Greetings Metro readers! No, this morning’s vision of a woman clad only in an Ikea shower curtain was not some hallucination brought on my last night’s curry and an early morning commute – it really was me!
Metro bottom dollar
Express Yourself
Greetings to everyone who saw my interview and photo in the Daily Express today! For those of you outside the UK, here’s a scan of the feature on page 37 (the centrefold):
You can read the but the lovely photos are only in the print edition.
Yellow satin cocktail dress
I fell in love with the yellow cocktail dress in the 11/07 Burda WOF magazine, with its wide, square neckline and fabulous 90 degree front darts, and it just so happened that I had just the right amount of butter-yellow duchess satin leftover from James’s pirate coat lining to sew this up. Since the satin was so thick I opted to omit the lining and just go for facings instead, which made this an even quicker project.
Together with my matching fascinator and steel grey satin gloves from the V&A gift shop, I rather overfulfilled the “glam attire” required for my neighbour’s lighting up party on Friday night.
One More ‘Times
To continue on with my domination of the world’s media, my interview with the Financial Times Germany appeared last weekend! This time I even got a funky illustration of me cutting into an IKEA shower curtain to go with my feature! Click below for the front page of the Weekend section, or for just my article (which appeared on page two).
Sign of the ‘Times
To follow on from yesterday’s comment about the New York Times Ikea hacks article, as things transpired throughout the day yesterday, I became less and less disappointed with being omitted from the article text itself. Sure, I gave what I thought was a good article with interesting things to say, but I know enough about the publishing world to accept that sometimes your articles get really, really chopped down and that word counts are super strict even when the topic is so interesting and varied. And did you see how many people the writer interviewed for this feature? I’m amazed she covered as much ground as she did!
Yikes! Stripes!
I wanted to make a few gifts to give to my niece and nephew while I was visiting in America, and a friend gave me the idea of making sock monkies out of really long knee socks. So when I was at Glastonbury I had a look around and picked up two striped pairs for the monkies, then stitched and stuffed them by hand over the course of two evenings (one spent in the A&E waiting room!). I added some button eyes and packed these guys in my suitcase…
Orla la!
I’m going on holiday very soon, and even though I’m not a “beach person” (try getting me to sit still long enough, my freckly pale colouring nonwithstanding), I know we’ll be going to a few pools and a municipal beach while I’m away. So I aimed towards making a beach coverup that I wouldn’t mind wearing out and about, and I’m pretty happy with the results!
Glastonbury dress in situ
I’ll have another update very shortly (as soon as I can arrange the photo shoot), but until then, I know some of you have been asking how the Glastonbury dress held up to the deluge of mud…
And the answer is, surprisingly well!
Glastonbury meets IKEA
Back when I got the pillowcases for the famous IKEA skirt, I also bought a Tanja shower curtain that caught my eye from across the store and was conveniently marked down to a fiver.
It’s stayed in my fabric stash ever since, just waiting for the perfect project, which presented itself in the form of this Burda WOF 60s dress from the May 2007 issue. It turned out to be the perfect fabric for this dress, considering that Glastonbury is coming up in a few weeks and I’ve been wanting something special to wear (and let’s face it, if the famous downpours happen again this year, this dress is ready for them!!), and because the pink piping matches my hot pink wellies perfectly.
Oh Baby!
I took a little sideline from my current two big projects (a massive velvet pirate coat for James and a lemon yellow tulle dress for a friend’s 30th birthday) to sew up some new arrivals for a friend’s, err, new arrival.
