Sewing patches by hand, however, is a incredibly LOOOONG process. I took felt, drew on my design and then hand stitched every single stitch needed to completely cover the felt. Then I had to do a whip stitch around all the edges. I'm really pleased with how they turned out but, honestly, I probably will never make one again. Well, maybe if/when I have children I'll make some again. But until that day, patches by hand are not going to happen. Patches by machine, however, are another story all together.
So, I played with felt and my darning foot on my sewing machine and discovered I could make some pretty cool patches. I had pictures of a couple of birds I made for me and my man for Valentine's Day, but my camera freaked out one day and deleted them and a few others before I'd put them on my computer. I'll have to take some new ones. I think I might make a line of patches to sell with my clothing at Fresh Baked Goods.
I bought these vintage ties at a couple different stores in Kensington Market. One store in particular, Courage My Love, was awesome for vintage ties! They have 2 large spinning tie racks laden with hundreds of ties. Hundreds! And they are all displayed in order of colour, which was super helpful. I spent a long time picking out the right ties for the right people.
In the end, I chose these 3 ties for my boyfriend, my dad and my brother. Then I silkscreened these designs I created onto them, experimenting with layering of colours. Fortunately all my experimenting turned out-- I'm horrible for experimenting on the final product rather than doing a mock-up first.
I also made 2 ties for my roomie, Rob, for his birthday back on December 10, but I didn't take photos of them. I'll have to do that. Preferably while he's wearing them.
So every single person I made gifts for also got one of these wine glasses. I went out and bought a few colours of Testor's Enamel from Curry's. I got the idea to paint wine glasses not long before Christmas so I had very few colours to choose from, but I'm happy with the way they turned out.
Of course, after I gave these glasses away both my brother and my boyfriend informed me that they each have about 20 different colours of Testor's Enamel that I could have chosen from (I forgot that boys tend to own these paints from their childhood; my brother used them to paint model cars and Jeff used them to paint tiny metal knights and soldiers). Oh well! I've got Jeff's collection of paints in my possession now, and I know exactly where Greg's are stashed at my parents' place. I'm sure I'll find more uses for Testor's Enamel in the future.
My inspiration for these came from a book I requested for my birthday. My birthday was in August, but my parents sent me a number of very exciting sewing-related books as a very belated birthday gift in November. The book is called Doodle Stitching and I am in LOVE with it. I really really enjoy doing hand embroidery. It's tough because I can't make and sell clothes with hand embroidered designs and details because so many hours have to go into the work, which makes the items too expensive to sell. So, I now reserve all my hand embroidery for the people I love most.
This is a super easy project if you want to get into hand embroidery. Just go online or grab a book that shows you how to do some basic embroidery stitches (the book I mentioned above would work, however, I learned--and as an adult, I might add--from this awesome Kids Klutz book). Then draw out some basic doodles on a piece of fabric (cotton works best, and if you put it in an embroidery hoop, that also helps to keep it stretched out and flat while sewing) and go to town embroidering over your doodles! That's what I did for these journal covers; however, I used linen to embroider onto, mainly because I liked the look of the fabric and because I happen to have about 3 metres of it lying around.
After hand stitching my designs, I ironed the edges of the linen under, so that there wouldn't be any frayed edges showing, and machine sewed it to the fabric that I used to cover the journal (but you could do this by hand). Or, if you don't want to make the journal cover part, you could just glue your beautiful bit of embroidery onto a journal of your choice. Voila!
This year at Christmas I hand made absolutely every single gift I gave; this was a HUGE endeavor, one that I've attempted to do for years now and always failed. Well, not this past Christmas (side note: I realize it is almost 2 months after Christmas and I'm just blogging about this now... I'm slowing getting my act together...).
Christmas of 2008 was the year of me finally pulling through with all my handmade gifts (and only a couple of them were late!) I must say though, the best way to go through with handmade gifts is to simply just not have enough money to rely on buying something in case your gift takes too long, or is finicky and frustrating, or any number of related excuses that always cause me to not make/finish handmade things. I HAD to make things this past year, or no one would be getting anything (well, or they'd be getting something lame, like a blank t-shirt. Not as exciting as a t-shirt with pretty designs).
So, to start off my gift-giving-handmade extravaganza, I have posted just the t-shirts that I made for people:
This was my second Christmas being part of the "adult draw" with the Jess family. This is the rule: once you're finished your undergrad/college, you no longer qualify to receive gifts from every aunt and uncle. This means you are put in the adult draw and have to draw the name of the person you will give a gift to. Last time I got my cousin Colin and I made him a Colin Action Figure. This time I drew my Uncle Glenn and I made him this t-shirt. I also made him something else, but it doesn't fit into my "Tee Time" blog. It's hard to tell, but I used a combo of silk screening, hand painting and free-hand-sewing-machine sewing/embroidery (I'm not sure that there's an official word for that last part).
This one was actually a custom order for my roomie, Vikki. This tee was made for one of her co-workers, Ashley. It's based on a tattoo that is a major part of a book that Ashley loves (this is the back of the tee). Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the book right now (but I'm pretty sure the author's name is Jacqueline Carrey).
This one I made for my bro.
And here's the same thing, only different colours for my bf. In this close-up pic you can see the free-hand sewing I did on my machine a little better.
There. All the shirts I made for the holiday season are now posted. Stay tuned for images of the non-shirt gifts I made...!
I LOVE doing custom orders. I took a number of custom orders from friends before Christmas, which was awesome. I get kind of bored printing/sewing the same design over and over, so doing custom orders is great because I only ever do one or two of any particular design. I feel it maximizes my enjoyment and creativity. And it makes other people really happy too! Who doesn't love a good custom-made item? Here are the custom orders I did up for this past Christmas season:
My friends, Chris and Shari, are getting married this coming spring. Shari asked me to design a couple shirts for her parents for Christmas. The only requirement was that one shirt had to say, "Father of the bride" and the other shirt had to say "Mother of the bride". So, that's just what I did. Shari's parents received these hand-embroidered shirts for Christmas and, apparently, they went over very well. So well, in fact, that Shari's dad reportedly wore his shirt the next day. Merry Christmas, Mr. and Mrs. Porter!
I think my favourite part about this project was designing my "font". I was inspired by a font that currently advertises some new high-rise condos that are being built at Bloor and St.George in Toronto. Pretty sweet.
Fortunately, this coming Thursday I'm also doing a craft show at the Gladstone Hotel from 8pm-Midnight. It's the SpeakEasy Holiday Show. I've been advertising like mad for it within the past few days. Unfortunately there isn't a specific website connected with the craft show, so you'll just have to trust me when I say it sounds like it's going to be awesome; TONS of handmade options. AND Palais Designs!
These arrived over a week ago now, but I'm still super-excited about them. LABELS! Aren't they cool? Part of me wants to sew them in everything I own, whether or not I made it. There's something really neat about a product that has your name in it (or company name; in this case it's kind of both since Palais is my camp name and business name). I'm really happy with these. And it's so cool that it's all my own handwriting; it would have taken me forever to pick the right font. The only disappointing part is that I did up the label in Adobe Illustrator, which I downloaded for free as a 30-day trial. Now my 30 days are up and I can no longer access this image. Boourns. Fortunately I have a few print-outs of it in a few sizes, but that's all. I really wish that Illustrator was in my budget! Some day...
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sarah said:
I especially like their blank expression!So "youth of today" ish!Ha ha--- Great work Palais- I second Travis on the mass... read more
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Travis Jon Allison said:
[this is good]Bloody BRILLIANT idea. You know... you could work this up as another income. There are metric-butt-loads of people doing craft... read more
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