kellan_the_tabby | Entries tagged with sewing & embroidery

[A mockup of a sandal built from pink card stock. It has two straps across the front, and a single strap at the back, across the heel.]

So what with one thing & another I am now limited to only wearing shoes that work with my suddenly VERY picky feet. This is not awesome! I’ve been lucky enough to be able to wear basically whatever shoes I wanted for most of my life! (Okay, it helped that I’ve never liked wearing high heels, or shoes with pointy toeparts that squish your toes. But STILL). Suddenly I need to wear the right kind of shoes or my feet will become Very Angry!

That’s the down side. The up side is that the fancy, special shoes my feet need to be functional? Shoes with absolutely the fuck no foot support whatsoever.

… look, I don’t even know.

These days you can buy barefoot shoes lots of places, which is pretty delightful. Down side? Sixty bucks a pop, minimum. & I’d already spent a fair amount of money on shoes trying to find SOMETHING that would work.

Up side? If you don’t have to worry about anything but a flat sole, shoes are pretty easy. & it’s not like we don’t have any leather kicking around.

So I made myself some sandals.

[One of the straps from the pattern sits next to a strap cut from lapis blue leather. Sitting on top of both is a black metal tool rather like a vegetable peeler, but with the blade perpendicular to the handle.]

I only had to buy one tool, a skiver, seen above. One uses these to thin out the ends of the straps, in a case like this, so that one does not have lumps of strap sitting underneath one’s feet. That blade? _Extremely_ sharp.

… it took a while to get the hang of it.

[The skiver sits on a piece of white card stock, along with the blue strap and a whole lot of tiny crumbs of blue leather. The card stock has been cut into in several places.]

Turns out if you start on the smooth side (& also hold the skiver right), you can start taking off bigger pieces. & also that if you work on a metal jewelry anvil instead of a hunk of card stock, you won’t make such a mess. (Probably not the best thing for the blade, but, welp)

Anyway I pushed through the ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, I am so bad at this, I will never learn’ & started getting the hang of it. As witness:

[The skiver is sitting on top of a flat steel jewelry anvil, along with a bunch of much larger pieces of blue leather. The end of the strap is sitting under the skiver; it looks pretty thin at the edge.]

Once I was through all of that it was time to glue the straps on, which required me to mark where the straps GO, which is a whole lot easier with a metallic sharpie than with a black one if you’re using black leather.

[A leather sole sits on my desk, with a gold metallic sharpie sitting on top. Short gold lines have been drawn along the edge of the sole in a couple places.]

& then I had to sew everything together, which was painfully tedious, so I didn’t get any pics of that process at all. Lastly I glued two more sole layers to the bottom of the soles, sandwiching the strap ends between the layers — you don’t want to sew all the sole layers on, as the stitches will wear through really fast as you walk. Those get glued on, too.

[A finished sandal, seen from above. The lapis blue straps sit above a brown suede insole. Slightly paler brown stitches run around the entire outer edge of the sandal.]

It’s a good thing that contact cement cures quickly, because I had maybe a half hour between glueing the last bits on & running out the door. But they look great!

[Sandals on my feet! They’re held on by lapis blue laces around my ankles. The edge of one of them, where the front straps run between the sole layers, is already pulling apart slightly. But they look pretty!]

Of course I already have plans for my next pair, & of course, there’s things I need to fix. But they work, & I have shoes again!

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

[ A rectangular piece of embroidery; the background is deep forest green, with two simple crossed trumpets in yellow. In blazon: Vert, two straight trumpets in saltire, bells in chief, Or. ]

So I’ve barely been able to really be _in_ the SCA in … a long while. It’s been five years since I lived close enough to a local group to be able to so much as go to fighter practice, & even before then, in Dragonsspine & Hartshorndale, I was too busy just surviving to be able to really be _involved_. I got to plenty of events, but always as a merchant. Not that merchants aren’t ever part of the community that makes up the SCA — most of us _are_ — but there’s still a gap there, especially when you’re the only one running the booth & can’t make it to classes. Or go watch the fencing. Or go to court to watch a friend get an award, especially when they put court up against the local version of Midnight Madness. & I’ve been missing all of that, a LOT.

So when it was announced that a friend would be getting her Pelican at Pennsic, & that a bunch of embroidery would need to be done, I JUMPED on that. I think I was the first one who asked, actually, which gave me my pick of what to embroider, so of COURSE I picked the heralds’ badge.

(& then it took me forEVer to actually get it done, because of Things & also I volunteered to sew a tunic for her as well, but I got it all done in time, if barely)

The SCA, despite the presence of merchants, runs on something much closer to a gift economy than on it does on anything like capitalism. I didn’t get paid for my work, either in money or in anything else. Eventually the energy I put into the embroidery (& the tunic) will make its way back around to me — & yes, that sounds pretty woo, but I mean it in a pretty literal sense here — & in the meantime, while I haven’t benefited financially, I’ve definitely gained some esteem in the eyes of those who know that I did the work (although that miiiight be a bit less than it would have been had I gotten everything done sooner!).

I really do prefer a gift economy — I’d love to be able to set up my booth & just leave it there, secure in the knowledge that people wouldn’t take more than was reasonable, & that I could, in turn, access the necessities of living as I needed them, & the small luxuries as I wanted them, within reason. But … here we are.

(I’m not looking for arguments about the perceived benefits and/or necessity of capitalism; take that somewhere else. I _will_ say that plenty of human societies have run just fine on gift economies, & if we’ve done it before, I don’t see why we can’t do it again)

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

[A messenger bag made from reclaimed denim — back pockets in various shades of blue and grey line the bottom edge, the flap is made of grey denim, and the strap is made from pieces of old waistband.

Back in December, more or less, a Discord friend was destashing a bunch of stuff, & I took one look at this messenger bag & said MINE. I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with purses for a while, but haven’t been able to find a messenger bag I actually liked for less than A LOT of money, & I really do prefer to get things used when I can. It’s not like I can’t mend them if they need it.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

[ A pair of thick socks, mottled in shades of dark pink. Blue stitching is visible at the balls & heels of the soles. ]

I didn’t spend the week doing nothing, have you MET me. (Although I did take several naps, go me.)

I spent a lot of time flopped on the couch, reading, & also got some sewing done. As witness!

… okay, yes, strictly speaking this is darning, not sewing.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!

not that I’m remotely done with the sewing, mind you

I think a lot of you are familiar with what my booth usually looks like. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the top picture is what I’ve been running with for the last several years. It’s a pretty standard wedge tent, with one long side held up on poles instead of staked to the ground. It’s sturdy, not terrible to put up, & it works.

I got the idea a year or two back to use the bits that hang down from the side of the roof — you can just see one on the left side of the tent; they’d be part of the door if I were using it as a wedge tent — to extend the space the tent overs out to the side a bit. This spring I finally got the chance to try it out.

It works! I mean, I knew that I could add a couple of poles & _do_ it; what I didn’t know was if it would make enough extra space to be worth the effort. Once I had the thing up? Yeah. SO worth it.

I’ve _also_ needed new sidewalls for years. I’ve been using too-small pieces of canvas, extra tablecloths, & even a random spare shower curtain for that, & it. Hasn’t LOOKED good. It looks like crap, to be honest, & I’m lucky I haven’t had to deal with serious wind. I couldn’t do anything about it until I tried the thing with the flaps, though, so I’ve been waiting to get that started, too.

I still have to sew a bunch of ties & loops to the side walls, but they’re cut, they’re hemmed, & they more-or-less fit.

…they also still need some adjustment, but I’ll be putting another pole on the side that’s drooping, & shifting some things around, & I think they’ll be in pretty good shape by Battlemoor.