This is the first year my boyfriend and I will be in our own place for Christmas, so we’re starting from scratch as far as ornaments and decorations go. We bought a string of lights and two packs of shiny baubles from the store, but apart from a few candy canes, the tree was bare.
I started with some festive bunting, by cutting triangles of fabric from an off-white curtain sample (donated by my boyfriend’s mother) and sewing them all together in a long strip of dark green bias binding.
The second curtain sample (with a slightly different weave from the first) became a Christmas tree skirt, with bright red bias binding along the outside edge. It’s also almost completely buried under presents now – hooray for us, boo for photos.
I then went into hand-sewing overdrive and created a bunch of soft ornaments out of (and stuffed with!) fabric scraps…
From left to right, we’ve got a fleecy blue mitten with an embroidered snowflake on either side, a fluffy red and white Santa hat, a fluffy snowman (who still needs a hat so that my Craft Night girls can stop telling me he looks like a duck!), a fluffy red and white stocking (can you tell I had lots of white fur leftover from last year’s Santa costume??), and finally, a small Christmas pudding with a green lacey holly leaf and three red embroidered berries on top.
Christmas also came a little early for me – the lovely ladies at Go Patterns sent me their new capelet pattern since I loved their little black dress so much, and I got some LilyPad Arduino components in the post today from my brother!
Arduino is a really cool, open source hardware system that magazines like Make: have been going on about for ages now, and Lilypad is the new range of sewable electronic components that work with it. I bought some conductive thread earlier this summer but haven’t got around to doing anything with it yet, but I’m really excited to start tinkering with the light sensor, power supply, and motherboard I’ve got in my kit. I just need to grab some LEDs at Maplins and I should be able to create clothing that responds to different light amounts (the sensor detects anywhere from 0-5v and can change its responses based on the input). I’m hoping the LEDs can be like a more responsive sequin accent, maybe around a neckline, but I don’t want it to look like tacky clubwear or anything!
And finally, I want to wish everyone a big, Happy Christmas and a big Welcome to everyone who’s just visiting for the first time from the Metro Ikea hacks interview (read more about that shower curtain dress here, btw). I’m thinking I need to do a bit of DIY on the site over the holidays and maybe add a press section to the sidebar, but we’ll see if I get any time amongst my sewing and tinkering to get that far!