Search Results for: holiday sewing update

Save Goldhwak Road!

On Friday I received an alert from FehrTrade reader Catriona that there are plans afoot to demolish part of Goldhawk Road, the best concentration of high quality, low price fabric shops in London (and, arguably, most of Europe)!

Hammersmith and Fulham Council are proposing to demolish 30-52 Goldhawk Road in order to build high-rise flats. Included in this row of shops are my beloved Classic Textiles and A One Fabrics (IMHO, the two best fabric shops in the whole of London!) as well as a fantastic little caff which I’ve stopped in every time I’ve been shopping, and a pie & mash shop that’s been around since 1899. Every single one of these shops is an independent business which will be completely ruined by this demolition.

Other cities around the world are losing their fabric shops as they go out of business due to lack of sales, but Goldhawk Road is thriving and prospering, and I can barely make my way through the crowds most Saturdays!

So I beg of you, fellow sewers – if you’re a Londoner who shops at Goldhawk Road, or you’ve travelled to London to shop here on your holidays, or even if you’d just like the chance in the future to buy fabric at these shops you’ve heard me go on about, then PLEASE make your objections heard now!

Please register your objections by email at SBMarket@lbhf.gov.uk or call Jackie Simkins in the council’s planning department on 020 8753 3460.

Our DIY wedding – printed materials

One cost that can add up really quickly for a wedding are all the printed materials you need for the day. I’m not just talking about the invites (which can get ridiculously expensive if you go the letterpress, inner envelope, return card, RSVP envelope, etc route!), but also all the other bits of papery stuff that is forgotten until a few days before when you realise you actually do need them!

The illustration

The first step in our wedding design process was to commission a cartoon drawing of us from the illustrator John Allison (of Scary Go Round fame). James has been a big fan of his comic for ages now, and we both really liked his design style. So we sent him a photo of us, a brief description of James’s suit and my dress (at that point I was still thinking of that Vogue cowl-neck number) and to imagine 6 months’ more hair on my head. Which somehow he got eerily spot-on.

(Apologies for the awful jpg artifacting – I’ve not got the big version of the illustration in front of me to work from)

The wedding website

With the illustration in a nice, big file, we could then set about making our wedding website, which was to be the crux of our invitations. We both work in web developments, and absolutely everyone we know, right up to my grandparents, has an email address, so this way we could put the bulk of the information for both receptions on our site and be able to update it later, too. The RSVPs were all online, using a Google Spreadsheets form (easy to set up, easier for people to reply to than a trip to the post office, and we could both get access to the running tally), and all the usual venue info and registry links could be added without having to worry about word counts and layout.

I can now post a link to it for you to have a look at James’s standards-compliant coding prowess, because I don’t have to worry about you all messing up the RSVPs or gatecrashing or anything! The worst that can happen is that you decide to buy us some more insulation off our registry…

Invites

So with the website in place, all the invites really had to do was give folks the date, and point them towards the website. We ran up two sets of postcards from Moo.com (one set for the UK wedding and reception, and one for the Pennsylvania reception). And to set the tone, the wording was “James and Melissa are finally getting married!” ha!

KnipMode Summer 2010 Roundup

I’m taken a brief moment to poke my head up from under my enormous pile of BurdaStyle Book sewing, wedding gown dismantling and bodice muslining, running, gardening, wedding planning, and some seriously busy office day-jobbing to bring you an overview of the summer KnipMode magazines… I’ll show off what I’m actually sewing if and when I can, I promise!

June 2010

This dress and skirt are ok, nothing to really grab me, but they’re nice enough basics. I mostly just liked that the model has wrinkles!

Woop! Another origami dress!

Wool, satin, and lace

I’m making good progress on my tuxedo-y suit using my grandmother’s vintage Pendleton wool. I’ve done the single welt pockets (a first time for me!) and the construction of the jacket body, and I’m now working on the many collars and lapels. The placement of the welt pockets (which are hidden under a front flap) is way too high, though, and the pockets are too narrow to be useful, though – this is the second time I’ve had BWOF jacket pockets be waaaay too narrow for my hands to fit through, so I must remember that for next time.