How much do you spend on your crafts?

When I was a young stripling, homemade equalled cheap. If you were wearing something homemade, people thought it was because you couldn’t afford to buy a proper one from a shop. I can still remember (violins please) the first garment I got from a shop, so it must have been a big deal: it was a nylon puff-sleeved blouse with an elastic bottom from Littlewoods, with a neon geometric print on a white background. I was beyond thrilled, and I wore it to a disco with my cousins John and Richard, you can imagine how stylish I looked. Anyway, now we have reclaimed homemade and we call it handmade, much excellent outreach and activism has been done on getting people to value handmade and not see it as a crappy cheap alternative. So here is my confession. Sometimes I wish it was a crappy cheap alternative. Although, emotionally, I am right there with everybody who is happy to pay £150 to get wool which has been gathered at dusk from the underbelly of a llama fed only on the finest tunnocks teacakes, financially, one of the things which really put me off knitting when I started (and stopped me quilting for years) was the thought of having to spend all that money on materials.

The John Lewis remnant bin's finest + a load of scrotty old bits. Hooray! Another quilt!

When I started, I mainly had access to Rowan knitting and quilting books, where if you buy the recommended yarn you are looking at about £70-£100+ for a jumper, or about £150 for the fabric for a quilt. Because I was dim and hadn’t discovered Internet Knitting/ anarchist guerilla quilting (I made that up), I didn’t realise you didn’t have to spend sums like this, and it really made me think that knitting and quilting were not for such as I, but were for nice wealthy ladies with long arm sewing machines, endless money for Kaffe Fassett fabrics, and houses big enough to lay the quilt out in (… and obviously this would be easier. But hard-up scruffs like me, we can quilt too!).

Not only do I not have that kind of money to start with, I would be reluctant to spend it anyway on projects I am practicing on, because I would feel I couldn’t make a mistake, my mad unhealthy perfectionism would kick in, and I would never get it finished. On the other hand, I don’t want to use materials that aren’t nice to use, and don’t make a finished product I am pleased with, and I don’t want to use materials that exploit people or are worse for the environment than I can help. So I wondered (because the crocheted shrug is eating up yarn and I am having to go poking about at Kemps to buy more) – how much do you generally feel happy about spending on a project?

I am the Giant Multicoloured Yarn-Eating Circular Shrug and I wish to be fed more DK, slurp slurp

Me:

For knitting/ crocheting projects, I don’t like to spend more than about £30 for a garment, and if possible I like to spend a lot less. This means essentially that I buy most of my yarn from Kemps. If Kemps are not selling it, I am probably not knitting it. I also buy yarn on sale from The Black Sheep, and I think the Araucania clearance at Stash fine yarns is great. If I get my yarn from Kemps, though, I can get enough yarn for a cardigan or something for less than £20. This means I feel happier about making mistakes, ripping out, and treating projects as a learning experience. For smaller projects i.e. one or two skeins, I don’t mind buying a much more expensive yarn, and I don’t think sock yarn is expensive at all, even if it works out at £15 for a pair of socks. Superior socks, people, superior socks!

Bargain yarn of thrift and utility. Wait...

I am only on my second proper quilt, but, I like to make them with the scraps from fabric I have got left over from other sewing projects, and I try to keep my purchasing of actual new fabric (front, back and binding) down to about 2 metres and preferably none. So my quilts so far have each cost me no more than £16 for fabric + £17 for batting each (the first was made entirely from stash fabric). This is dependent on having a large fabric stash, it is true. I normally acquire my fabric either from remnants bins, from old clothes cut up, charity shops, or random stash packs from etsy or Ely Cycle Centre. I do buy some full price yardage occasionally, but I tend to enjoy the scratting about, so if suddenly I got lots of money I don't think I'd do any different.

For sewing clothes, I like to make clothes out of upcycled things anyway, so I am happy to use inexpensive materials (indeed! I enjoy it!). If I am making something out of actual new fabric, I tend to use quilters’ cotton, which is relatively inexpensive (and I tend to buy the lines which are discounted because I am not, shall we say, fussy about pattern). So I would expect a dress or a skirt (thread/ needle excluded) to cost about £10-20, because normally you don’t need more than about 3m, but I would be happy to pay £30 or so (very occasionally). Beyond that, I would start to get very, very twitchy.

Does that all seem cheap or expensive to you? I am interested. How much would you spend on a project?

Shirring for the cackhanded: helpful tips

Some things in life are difficult to explain, but are very easy to do. For example, falling in love. If you tried to explain love, you would have to use words like pheremones and synapses, which would be unpleasant: but, in practice, if you mix strong alcohol with mutual admiration of some obscure band/ foodstuff/ children’s television programme, generally before you know it there you are sharing a bathroom and wondering why your loved one squeezes the toothpaste in such an odd way. And some things are extremely easy to explain and very difficult to do in practice. Do you know what one of those is? Sewing with shirring elastic.

This is my summer dress, for me. I sewed this inspired by a shirred dress in Sew Hip magazine, which gave simple instructions. Essentially, when you shirr you are making a big tube and then pulling it in with elastic to make a smaller, slightly squashy-looking tube. There are no darts, there is no shaping. That should be easy, right? Well, the instructions certainly made it sound easy. You handwind the bobbin with your elastic thread, and then you just sew round and round your tube in a kind of a spiral (using the presser foot as a guide to space the rows) until you have done enough to fit over your bust, and then you clip your threads, put your dress on, and skip away, possibly to some kind of cool festival or a picnic in the park. Result happiness. However. Trying to follow these instructions felt a little bit like nailing a jelly to the ceiling, which is also easy to explain (take one jelly. Stand on chair. Hold jelly against ceiling. Knock nail through jelly with a big hammer – you might need a friend to help you steady the jelly at this point. Voila! Jelly nailed to ceiling! Enjoy!).

Basically, if you try to shirr your dress by sewing round a big spiral, unless you are making a dress for a very small baby (and I suspect this might be the case even then), you will run out of elastic. Elastic thread is thicker than sewing thread: you will have to rewind your bobbin at least once, possibly more. This is fine – rewinding the bobbin is no trouble (it doesn’t have to be tidy – I can make my sewing machine knot up just by looking at it, but my haphazard bobbin winding didn’t cause any problems.) However! You cannot backsew to secure elastic thread: it doesn’t work: I have tried. So, if you are starting again in the middle of your spiral, it is likely to come undone, especially because you have to pull and stretch the elastic as you are sewing to get a bit of flat fabric to sew through. My dress looks pretty on the outside: inside it is Frankenstein’s monster with elastic pulled and knotted and handsewn to secure. Also, it is not easy to use the presser foot as a guide for seams. You have to pull and tug at your fabric to stretch it to sew: sometimes frankly it is not clear what direction you are sewing in, never mind if you are correctly placing the new line of stitching half an inch from the old one.

So this is how I have decided to do it and it seems to be working much better (if a shirred top appears in my etsy shop you’ll know it was ok, if not I’m going to quietly skulk off and never mention it again.) 1/ Sew lines of shirring, not a spiral, and trap the ends in a seam (I will be using a french seam, doubly secure and also I am using sheer-ish fabric.) I’m doing this with a seam on the back, but you could probably use one of the side seams too. Don’t start with a new bobbin half-way through seams – check you’ve got enough to finish before you start. 2/ Mark with washable fabric pen lines where you want to sew – I’m spacing mine half an inch apart. I’m reasonably confident the washable fabric pen is actually washable, if not I’ll be walking about with a grid marked on my chest. Horizontal lines, so flattering! 3/ Sew with a very short stitch length, and I’ve found I need a tight top tension: if my bobbin tension is adjusted correctly, I haven’t found I need to adjust it any more, which is useful as I’m not sure where I’ve put the screwdriver.

Those are my shirring tips, I hope this is helpful. It is a performance but worth doing as it looks attractive, and as you are tripping about in your diaphanous creations only you will know about the bitter tears and swearing at the sewing machine, everyone else will think you are effortlessly chic in a hippie kind of way.

Hello, introduction etc

Hello... First blog post so let's do introductions. My name's Susie. I've been sewing for years and years and years, but until last year I mostly made cushions and bags and patchwork, and square things like that. Then last year, the hugely stressful and time-intensive job I was doing ended, and I thought I'd teach myself to sew clothes properly. Well, a few months on and I've restocked my wardrobe, anything that could possibly need a cosy has a cosy, and I haven't got enough time to wear or space to store all the things I want to sew. In fact I'm eyeing up next door's cat and thinking whether he'd be improved by a little quilted jerkin. And he really wouldn't. So I thought I'd see if other people might like my things, because if I can sell some then I can make more. And I don't want to sound naff, because there's enough naffness in life (isn't there?) but nothing would make me happier than to think of other people walking about wearing my clothes. That would be amazing. So I started an etsy shop and it's been quite a learning curve so far (and I've hardly got anything in it yet.) I'm learning more than I ever thought I'd need to know about taking photographs in a house so small we haven't got any blank walls, using Gimp, and engaging with sergers. If I ever get to a stage where I know what I'm doing with any of them I'm going to blog about it.


In the meantime, this is my studio: I say studio: I mean box room. You note I'm not showing you the floor? The picture is by Dave who I used to work with. Dave has some lovely pictures – look on his site. But don't go buying all the Sun ones, because I'm having one of those as soon as I've got a bit of spare money. And the plant is a Peace Lily. It's the only plant I've ever not killed. I haven't given it a name because I don't want to become too attached (well, I have. I call it Fred. But I don't call it that out loud, because that would be tempting fate.)


This is a shelf full of my books. It has so many books it's actually bending. I won't tell you what I think about Weekend Sewing because I'm trying to be upbeat. All I'll say is, do you remember when Les Dawson used to dress as a woman? I looked like that in the Kimono dress.


And this is my tree. It only looks like that for about 5 minutes but while it does it's spectacular and I rush about taking photos. I thought it was appropriate for Spring and new beginnings.

Thanks for reading. I'll be back tomorrow to tell you my adventures with my serger because I'm hoping my experience can serve as a warning to others: that might give me some comfort, at least.