Prom dress

My boyfriend's little cousin asked me to make her a prom dress so I've done it as a present for her 16th birthday.

She wanted to go for a dress with a fitted bodice and a tutu style bottom of the dress. We went shopping to one of my favourite fabric shops Abakhan.

I started with taking her measurements and fitting a bodice.

Then I started on a tutu. The whole 14 meters of fabric and many pins later i got this

Sewing in the zip is the tricky bit here. 

Project House

Our Handmade Story is mostly all about handmade things but recently we`ve been busy with our Project House. Our aim is to turn it into full time property development. We`ve bought it a couple of months ago, It needed quite a bit of work doing, A LOT more than we anticipated.

First house, many mistakes and lessons learnt. I have to admit very expensive lessons. We had many days when we thought that it just couldn`t get worse but it did. It all started well with creating a third bedroom. After that we had a lot of problems with our first builders. Drinking, smoking, not turning up, using the back yard as skip, plastering over damp walls... You name it!

 

 

 Some of the walls were so damp that the plaster was coming off when we were taking the wallpaper off, so we had to strip them back to brick.

 

 

Now we know that finding the right local builder is the most important thing when you want to be renovating properties and that should have been our priority. The right builder works to your requirements, can plan properly and does not come out with a lot of excuses.

We are just a couple of weeks away from completing it and we can finally breathe knowing that it`s on the right track.

I`ll be keeping you up to date with our work so I will post some pictures of the work that was being done in the meantime and then the finished project.

My niece`s 1st birthday :)

My niece is celebrating her 1st birthday at the end of the month, I can`t wait! :)  I really would like to make something special for her. At the minute the plan is to make a few summery outfits: skirts with matching customised bodysuits, a couple of nappy cover shorts, headbands, a dress and a simple patchwork quilt. Ohhh and a little handmade doll.

Today I`ve made a skirt, a pair of leggings and little baby shorts with a matching headband.  I was just about to make another pair of leggings but my double needle broke... and..... I didn`t have a spare one :( This one lasted me ages. I can`t believe that I never used to use a double needle and now I couldn`t even think about sewing stretchy fabrics without it. I guess it`s ok if someone has stretchy stich on their sewing machine. My Singer only does straight and zigzag stich.

I`m in love with Cynthia Rowley for Michael Miller fabric!

I really enjoyed making these littlle clothes, There are a few more to come!

Crochet baby shoes

Someone asked me to make little crochet shoes. I`ve not crocheted in ages so was really happy to dig out my crochet hook. I didn`t use a pattern, I just made them.
My first attemp was pretty rubbish so started again, they are not perfect but I`m quite happy with them.

I really quite enjoy crocheting. I`m really tempted to start doing it more often. I`ve just had a go at a wavy style crochet.

Love Sewing

I always buy the Burda magazine, you get a lot of patterns for £4.95. Even if there was just one or two patterns that I liked I think it`s still worth buying when a single pattern is about £5 or more.This month I looked through Burda and I wasn`t really happy with the content. I decied not to buy it, It doesn`t happen often at all. I looked through a few different sewing magazines and Love Sewing caught my eye.

Love Sewing

It had a free pattern I really liked the look of - The Bardot Dress, right up my street!

The Bardot Dress

It`s quite an interesting magzine, there are many projects at different levels for beginers or advanced. It's not perfect though, It looks like they made a mistake with a mini Ruby Dress, The neckline is very very small and I'm sure it's not suppose to look like that.

What puts me off most sewing magazines is that the projects are either very simple or not attractive at all, pictures look like they were taken 10 years ago. I like vintage but real vintage, not old looking stuff. Love Sewing looks modern, I`m even considering subscribing to it!

I've challenge myself to stay off sugar for a month, I'm at the end of my second week now and I have to say it's been difficult but not impossible. I started eating a lot more greens and drinking herbal teas. My favourite at the moment : lemon and ginger tea (with fresh ginger and lemon).