Birthday overload (dodgy photo overload, too)

If you are thinking to yourself "well blow me! Kathryn Driffield's done a new blog post. I thought she was dead!" then I don't blame you. As you can see, I'm not dead, but I have been manically busy. Up to my eyes in birthdays, sewing orders, face painting, summer fetes, and other fun but somewhat draining activities. No time for blogging (though I have rediscovered Twitter and am now a proper fan).

Anyway, dealing with the procrastination sewing first.... a skirt for me. I have since Christmas been exercising hard and dieting reluctantly. With the result that I urgently need some summer skirts that actully fit and have pockets for my phone. When I'm a size 10 I am going to treat myself to a Desigual skirt but since I am still two sizes away I ran up a Desigual knock-off. It's kind of hard to achieve that edgy Desigual look when you mostly have kids' prints in the stash, but I gave it my best shot....
It's comfy, it fits, and it has pockets. Result!

Then onto Laura's pressing need for summer skirt & leggings combos. These are intended for wear at Hatton Country World and other places where protection from fast slides and grazed knees is required. I ran up 4 sets over the course of a day - it's an Ottobre pattern and has pretty much gone viral in the sewing for girls community. I love it!

And now for the birthday sewing... James turned 6 last week and here's his new jacket. Ottobre strikes again! It's in an outdoor wear fabric that was very cheap at Fabricland in Bristol. It was an absolute swine to sew, so I bitterly regretted choosing a pattern that featured welt pockets. It's not my best work, but it's the best I could do and James really likes it.

Though not as much as he likes his new shorts. Also an Ottobre pattern and huge fun to make.

Then came a crochet aquarium for my father-in-law on father's day. Trouble-free fish! He saw the funny side.

Laura's birthday is the last on the list. Believe me, the four weeks from June 9 to July 8 is tough going in this house - five birthdays, one after the other, with Father's Day thrown in just to make life interesting. I hardly have time to catch my breath! But Laura's is the last birthday where I feel the compulsion to sew. This is her birthday jacket. It's an Ottobre pattern (no? really?), which should have been made up in wool but which I did in fleece. Laura does actually need a fleece jacket and I was getting tired of hearing about her best friend's coat which is pink with flowers, so I embellished the fleece with heart pockets and some flowers. And pom-pom trim just for fun.

It even comes with a zip-up hood. She will simply love it!

I'm not so sure about her dress, and I think she'll be a bit 'meh' too. She really wanted something twirly, and this combination just isn't. Also, I screwed up the collar somewhat which doesn't add to my dress-love, but I think the real problem lies in the fabric choice. Both are pretty enough but lack drape, so they somehow don't flow. I suspect the pinafore will get a lot more wear than the dress, especially once I've added the strawberry buttons.

I felt a wee bit guilty about imposing my own dress choice on the birthday girl (I can't tell you how much she wanted a twirly dress) so I painted some faux Lelli Kellys for her. Don't get me wrong - I don't think they rival the real thing, but they cost me a mere £12.50 (and a fair amount of time). I used sequins, fabric glitter and fabric paint from stash, and hoped to keep them secret from her until Sunday. Unfortunately, she opened the box when they were half-finished, and the cat was out of the bag. She liked them then and now they're blinged up, I just know she'll love them.

Speaking of cats, she decided last week she wanted me to make her a kitten costume for her birthday. With claws on the hands. Now that's a challenge I decided not to try to rise to but watch this space for a Halloween post!

Spring sewing

Has it really been over a month since the last post? Oh dear, I'm slipping! My excuse is, as it is for all bloggers, that there's not enough time in the day. The nice weather has brought shoppers to the Bentley Heath Country Market and I'm having a job keeping up with demand. This is, of course, A Good Thing.

In between orders and sales, I've been working on a posh frock line. More specifically, a line of communion dresses. It's been great fun sourcing and using beautiful silks and cottons and trying to come up with dresses that will set them off. And then of course I had to find a right-sized model to set off the dresses. My friend volunteered her daughter and we had a lovely modelling session. My two are at the "fixed smile & funny face" for camera stage, so it was so nice photographing a child who looked completely natural. And it doesn't hurt that she is also an extremely pretty girl, so even I can take good photos!

First up was the crochet dress because this was the one I was most anxious about. I kid you not, I made this dress twice - I don't think there's a stitch in it that hasn't been done and re-done at least once. But I finally got it done and made a little viscose slip for under it. To finish it, I made 5 little crochet flowers and put them on hairslides. They looked like little daisies growing in her hair and gave such a pretty organic look to the outfit. I had many a crisis of confidence about this dress while I was making it, but like all good fairytales, it had a happy ending.

Next up: the traditional dress. Well, traditional with a modern vibe, I hope!

This one has a pleated sash over a paperbag waist. I love paperbag waists but no matter how much weight I lose, I'm never going to be able to wear one (there is no diet that can turn a middle-aged apple into a young beanpole) so I'm living vicariously here. The skirt is a self-embroidered lawn, which I hand-beaded to embellish the flowers. You can't see it in the photograph and I did wonder if it was worth doing, but in real life, the little beads make all the difference. There is also a semi-detachable bow at the back. Very traditional, very charming. And since it's getting harder and harder to find all-cotton communion dresses, I'm hopeful it will find a market.

And finally, everyone's favourite: the silk and tulle dress. I found the pattern for this in a Japanese pattern book. I made up a smaller two-colour version for my daughter to test the pattern (photos to follow in another post) but found that the sizing wasn't quite right and so the dress has gone into the shop. She's gutted! I also found that I didn't like the bodice so I played around with another couple of patterns and this is the changeling that emerged.

I knocked up a tiara to match and my model loved both dress and tiara so much she didn't really want to take them off. The dress is lined with habotai silk and it feels so cool and smooth - there is nothing like a silk lining for making a dress feel just sumptuous!

All that remained was for me to actually stock the shop. I've now added an Etsy shop to my stable so I had two lots of stocking up to do, but four episodes of ER got me through the tedium of uploading photos. I'm about to start on some Farbenmix baby clothes using some gorgeous fabrics from Dots & Stripes - it will make a change to use colours again!

The Klimt party dress and reinventing the wheel

For some time I've been thinking about doing a garment inspired by Klimt's The Kiss. The trouble was, how to recreate those beautiful patterns he used. I dithered over using fabric paints but decided (I think correctly) that I'd just run out of talent. And then I realised that the beautiful little symbolic flowers he used so often could be rendered in crochet motifs. So I started hooking..

Twenty motifs in, and during a brief vacation from the virus that's been dogging me since early December, I started thinking about joining them. I had an idea that I could do it in a laissez-faire free-form way to build them up into a bodice. I used Ottobre's sundress pattern from 02/2002 as the block for the bodice. Once I'd twigged that the easiest way to shape the fabric as I was building it was to pin it to the bodice lining, it worked out great.

I kept to the Ottobre pattern for the back - I love that lace up detail. This is a dress that will fit Laura for quite some time!

Now this post was going to be along the lines of 'ta-dah! look at my wonderful new invention: FREE-FORM CROCHET!!!! And then I googled free-form crochet (kind of patent checking, you know?) and discovered that it's actually been around since the 1970s when it was invented by James Walters and Sylvia Cosh. Go figure! Those gits even stole my name for it!!!

Stolen glory aside, here is the finished dress in all its yellowness. It's actually much more yellow in real life (no, honestly, it really is.)

I'm already planning the next - maybe a nod to Monet? If I'm going to skank from fine art, I might as well skank from the best....

Free Pattern - Crochet bolero

Newsflash! I thought this was free from errors. I was wrong. Oh, so wrong! Anyway, many thanks to Peg for very nicely pointing this out to me. The pattern is now amended, the link has been altered, everything in the garden is lovely. If you have already downloaded the incorrect pattern then I am really sorry. And if you find any more errors in the new version, then feel free to beat me around the head until I agree to find some pattern testers for the next one.

This must be a record! In my last post I promised a crochet bolero pattern and, not a fortnight later, here it is - free pattern for a little girl's crochet bolero! I feel quite giddy with smuggery.
You can either get it from Google Docs at the above link or, if that doesn't work, then I've cut & pasted it into a new Blogger posting at http://lespetitsanglais.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/crochet-bolero-pattern.html .


At Christmas I needed something to go over Laura's party dress(es!). There were numerous free patterns available for shrugs, but I couldn't find one for a bolero. So, being far too cheap to part with cash, I set to and created this one. I was in a hurry at the time so I used an edging from my Harmony Guide. Obviously, I can't include that one in my pattern because of copyright and all, so I've come up with a somewhat simpler one.


On the downside, this is not the most professional looking pattern you will ever see. I had to do a chart for the fronts because I got so entangled in turning chains and trebles and double crochets, and I even made a mistake in the chart. Otherwise, I think it's free from errors, and the resulting bolero is well worth wading through the pattern! It's actually a very easy bolero to make, and also easy enough to size up or down because of the small pattern repeat. American readers please bear in mind that it is written using British terminology, so read single crochet for double crochet, and double crochet for treble.



I hope you enjoy the pattern.