Everybody’s Talking Sewing

I LOVE SILK! I love the feel, the drape, the versatility - and most of all, I love dyeing it. I get shivers just thinking about it.

Hey! I heard that - I’m not weird, I’m unique.

Last year I decided to dye a bunch of 14″ x 72″ Habotai 8mm silk scarves as holiday gifts.

There were several reasons for it:

1. Nothing beats a hand-made gift, especially when it’s silk
2. No two were the same, and you won’t find anything like it on a store shelf
3. I got to play!

So about a month before Christmas, I got in my silk scarf blanks, new dyes, different kinds of salts (table, Kosher, rock), and Wintergreen rubbing alcohol.

I set up in the sewing room with saw-horses and a board. The board was covered in mid-weight plastic that could be either wiped down or easily removed and replaced as needed.

I could now only walk on one side of the room along the board. I have got to get a bigger sewing room!

The pictures you see here (nice and large) were my favorites. I ended up doing 15 scarves, and the biggest problem was keeping the fur-kids away as I worked. You would have thought I was depriving them of food and water the way they carried on! Gads they’re spoiled.

All my dyeing is done by hand; I don’t do vat dyeing. That means that every color is separately applied with ‘something’ and so are any additional effect like using the salts or alcohol.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with vat dyeing, I simply don’t enjoy doing it.

The dyes I use are non-toxic and come premixed in most cases. Some are concentrates, but I never use powders. Between my asthma, tons of allergies, and the fur-kids, I’m extremely careful - and that cancels out working with powders. I can even work without gloves as long as I don’t mind brightly colored hands. I don’t.

So here I dyed all these great looking scarves and included pictures of them in the December Wearable Update Newsletter. Next thing I knew, I had requests to buy them!

Yeah, I was flattered - I was also pretty speechless.

Every single one of them sold. I’d never-ever even tried to sell my dyed pieces! I’d used them for competition garments, samples, and gifts.

One of the women, Nancy, bought 4 of the them and sent a picture of the happy group at Christmas. Have I mentioned how much I love what I do?

Um, I had to remake all the Christmas gifts. Everyone got three different kinds of herbal bath soak. And I made sure that there was enough left over for me too!

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It’s almost the middle of October. How can it be the middle of October? It was just June! I blinked again didn’t I? Gotta stop doing that…

I know a lot of folks that have the exact same reaction - usually followed by a good case of panic for the upcoming holiday season. I can relate.

Last year we started creating fast-to-make Free Holiday Ornament patterns to download in PDF format. The original series was Cats and Dogs, and since then we’ve added All Baby Things and Hope and Remembrance.

Make them out of fleece or have the kids do them from felt! Nice and quirky - they’re going to make you smile.

A few weeks ago while paying bills I realized it was getting on that time of year again. I know their’s a correlation between those two items… anyway, I wanted something that could make up fast, didn’t cost an arm-and-a-leg, and still look good.

I don’t want much do I?

Well it took a bit, but I figured it out. If you’ve opened a catalogue lately, you’re going to see Wine Glass Charms staring at you - pricey Wine Glass Charms.

I think they’re great… especially when I realized I had everything I needed to really personalize them. Well Duh Ann! Glad you woke up kiddo.

We’d already put together 13 different sets of themed Pewter Charms and had them on the Wearables site, and I’m discovering more I’ve just ‘got to have’ all the time. (If there’s some theme we haven’t created yet, but you’d really like, let us know) These are perfect to use for Wine Glass Charms.

All I needed to do was get the rest of the components and write up some instructions. I could so do that!

I ended up putting together kits for sets of 6 Wine Glass Charms; with extra split rings and 24 extra crystal glass beads. You didn’t think I was going to use acrylic did you? Not a chance. All you need to do is add your favorite charms.

Quick, easy, and inexpensive - I think we have a winner here. Besides, I’ve already made 24; I’m on a roll.

PS: You can learn all about them if you just Click Here.

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