Remake: Tiny Pocket Tank

My wee sister’s a bit of a globe trotter. As I may have mentioned before, I am not in the least bit jealous of this. Not at all. Not even one tiny little bit. The upside of this (not that there’s a downside, not even a green ugly head-rearing one) is that she brings back gorgeous fabricky offerings from far-off lands (mostly India.) I haven’t quite got her trained to select fabulous bolts of fabric, pack them up and send them straight to me in Switzerland (you she wouldn’t even have to carry them around with you her! ;) ) However, when she spent some months on the subcontinent a couple of years ago, she didn’t resist the call of the local markets, or the call of the clothes sellers who make up clothes in whatever size requested. She’s an inch or so taller than me, and proportionally very similar, so most of her clothes fit me quite well (although you certainly wouldn’t find me going through her wardrobe when she’s away. Not at all.*innocent face*)

Patching it up.

One of the things that I do quite a lot of is mending clothes. I really believe in not throwing clothes away when they break, but mending and re-making whenever possible. It makes you realise how quickly the clothes that looked good on the shop hanger deteriorate – in our awful culture disposable fashion, they’re only meant to look good long enough for you to buy them, get them home and wear them once. Almost all of my jeans (apart from the newest pair) have holes in the knees, which I’ve mended over and over usually with a bit of fusible interfacing on the inside and machine or hand stitching to secure it, and draw attention away from the hole make it look more interesting.

Button-back Top

Remember this patterned fabric? It was on my list of things to do for the summer.

China-blue Top

So here are the long-promised pictures of that top I’ve been going on about.

It started life as a pillow-case in the sale in Coop, reduced down to a couple of francs, and I bought it purely for the fabric, as Swiss pillows are much larger than the ones we’re used to in the UK. (Actually, it turned out that this one was the right size for one of my English pillows, so I have less scrap fabric left over than I expected, but there was still enough for a top that I fit in.)

Pattern Snippets

In this post I introduced you to some pretty patterned fabric that I have clothing plans for. One of those plans is finished, this pretty china-patterned (and as someone pointed out, which describes it beautifully) Delfty cloth:

A Doily Lampshade

Here’s a project that was on my mental to-do list for a very long time. It first crept in and settled down before I left England, inspired by a penchant for doilies that was plaguing Pinterest at the time, and the idea started putting down roots

Shoe rack from a pallet

I had a problem, which was this.

Shoes.

Now, it’s not what you’re thinking, I’m not a millions-of-pairs-of-shoes kind of gal, I’d generally rather have a few pairs of good leather shoes than a dozen pairs of cheaply-made, brightly-coloured shinies.

No, my problem is the size of my flat, or more specifically, the size of the hallway in my flat. There are three or four pairs of shoes I wear regularly,