glistening corolla posts
(the inspiration)
(my guide)I needed a little help to make it; I have oodles of trouble sewing with slippery silk fabrics; they slide all over and I usually end up with wonky seams and things that don't fit somehow. So, a basic Simplicity pattern to the rescue! At only $6.55, plus a couple bucks for thread, it's a lot cheaper than the sale shirt (I got the silk on major clearance at $1.95/yard and bought enough to get free shipping).
I skipped adding a pocket to mine because the way I see it, the pocket's just for show, anyway, and I'm not sure I'm quite cool enough to pull off the late 1980s quotation that this shirt seems to be. So, no pocket. I also ended up cutting the scoop neck on pattern D a bit larger and trimming with bias binding I cut from the remaining silk (I did try it with the facing first, but it was a mess, and much too small of a neck opening).
(finished!)
I think it turned out well! I did a bit of googling and reading up, and it seems that steaming wrinkles into silk is the way to make permanent crinkling. Although my fabric had a light overall crinkle texture, I wanted sharper and more irregular texture like the j. crew original. So after finishing the sewing, I lightly dampened it, squeezed it with a towel to remove excess water, then cranked my iron (dry, no steam!) to the highest setting, balled the top up on my ironing board and basically commenced to burn and/or steam the heck out of the fabric, pressing the iron down for 10+ seconds at a time on a section of the fabric, then moving it. I turned the blouse itself two or three times, so that I could steam/burn all sides of it. It worked! It was still a bit damp when I stopped and hung it to dry; I'll be sure and post if for some reason these crinkles don't hold permanently, but I hope they do.
yeah, those are cobwebs linking those two dinner knives together. The sugar spoon is from another set entirely. There are seven dinner knives, seven little spoons, three salad forks, six dinner forks, and eight large spoons. And of course, it's all tarnished.
Town Talk Silver Polish Spray is amazing. Spray it on, rub it off with a clean cloth (I use rags I cut from Cass' old flannel pajamas - the cotton nap is perfect for getting into the grooves in the floral pattern). A bit of energetic rubbing up will really bring out the shine. You don't have to buy this stuff from the British homepage, as I think many stores carry it - Restoration Hardware certainly does, Williams Sonoma may, and I think I've even seen it at my local Ace Hardware here in Greenwood, which has really nice cleaners available.
Nice, huh? We looked them up: they're Oneida's "Briar Rose" design (silver plate), from 1948. I love how long the tines on the dinner forks are - they're so elegant.
We've also started picking up the table linens and are wrapping up the china (I have a few more pieces to show you). The linen napkins with the pick-stitching detail are from Goodwill; I only found 4, and whitened them up with bleach. A few threads are missing here and there from the pickstitching, but at 50 cents apiece, I think they'll do. Under them are 8 ivory cotton napkins from Value Village - more basic, but they'll do if I can't find enough linen by August. And the new china pieces? Lenox's Solitaire line. I picked up 4 salad plates and 4 saucers on sale at Goodwill for a total of $12. Considering that saucers were originally $15 apiece (the price tags, yellowing with age, were still stuck to the undersides), they were a nice find!
A new necklace! This one is made of some leftover fabric scraps I got in a swap, leather sequins (more on this below), glass beads (the smallest beads) and smoky quartz beads (the medium and large beads).
I cut all of the leather sequins by hand from scraps of leather that I salvaged when I worked in retail. You see, when I worked in a certain women's boutique, all of the leather goods came on specially padded hangers. The pants and skirts would come with a little rectangle of leather that had been placed between the ridged grippers on the pants hangers and the garment, to keep the garment from developing ridged patches while being shipped. Unfortunately, we knew our clientele would not carefully replace those leather pieces after trying something on, so I had to remove all of those pieces before moving the garments to the floor.
I hated all the waste in that store. I actually started a recycling program that eliminated 80% of our waste and saved us money (because recycling was free, but we paid for our garbage service by the trashbag). I'm not a vegetarian, but I do hate to see animal products go to waste, even scraps of leather like this. So I started stacking them up, and slipping them into my bag. I never knew if it was kosher with the company or not - I figured it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and no one ever noticed that I was taking these things home instead of throwing them out. I still have hundreds of these things, about an inch to two inches wide, and about 3 inches long, in various shades of tan, brown, and black. Most are suede.
So, for this project, while it would have been nice to use a firmer leather, I wanted to use up some of these scraps. I lightly pressed them with a dry iron on low setting to get them all flat, then, using a die I bought from a leather goods shop online, I scored about 5 leather "sequins" into each piece. I had to cut all of these circles by hand, which took a while, but the sewing went really fast, at least. I made up a pattern for the base using paper, then cut and stitched it out of some scrap fabric. All of the sequins and beads are sewn on by hand, but even with some 300 or 400 of these 3/4" sequins to attach, I was able to stitch about 3/4 or more of them on in a single evening while playing board games to boot.
I still have lots of those leather bits left! I'll have to come up with another project!
(3.5 c. white flour, .5 c. dark rye flour, 1 c. wheat bran, .3 c. brown sugar, 2 Tbl baking powder, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 c. warm milk + .5 c. nonfat plain yogurt [whisked togher = 1.5 c. buttermilk substitute], 1 egg, .5 c. currants plumped in cognac, 2 Tbl fennel seeds)
