Robot toys and the Zeitgeist

A few years back I spoke about just how many butterfly fabrics we had in our shop.  I had in away touched on the concept of zeitgeist. Many people like to follow and be part of fashion. Other people like the idea of being in touch with society but treading their own sartorial path. Others of us just wear waistcoats. But even when we are forging our own fabric creations in the crucibles of our sewing rooms we can still show that we are wear of the word outside. And this is the zeitgeist.

 Zeitgeist is a German concept meaning "Spirit of the Age". In other words capturing the scene of the moment, that indefinable  thing that connects us all. Our staff are charged with the duty of working out what will be "In", what people will want, but also to ensure our customers can then take our fabrics and mold them to their will and to express their individuality whist;t also being fashion savvy.

I suppose right now themes around us include zombies and general retro mad science.
I was in a coffee shop reading a book about a scientist fellow of old with questionable sanity.

Vintage robot fabric

Whilst thinking of giant robots and death rays I spotted a young lady who was a shining example of what I mean.  She had a rather fetching bag in the shape of a fuzzy green monster whilst her sweater had a collection of vintage or retro robots! I just had to take a picture to show everyone in our shop around the corner. You see we'd just taken collection of a simaler pattern, but in a heavier cotton fabric.

Retro robot fabric

And so there you have it, how to be fashionable and yet also individual. 
There are plenty of other cool retro sci fi fabrics  out there, like this fantastic Rocket Capitan fabric.

Experiment, mix different fabrics and textures  go  forth and create, to infinity and beyond! (well to the sewing machine and beyond!)

Making a Princess Bubblegum Cosplay Dress

I was around my friend Keely's  house when she started talking about a Fancy dress event called INVASION COLCHESTER! Her and her family were planning on going as characters from Adventure Time, a strange cartoon for children set in what appears to be a post apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. My friend was stressing about getting a dress to become "Princes Bubblegum". I asked why she didn't just make one. "It's okay for you with a full sewing room and hundreds of reference books, it's much harder  to make things up as you go along". Challenge accepted. Can I make an affordable costume (around £20) using a standard sewing gear and no fancy or difficult techniques.

Many of these ideas would work just as well for a Halloween costume. 

Step one - Reference

What does Prince Bubblegum look like?
The dress looks simple enough, puffy sleeves, tight bodice, long skirt section. Then a contrasting collar and belt.

Step two- Initial planning

I decided to make a pattern for a tight-ish bodice and a floor length circle skirt. These would be sewn together at the waist and the belt would hide the seam. The whole garment would be made of poly cotton and have a zip fastening at the back. Initially I was going to leave the seams untreated and the garment unlined, however my friend said she would like to be able to wear it a few times. As a result I quickly change my  plans to make the dress more durable.  The bodice section would be lined and all exposed seams would be bias bound. The hem of the circle dress would be bias bound as well.

Step three - Making a pattern

Normally in my studio I have proper pattern paper or brown paper. However these aren't essential. You can just tape newspaper sheets together. use MASKING tape however and not sellotape. If need be later on you can iron your pattern if you use masking tape but sellotape will melt everywhere. You can also draw on masking tape much easier than sellotape.


I didn't have access to my books and so I had to come up with a pattern off the top of my head.
I can not stress the following enough- There is no supbstitute for a good pattern or a pattern making book.
However here's what I did. I drew a rectangle that measured 2cm more than my friends' nape (bottom of neck) to waist measurement high. The width was half her bust plus 5cm. I worked the neck out by measuring her neck and adding some ease this is VERY unscientific. The waist darts are easier, just take the difference between the bust and the waist and half it (as the pattern makes half a garment). The amount left is the amount you have to dart into the waist.I guessed at what angle the should sloped at and then drew in the arm hole, going down as far as the bust line.

Once the pattern was drawn  I cut it out, and then cut up through the bust darts, the side dart and the back dart. This left me with 3 pattern pieces.

Step four - Cutting out fabric

The fabric was folded selvedges together and the centre bodice panel placed on the fold. The pattern has NO SEAM ALLOWANCE. At home I'd use a seam guide to ass a traditional 5'8 of an inch seam. However I was back to basics here and so I fashioned a guide out of a cereal packet.




Step five - Making up

Construction of the bodice was relatively simple.  Just sew the panels together, right  sides together. The sleeves were slightly trickier. Now  here I went totally off track. I knew the sleeves were going to be VERY puffy, this gave me a lot of wiggle  room in design. I just taped the pattern together  the shoulders to give me the outline of the arm hole. I drew this on to some newspaper and then stretched the design making it Twice as wide and nearly twice as high. I then added 15cm to the bottoms length for the actual sleeve.

I removed the seam allowances from the arm hole of the LINING and bias bound it. Each sleeve was sewn along it's length and then pleated into the armhole of the bodice.

A pattern for the collar was made the same was as the sleeves with it being cut at the back for the zip.


Before the collar and lining were attached to the bodice  the circle skirt had to be made and attached.
Check out our guide on " How to make a circle skirt ".

The seams of the circle skirt were pressed open and bias bound and the hem was bias bound.
The collar was basted with minimal seam allowance to the neckline and the circle skirt was sewn to the bodice. All that remained was sewing the lining around the neck hole and  then pulling the dress right side out and pressing it. I tacked the lining to the bodice around the shoulders and around the waist as well to give it stability.








Final Thoughts.

This post isn't one of my typical "how to make" posts. It's more a collection if ideas and concepts. If you are not sure how to make something just get some poly cotton and give it a go, fly hands free once in a while, you may surprise yourself by your own ingenuity.

Where's the website Dean?

Still no website! The problems behind this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago. I was watching the news when the terrible tsunami laid waste to Fukashima. My friend kept telling me I shouldn't be so concerned with things on the other side of the world, that I was "buying into the global panic".  I didn't feel like I was panicking, I was concerned for the people affected and also aware that the impact of this disaster would be far reaching.  Three months later the same friends was complaining that his new hard drive cost much more than it would have a year ago. I explained  the hard drive factories in Fukashima were destroyed, causing a drop in supply hence an increase in cost.  A global event on the other side of the world had affected his bank account, take about a butterfly effect.

Such is the problem with our new website. Our old site just worked on pay pal. The new site is built and ready to go, but needs a merchant e-commerce back account for payments. These accounts have been used by terrorists and criminals in the past, and so they are now strictly regulated. A global issue is slowing us up. However we have now been given the green light, it's just a matter  of getting our account number sorted out and transferring our domain! Much like the old British Rail, we're getting there, and like any great journey  the destination will be worth the travel.

So where is the website, and where have we been?

Okay so there's no website yet, why? We've had people panicking (including us at one point) but it's all being sorted. In an exercise of radical honesty, I thought I would share exactly and honesty what's been going on behind the scenes.

The big huge plus of our new website is that it's linked directly to the database of stock. This means if we only have 3 metres of something it will warn the customer that there may be a delay in ordering if they try to order more than 3 metres.

To use this new sight we need to have a new payment gateway as the system will not allow us to just use PayPal like our old site did. Here lays the problem. A new payment system means a new merchant account. In the post 9-11 world there are a LOT of hoops to jump through to set up one of these accounts.

This is almost sorted, so the website will go live about 48 hours after the payment system is sorted.

So where have the blogs and the tweets been?
ALMOST all of the social media is done by one person, the same person is sorting out the web.  And here we hit another snag. The current database is about a year old. A lot of products were imported from an old data base. This worked fine, that is until we started putting things on the website. There is no structure to how the yarns are arranged on the database. This in itself causes no problems in the shop, the wool is scanned the bar-code brings up the correct product. However if you were to look through the database you would find it very hard to find something as there is no real organization, at least for yarn.  So every single yarn had to be duplicated, photographed, new product info imputed, and then the bar-code transferred from the old one. A long laborious processes and there just wasn't enough time to sort out the  social side, esp as I like to link the webshop to the blogs, and there was no webshop.

We're through the worst of  it now though, so we're back!

So what's happening with the Website?

We've noticed a change in our relationships with our customers in the last year, and quite frankly, we like it.
Our customers are no longer just coming to us for fabric (although they are always welcome to do so), we are becoming more of a service than a vendor.  People come in for advice on projects and inspiration for things to make. We are embracing this whole heartily and so want our blog to not just have a few projects but to also let you know what we're up to, to treat you as part of our Fabric8 family and to keep you informed on what's happening at your shop. We don't want to just tell you about any changes we're making, we also want you to know WHY we are making them.

Some of you may have been along to our website and found it shut down. Fear not we're not shutting up shop, in fact quite the reverse.  We had an epiphany a few weeks ago.
Our Colchester branch of Fabric8 has had a bit of a re-arrange.  Our knitting section is now downstairs to help those with reduced mobility to carry on with a past time they love.  Whilst working out what changes we can make in store we decided to have a look at what improvements we needed in  our virtual store as well.

  We've been working very hard on our webshop but there were some things the software we were using just couldn't do.  These included:
Presenting all the linings on one page and having icons to pick out the colour you need.
Easily linking to complimentary fabrics
And the biggest change for me, hooking up the website to the tills so the website will not offer fabrics that we are out of stock of.

Luckily we have a solution to all these issues with our new website system. But here's the downside, we have to take our website off line for a few days. When we go live again the website will be better than ever complete with a few added touches such as being able to post to a news section as well as highlighting new stock.
Make sure to check back this time next week when we will have a new and improved website, and I'll show you the ropes. Until then, take care.

Bridal and other Wedding Sewing

I don't know if it's my imagination but we're getting a lot more bridal parties come into the shop to prepare for weddings. Sometimes they want something simple like dress net to make favour bags with, or ribbon for the cake.  Other brides (or their mums) are tackling the wedding dresses.

  I myself am about to get married (this coming Sunday in fact) and so I'm sewing for my wedding as well. Many people were expecting me to sew the wedding dress, however my bride has put her foot down on that matter. I'm not allowed to know anything about the dress and I can't very well sew whilst blindfolded. 

So have I made all of my (the groom's) outfit. Surprisingly not. I've been a busy boy with other aspects of work, however I did want to have some of my own creations in the wedding. This  was when I realised I could sew and save a fair bit of money.

I am guilty of having an "All or nothing" attitude at times. BUT I realized I don't have to make ALL of my outfit. I love making waistcoats and cravats so decided if I wear plain black trousers I only need a frock coat for the day it's self. Renting a wedding suit cots around £90 however BUYING a frock coat second hand on E-bay, £50. So by making a waistcoat and cravat I'm saving money and I get to have a frock coat to KEEP (and trust me I will get use out of it). There will be many pics of my creations for the day coming (and maybe another blog) until then I suggest you check out these past entries...

Learn from my wedding sewing mistakes.

How to make a petticoat

Retro Weddings 

The Tao of Fabric8

We have a new addition to our little Fabric8 Family. A strange but fantastic thing about getting a new member of staff is we end up seeing ourselves in a  new light, or examining everything we do in the shop as we explain the running of the shop to them. In the past we've picked up some very odd little quirks when our new member says "But why do you do it like that, it's so illogical?"  Sometimes we have to do things a certain way because of something else, but then when that "something else"  is removed we may still have a long winded or illogical system in place. Other times we hear some lovely things from our new staff members such as "This is the most friendly place I've worked in" or my personal  favourite from a new  member of the furnishing team "I just keep wanting to hug everyone here!"

  One observation really did start a long conversation. Our young acolyte said she was surprised at how much time we were willing to spend with customers who weren't spending much money. This came as a shock to a few of us you see we're not there to sell stuff, we're there to help people. This may sound cheesy and corny but our mission statement goes along the lines of " To inspire people to be creative" and not "To sell 5 meters of white velcro". As a result we're not fussed with how much people are intending to spend, we're more interested in helping them work out what they want to do, and then how to do it. It's a happier way of working as it's much more enjoyable to help someone on their journey through creativity than it is to try and get their cash. 

Some people have dismissed this idea of how we should work, but in the long term we think people enjoy coming into our shop because of the help they get, and because they know we wont try selling them things they don't need.  We have a few customers who are very talented fashion degree students who I remember helping with their GCSE projects. This firstly makes me feel quit old, but more importantly it shows that treating our customers with care and not pressuring  them makes for life long customers. 

When asked why I work  at the shop I responded simply with "I want to change the world". This elicited a bit of a giggle from the questioner but it is true. I personally feel the world would be a better place if people made things. We're forgetting the simple joy of achievement and of self expression.  Okay so maybe working in a fabric shop in Colchester only lets me help a small number of people, but it's a start. And it's through Fabric8 that I get to do these blogs with hints and tips and projects for people to try.  

So why am I writing this? Partly to share with you WHY we do what we do. However I also wonder if this is a normal way of running a shop. So the next time your'e in any shop try asking for help, even if you're not spending much money, they may just enjoy helping.