

All manner of merry

Merry Christmas to all who celebrated it today.

Santa brought a new Elna mini sewing machine to the wee girl.  There was much excitement (and pre-breakfast sewing).  The machine goes at a pace that a 6-year-old can manage and has a small range of simple stitches, but is otherwise a normal sewing machine.  (It appears that Santa is in on the indoctrination campaign.)

 Before breakfast, she whipped up a teddybear (of her own design) for a toddler cousin....

...which gave me time to finish a baby hat (from my book) and a pair of shorts for a baby boy, who previously received non-gender-specific-verging-on-girly handmade gifts from me.  I thought his Dad might appreciate something screamingly "BOY".

 And then it was time for an extended family (in-laws) lunch.  Great to get the family together....

 Although, I must admit to being somewhat worried about the way that cousins play together these days.....

 My girl was the only one who didn't own an electronic gizmo, so was loaned one, which she tired of quickly and then went out to hold court at the garden table.  I took the opportunity to photograph the new dress.  (I'm working on some new pattern ideas along these lines.  This was the first toile).

 And then there was food.  LOTS of food.  And family and kids and presents and more food.  Lovely.

 And then Melbourne did what Melbourne does best..... turned on a complete change in the weather (with a super-cell hurricane storm and massive hailstones thrown in... or machine-gunned in, as it seemed).

To top off the day, my little sewing girl went straight back to the sewing machine when we got home early this evening. 

Having finished her second cushion for the day, she began making "a library bag" for me.  As bedtime loomed, I allowed her 15 minutes extra to finish... and THEN remembered that we hadn't eaten dinner.  When I suggested she choose from the leftovers, she enthusiastically started looking through the fridge.  I then added that the time it takes to eat something would mean that there'd be no time to finish sewing.  She was sitting back in front of the machine (fridge door left swinging) before I could finish my sentence.  "Then I'll just do more sewing!"

That's my girl.

'Twas the week before Christmas

I've been snapping photos randomly this week, in case they come together in some sort of coherent, thematically-linked manner to inspire a well-mulled-over, thought-provoking blog post. 

But all I have to say about this photo is that I made a HOBO bag to send up to Addicted To Fabric in Canberra....  and it has a zip....

And I quite like the lining.

I also like the look of our new patterns.  That Tania knows how to tart things up, doesn't she?

..And the studio is a mess.   (Nothing to do with Tania.)

I found this photo of my 12th birthday cake - a free-standing sewing machine.  My mother was a fantastic sculptor when it came to birthday cakes. 

(The other cakes on the table were for my Mum and sister - our birthdays fall in the same week.  I think my sister made the caterpillar cake, or perhaps I did).

The cake pic prompted me think about this sewing obsession of mine... but I didn't come up with anything profound to say about it.  It just IS what it is.

Then today I had to supply a magazine with a mugshot.  Very weird to have to look at high-res images of my face.

For a while there, I wished I was either vain enough to have my teeth whitened and my wrinkles filled, or not vain enough to care about the wrinkles and the discoloured teeth.  I ended up thinking that I should just go back to not looking at high-res images of my face.  I is what I is.

So.... no deep thoughts at all this week - just photos and behind-the-scenes-last-minute-xmas panic (I started making gifts TODAY.... yikes!).  No time to mull things over.

I hope that your Christmas/holiday plans are coming together, and I wish you all the best!