Colorful details

Still no sewing, but at least some of making my home pretty! Last Friday (less than a week from the big separation and moving out chaos) one of my cats managed to open the door to the laundry room, jump up onto some loose shelves tearing down them and five empty flower pots, this resulting in a shard cutting off his Achilles tendon (OUCH!). Pretty much as much bad luck as possible, according to the Vet, that tendon is not easy to break :( So, Murphy's law is very much at work in my life... Now, ten weeks of miserable cat in plaster to look forward to. Lovely!

Oh well, whenever things actually do calm down (like, next year or so, lol), the very first thing on the list of things I want to make is something along the lines of these gorgeous Giorgio Armani silk pants from the spring 2012 collection. (I might have mentioned these before...). Only I think I'll put the zipper in the back instead, less weird bulk over the belly... After all I'm not model skinny... (thank God!) :)

I have the perfect fabric already in my stash, a crazy cheap charity shop find (20SEK, that's like 3$, insane!)

Oh and by the way, those shoes in the bookshelf in the first pic? Mum's party shoes from the 1970's. Way too cool to be hidden in a cabinet.

Home. My home.

My home.

After the ordeals of this weekend's move, the unexpected sadness... I thought I was supposed to feel good about being by myself, after all it's all I wished for these last months. But no. Thankfully I'm not the kind to gravel, so I built furniture and started (and got quite far in) making this MY home. Most of the things my ex took with him when he moved out were in the living room, guest room and "office". I focused on getting the living room and the office in order. One great thing is that the new office/work room has a very long desk where I can fit in both computer and sewing machine. Hello creativity! And speaking of creativity, the living room corner below is my inspiration corner. It makes me happy just looking at the picture.

Fashion magazine stacking NYC style, my easel, a camel saddle that my grandfather got on one of his business trips decades ago, and my dads old banjo (in it's case). (And Totoro!) I love this corner. The only change I'll make here is put a very colorful painting where the ships are now. Something Chagall-style. I just need to find me a very very big canvas.

Finally two bookshelves! I do need to get the art up on the walls though.

The sewing corner of the office. Pattern collection sorted by decade, and loads of pattern magazines.

 My office/sewing room. This used to be the darkest room of the apartment, so you can imagine how happy I am about this solution!

So, just a small update, but I'm so happy with the results so far, I really wanted to share :)

Have a great week everyone!

D-day

...as in my-ex-moving-out-day. I'm sorry about bombing the blog with these things. It'll be over soon, trust me. Then I'll be posting loads about sewing, fashion, inspiration and most likely quite a lot about home decor/interior design as I make this place my HOME!

For now, more inspiration pictures, just because I can, I need to focus on the good things, and a girl can dream, right?

All pictures courtesy of http://habituallychic.blogspot.com/

A new day...

And this is all I had to say today. Hope you will all have a lovely weekend!

Where did she go?

I bet some of you were wondering that, right?

(I just wrote this post, version 1, about how everything has been going really crappy for me the last year or so, was adding the pictures at the end when blogger crashed, and ta-da! Apparently no more autosave to draft! Didn't see that one coming, 30 minutes of writing gone. Oh the irony!)

Well anyway, here's take 2, and I hope you don't mind the blog being just a bit overly personal just this once. (If you don't want to know, scroll down and look at some lovely interior design inspiration instead!)

Last summer, this little Miss Overachiever burned-out, spent months in the couch staring at the wall. I did of course spend quite a lot of time in front of the sewing machine as well (as I think you know), now that's great therapy! Then - no job for the latter of fall and all winter (both because I just didn't have the energy and because the market isn't exactly peachy). Somewhere in this mess, the relationship I've been in for the last few years went belly up and died. So the last few months have been all about what to do next, who is going to move, and where to, and what will I do if I can't find a job... With all those things rambling around in my head like a bunch of wild boar there has been absolutely no room for sewing. But then finally a month ago I did find a job, and a quite good one actually, so I'll be able to support myself again. Now in two days my ex is moving out, and in between the chaos, the boxes and bags, I have decided to stay here, in my big apartment.

Maybe now I can get something done again, in a time not too far away! I have so many great ideas! I just need to get me a desk/sewing table. I have looked at a big one I can use for both purposes at IKEA, quite cheap but really ugly. However at this point I don't care. It's not always about the furniture, a lot can be done to make a room look great anyway!  I've been reading a lot of home decor magazines and blogs the last week, inspired to make this place more "me" in the near future. It's all about color!

We'll see what happens, but for now I wanted to share some of my favorite inspiration pictures of gorgeous homes at this moment.

All pictures courtesy of http://habituallychic.blogspot.com/

The Vincent minidress

Finally I got back to sewing! I think I broke myself a bit on making that 1950's party dress for New Years. That does of course not mean I've been doing nothing, there's always something creative going on. For the last few months, it's been music.

To make a long story short, I've been longing to get back to sewing, but just not found any reason/garment interesting enough to make me. Then, a fellow musician shared this video on facebook:



Not only did it remind me of what an amazing song that is, but obviously also of the wonderful art of Vincent Van Gogh. And, shortly after that, I checked The Sew Weekly and found the theme of the week to be art. Figuring that must be a sign, I decided to make something very colorful and lively, inspired by Vincent. I went with a super simple mini dress with some hippie vibe. Here's my result:

Why, yes I just had to get a little extra creative working on the picture! It took forever, so the collage is the only one.

The dress is really hard to photograph, it gets very flat under the flash and the color is a bit off, the picture below is perhaps closer to the truth.

I left the edges raw, but zigzaged a couple of rows inside of the edge, both for decoration and for making sure it wont fray. The material is some sort of stretchy sweatshirt kind of fabric so I think it will most likely just roll instead of fray.

And here's the pattern I used, year unknown as with many old Swedish patterns... I shortened it A LOT, (I didn't have enough fabric, surprise surprise!), lowered the neckline quite a bit and cut the sleeves to about elbow length. Also I ignored the fact that the pattern called for a zipper. I can wiggle into the dress fairly easy anyway!

All in all, it took me 2 hours, maybe 2,5 to get this done. Why on earth did I put sewing off for so long?

How I miss summer!

Woke up bright and early this morning to a lovely sixteen degrees below zero (about 3 °F). Just realized that one big reason for not sewing is that I just want to make garments for warmer weather. I dream about walking around in shorts like in this photo below, from last summer.

There are so many lovely ideas for dresses, skirts, cute little tops, nice silky pants in my head... Wonder what I should do to get back on track seasonwise? I'm quite likely to have at least another 8 weeks of winter. Maybe I should sort through my stash, placing all warmer fabrics on top so I see those everytime I open the drawers and cabinets? (Instead of seeing my silks, organzas, lightweight flower patterned cottons and so on... Oh misery!)