This weekend was full of sewing. On Saturday Steve and I hosted the Fire’n'Motion travelling sweatshop, six people in a small room making performance costumes:
Here we have Steve and Jed cutting out, Nat hemming, and Cat and Mikey sewing poppers on. I was working off to the right, also hemming. We’re doing this again next weekend, with seven people, but luckily not at my house – I don’t think we could fit another person in our living room.
At the end of the day the living room floor was thick with fabric scraps, bits of thread and scraps of brown paper from patternmaking. I also have a small stash of Lost & Found: a pair of scissors, two pencils, some kevlar thread with needle, and a lighter (no smokers here, just fire-twirlers 
).
My homework for the week is to make performance pants and a top for Steve, using existing ones as a pattern. I could have started on that on Saturday night, once the rest went home, but I decided to do some creative sewing instead. So I switched on the Tour de France coverage and pulled out the most recent addition to my stash: a set of fabric samples from a curtain shop, 10 small pieces and one large, each a different colourway of shiny, skinny-stripey goodness. I have a book from my local library with patterns and ideas for softies – stuffed toys – and I want to make one small softie from each of the small sample pieces. Here is the first one:
Apart from the stuffing and the thread used to sew it together, this cat is made entirely of freebie, second-hand materials – upcycled, I suppose. The stripey fabric is curtain material, the base is upholstery material, and the lace scrap came from a dressmaking shop – these are all from Remida, where I work. The thread I used for the embroidery and the crocheted tail I got from Steve’s granny. I’m pretty pleased with it, but I’m going to try for some more sophisticated shapes in future softies. I’m not sure how sophisticated they can get with only 26x22cm of fabric – we shall see.
And now I’m off to spotlight to spend my birthday vouchers on some shiny things – alpaca wool and pretty patterned fabric and pinking shears. Hooray for vouchers, guilt-free spending money!
