Purse Frame Class and Bag of the Month

Over at CreativeBug, they're having a Bag of The Month year, with new bag classes every month. February sees my "Snap Clasp Purse" class ready to go.

 

 

I'm a bit concerned that the official image only gives a top-down view, when the purse is actually a bit more triangular than that.

 

 



 

These are a few snaps I took when I finished one of the samples. You can see that it has purse feet, magnetic snaps and d-rings in the straps. All that and a purse frame too means that there are LOADS of skills to learn in this one, along with all my tips and tricks for creating structure and a fine finish.

And if I ever get around to it, I'm going to make one with the straps on both sides. I think that would have a really natty 1940's utilitarian-glamour look...especially in a light wool or something like that. (I can never leave well-enough alone, me...)

 

 

  

 

This is the first sample I made while developing the pattern.  I think it looks cute in denim. I put an adjustable strap on it, so that I can use it hands-free. This was an easy modification, using snap hooks on the end of a long strap instead of joining the strap to the rings.

 

 

I've been watching all the classes coming up in the CreativeBug Facebook feed, and feel very inspired to make EVERYTHING. There are many free classes and for US$4.95 per month, you have access to 600+ more classes.  The free trial includes lifelong access to one class. 

 

You can see all the classes I teach on CreativeBug here.

 

 

In other great website news.  The lovely Ms Peppermint Penguin - a long-time follower and commenter on this little blog of mine, finally finished her website.  She's knitting and sewing and selling her wares. Go you, Ms Pengiun!!

 

 

A great big lightning-tour catch-up... again

Well, it appears that having an iPad really does make it easy to snap photos, load them up to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, and then completely forget about them... and the blog.  My apologies to the blog-reading purists who have been so very rudely overlooked.

Looking through the iPad pics, I realise that  there are too many that I took but didn't post.  I'll never catch up. 

So, here's a brief overview of the last few months....

There appear to have been many Purse Frame classes.  The photo above was taken two weeks ago,at Addicted To Fabric in Canberra, and the one below was a few weeks before that, in my studio. 

If you'd like to come to the very last Purse Frame Class in my studio, you'd better book in now.

Yes... I did just say that.  I've made the huge decision not to renew the lease on my business premises, and will be looking for a home that is more home and less work.  I'll be teaching classes in all the usual places and more, but not in my cosy, light-filled studio, with no more than 6 people and all the attention you could ask for...

Same goes for the current schedule of hat and bag-making classes.  Last chance to do the Helen St thing.

 

I've also been cooking up a new pattern design.  The first draft was tested in 1/2 scale... and it's half a kid-size 4.  It was unbelievably squeak-inducingly cute.

(The final - full-size - pattern is currently being tested by some trusty pattern-testers and should be ready to launch soon.)

 

In other random iPad photo news.... I was digging through an old box of photos at my parents' house, and found a photo of my Dad and Ms CurlyPops' uncle, in about 1950.  Small world, huh?

 

 

And the wee girl finally cracked the knitting thing.  You can pretty much see the row where she got the hang of even tension.  She's been knitting up a storm of... well... little knitted bits... ever since. 

And there was great geeky excitement in hip and happening Northcote last Saturday night! 

My sewing buddy brought around her super high-tech fashion industry pattern-drafting program to show me.  We drank a glass of wine or two and compared CAD functions (... and for $19,000-odd more than I spent on mine, you actually get a lot of really cool functions). 

Wild young things, we are.

 

 

...and apparently I bought books a month or two ago, and took photos of them.  There's a very good (and cheap) bookstore between home and the hairdressers... which makes for expensive haircuts....and the occasional iPad snap.

 

I'll be back at some point soon to show-and-tell the pattern-free garment class we had last weekend... but it needs a post all to itself.

Hope you have a fab weekend!

Purses de jour

Thanks lovely ladies for a great purse frame class today.   It was a great way to spend a Saturday!!

Tonight it's back to life, back to reality..... and I'm back to knitting cats.

Kokka-loco and purse-mania

Yep. Purses. Production-line style. This one with a (completely intentional, of course....) wrap-around bird.

The odd playground scene...Cutesy stuff.

Gotta love those Japanese prints. These are all from Duckcloth a year or so ago. I've been thinking about Echino (by Kokka) fabrics as a panel in my A-line Skirt.

(BTW - Did you know that Duckcloth are now stocking my A-line Skirt pattern? As are GJ's and Addicted to Fabric. You can now buy the pattern and the fabric together!)

Then it was onto a bit of quilting fabric.... Shell purse and 90mm purse frame purses.

And then I gave up on old and goopy glue. Things were not coming together as they ought, so production has been suspended until new glue arrives.

I have a few more purses to frame and a few more made in various stages of construction to take to Canberra on Thursday. I'm also madly sewing up step-by-step samples of bag bits for two purse frame workshops and two Sharper Edge classes at Addicted to Fabric.

Busy days.

Around the edges

So, another week has passed....
Last week, some recreational sewing and knitting was fitted in around the edges of contracted work. I've been stock-piling cutesy baby fabriics for a while. Friends and family members keep expecting babies and I'm always looking for excuses to buy cute fabric.

I thought that this duck fabric was pretty unisex.... and then, when I made it up, a few second thoughts crept in. People are particular about how they dress boys, and I've only got girl-baby experience. I don't know....

I tried dark green binding. I'm still not sure....
Other cute fabric (from Kimono House) was made into a shell purse (my demonstration-model for the Shell Purse workshop). In between times, last week, I finished sewing the red beads around the edges of the frame and I'm a bit in love with it.

This book arrived last week, too.... not looking very sharp around the edges. It wasn't damaged in transit - it was PACKED with those great big dents along the side! (Thankfully, Amazon refunded me when I complained).

Apart from the dents, the book is pretty impressive.

I don't know how it rates (re: instructions) from a user's point of view, but the designs are good and the samples are well-made, which isn't always the case with bag-making books. I'm looking forward to looking through it more thoroughly.

On Saturday, we had a fun, chatty, Pattern-free Wrap Skirt class. Cathie took to the industrial iron like the proverbial duck to water and double-turned edges like nobody's business. KA-shhhhhhhhhhh!

Other achievements, fitted in around the edges of last week....
I enlisted the help of my SUPER SISTER to help me turn the bomb-site upstairs sewing room at work into functional teaching space. We now have a HUGE cutting space and a few extra surfaces and sewing machines. Hooray.

Gymnastics and swimming lesson enrolments were made for the wee girl and we somehow even made it to the try-out classes (it's only taken me 9 months to get around to organising this).

I undid nearly 10 years of recovery from sports-injured knees with a few short runs to and from the swimming pool. Back to twanging, aching knees. Oh joy.

Bought a pull bouy, so I can refine my swimming stroke (and... ahem...still swim with dodgey knees).

Hmm... busy week...

Not much time for online socialising or bloggy action, it seems.... Lots of secret-squirrel design work, quite a few visitors and a swim EVERY MORNING* from Tuesday-Friday.

*Nobody is more surprised than I am! Saturday was the Shell Purse Class... ...a lovely day of stitching and chatting with 6 lovely ladies, finishing up with 6 lovely new purses.

Somewhere between a post office queue and a page-load on the computer, I finished my linen crochet lace top (photos forthcoming...). I've now started on my very first practise sock. I'm using this book, some yarn from Auntie Wilma's stash and my fancy-schmantzy new circular needles, working slowly through my first practise mini-sock. I have some lovely new yarn to use when I get the hang of it.

Sunday... a day of...

.....laundry, vacuuming, bathroom-cleaning and Father's Day cake making. (The cake was decorated by the sweetest tooth in the house, for the bloke who thinks there's no finer snack than a lump of feta cheese and bread...). ...and more vistors (she says, looking out the window to see the extended family of in-laws arriving....).

Can I have a weekend soon...?

The Roses of Success

One of the things that I love about making purses, is just how little fabric is required. The scrap bag is full of treasures that can be transformed into useful, beautiful objects. I've been a bit obsessed with scraps of machine-knitted experiments and disasters. Waste-not-want-not and all that....

I'm also enjoying the challenge of working with new materials within a familiar form. It's a magical mystery tour of design decisions, based on what the fabric will and will NOT do. I moved on to felted woollen jumpers (and stayed with the purse frames).

The green boucle was particularly thick, so I had to re-think the construction process somewhat. The seams are blanket-stitched (by machine) and exposed. The lining is attached to the outer fabric in the same way. I didn't reduce the seam allowance, so the finished purse is bigger than the usual Shell Purse. I like it.

Cue: The song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Occasionally (...ahem...) I'm still inspired to buy new fabrics, because they speak to me about the potential of future projects.... I dropped into GJ's on Saturday and found lots of inspiration... Stay tuned...

Another day at the office...

It was great to see this little purse finished today. My second-thoughts about having done squiggly free-motion stitchery were put to rest. I like. And I like it when I like.

I bought this tie-dye/marbled, felted wool in GJ's clearance room (upstairs, where the patchwork fabrics used to be) during the week. $15 per metre and lovely stuff...... so I took a metre in each of 3 colourways.

Ahem.. that's a lot of purses....
There were lots of purses at work today, in fact. A Purse Frame Class.
It was a hoot! Not only did I teach six fabulous women to make purses, but I learned a lot about what goes on behind-the-scenes in the Melbourne Zoo Gorilla enclosure..... (Conversation was interesting and varied!!!). Thanks for a fun day, girls!

Hot on the heels of the purse gals departure, a special student arrived for a bit of one-on-one tuition. This class had to be rescheduled from yesterday, when I was bad-mummy-who-was-too-busy. We used a Christmas present book as the basis of the lesson (because Mummy couldn't possibly know what she's talking about).And a star is born....

The rest of this week wasn't a lot of fun (bills, stress, deadlines... school holidays...). But days like today make me feel like I have the best job in the world.

Winter woollies

Since I felted some of my early machine knitting experiments, I've been seeing little purses....And now, it's not just my mind's eye that's doing the seeing. I made this one using the 90mm purse frame kit. The rose is simply rough-cut circles of felted knitting, stacked on top of each other and stitched by machine, with the fancy-schmantzy "hand-stitching" stitch. (...I know. I'm lazy like that).
In other news, the lovely Karen alerted me to a yarn stash that was being given away in her neighbourhood - she even picked it up for me and delivered it!!!
I was so overcome with excitement when I saw a brim-full box of yarn, I immediately started bagging up my favourite colours and loading up the (potential-moth-egg exterminating) freezer. I only thought to take a photo when I ran out of space in the freezer.

Well, actually, I thought of the camera BEFORE I ate the ice-cream to make space for more yarn in there. (Then I ate the ice cream and forgot about the camera again).
I'm just a little bit jumping-up-and-down excited at the prospect of knitting my way through this lot. I'm planning on expanding the knitting machine repertoire to include Shapes Other Than Rectangles.
I daresay there'll be more felted wool purses made along the way.

I'm listening....

We've had a few requests for double purse frames lately, so I thought I'd try getting a few in. These frames are 150mm (6") with a curved edge, and are available here. If you like (and buy!!) them, I'll be able to continue the supply. I may even get around to making a pattern for them ...eventually. I have a few 150mm purse frames in CHUNKY style (like the 200mm chunky frames, only shorter!!). They're available here. And we also have some 200mm Chunky frames with loops for a purse chain. (We also have the chain). I think these would look cute on the Kiss Purse. We've had a lot of requests for o-rings that can be opened and linked onto other loops or eyelets. I found these.... 60mm diameter with 4mm wire. We also have some new antique o-rings. These are 25mm (1") and in 3mm wire, and you can find them in the shop here.

During an overhaul of postage prices (thanks Australia Post for giving us reason to do this on a regular basis....), we've taken the opportunity to make a much-needed increase to our packaging and handling fee (from $2 to $3 per order).

This will go some way towards paying for the time it takes the lovely office gals to give you the best service they can and find the most economical postage method for you.... as well as pay for bubblewrap, tissue paper, labels, sticky tape and envelopes. Rather than increasing all our prices, I felt that the "user pays" method would be fairer.

(So... the more you order per order, the better for you..... How's that for justifying your stash-building???)