Advent Calendar Haute Couture

This year's advent calendar kicks it up a notch, past the 2011 Spectacular Walnut Advent Calendar and the 2012 Greener-Than-Thou Advent Calendar. In fact, this year there are two calendars. Inspired by Italian fashion designer Daniela Gregis and her annual advent skirts produced in collaboration each year with a different artist, this year's advent calendars are two skirts which I've upcycled, designed, and hand-stitched in a fit of pre-holiday insanity. The clients are a four-year-old and a two-year-old.

Not a Creature Was Stirring

The advent skirt "unopened" and stuffed with chocolate and toys

This calendar began with a thrift store ruffled mini-skirt, slit up one side and then overlapped with velcro tabs to produce a wrap-around skirt. It was also reduced in size to fit a 23-inch waist by accordion-pleating the extra inches at the back into a bustle. Copper colored ribbon with bells at the end were added for decoration and jingle bell sound effects when the skirt is worn. Scrap fabric was used to create a lining which was then stitched (with the stitching hidden by the ruffles) to create 25 sections. Those sections were turned into pockets by lifting a ruffle and slitting the skirt fabric just underneath the ruffle. Copper fabric paint (Liquid Pearls) was used to number the pockets on the ruffles above in random order. Hunting for the numbers is part of the game.

Pocket hidden under a ruffle; tulle stitched to top back of pocket

A swath of tulle is stitched underneath the ruffle at the top of the pocket. In its starting state, each pocket contains a foil-wrapped chocolate coin, and every fourth pocket or so also contains a little gift. Each day as the pockets are opened the tulle is pulled out of the pocket, creating the final advent couture look.

The skirt on the final day, with presents removed and tulle unfurled.

Not Even a Mouse

The advent skirt styled for a two-year-old began with another thrift store find: a green satin wrap-around dance skirt. After cutting several inches off the bottom, wrapping the skirt to fit a 17-inch waist, and adding velcro tab fasteners, 25 swathes of tulle were added. Each swath of tulle is gathered at the top and stitched to the skirt, along with a ribbon that is stitched to the top of the tulle half-way down its length.

Skirt in its starting state, with bundles of little gifts

For this skirt, the foil-wrapped chocolates and little gifts were wrapped in scraps of light green satin and numbered from 1 to 25. Each bundle was then wrapped in one of the tulle swathes as shown below, and tied with a ribbon.

Swath of tulle with ribbon secured to top

Numbered gift bundle placed on tulle

Tulle folded up and around bundle and tied with ribbon

Once again, the skirt is a work of interactive couture. As each bundle is unwrapped and the ribbon untied, the tulle and ribbons are unfurled and become part of the final look as shown below.

The skirt on the last day, with all gift bundles untied

The Gifts - Lots of Mice

You may have noticed the Night Before Christmas theme going on in the skirt titles on the waistbands: "Not a creature was stirring," and "not even a mouse." All of the little surprise gifts in the skirts were hand-stitched from felt and all have a mouse theme. Little notes with vintage holiday mouse-themed pictures are included with the gifts in the four-year-old's skirt explaining what they are. The gifts in each skirt are identical (except for color) and fall on the same day, to avoid any fights between the models as they sprint or toddle down the runway.

Wear a Mouse in Your Hair: Mouse Barrettes

Mouse barrettes

Wear a Mouse on Your Finger: Mouse Rings

Mouse rings: finger slips into belly band underneath mouse

Put a Mouse to Bed

The little mice in these beds are tiny puppets, worn on the tip of a finger or the tip of a pencil

Mice in their matchbox beds

Mouse puppet out of bed

Hang a Mouse on the Tree: Christmas Ornaments

Mice Christmas Ornaments

Be a Mouse: Mouse Masks

The recipients are encouraged to don their masks and practice curling up like mice and not stirring.

Mouse masks

On the last day, December 25, a final note tells the recipients to put on their completed advent skirts (which have magically become tutus), don their mouse masks, and put on a mouse ballet.

Angry Mice

I'm ready for a rumble in the mean city in my Angry Mice Jacket.

This is an example of pushing past a mistake into something entirely unexpected. While trying to make two felt masks for young children as part of an extreme advent calendar (stay tuned), I turned out a mask so small it would only be appropriate on a day-old infant. I set it aside, but liked it so much that I had to use it on something.

Happily, I had an Oska gray linen jacket on hand, a thrift store find just waiting to be fiddled with.

The addition of the felt mouse mask and a little hand embroidery made all the difference.

The Angry Mice Jacket

Flotsam, Jetsam and All-around Junk

An embarrasment of garbage

The three pieces shown below were assembled from junk found along the edge of the San Francisco Bay. For the rules and regs of garbage walks see the previous post, Going On a Garbage Walk. The rubble utilized for these assemblages was collected at a site I call "Glass Beach," which is really a section of a nature reserve on the shores of the bay that is built on landfill. Waves against the shore slowly erode the edge of the landfill exposing bits and pieces of the past including bottles and broken pottery. Once glass is exposed the waves work like a rock tumbler, smoothing the pieces down into sea glass.

 

Cup handle, eroded seashell, glass

As per garbage walk rules, the attachment used to hang these on a wall is also garbage from the site. In the assemblage above it is an eroded seashell. In the assemblage below it is fluted circular piece that looks like a miniature bundt cake mold.

7 shards of pottery and a circular piece of jetsam

Wood, glass, barnacle, and cup handle

Going on a Garbage Walk

This is the first of a series of garbage walks, resulting in a series of works to be artfully hung on one wall. The wall itself is pretty well trashed from past water leakage, so it's garbage all around!

This first piece is made entirely from found crap at the Port of Oakland 7th Street Park, picked up during a walk along a barbed wire fence armed with cameras guarding the high-security shipping terminal and customs booths, out to a fishing pier that juts into the Bay with spectacular views of San Francisco.

Garbage walk #1, 10/23/13 (click to enlarge)

Garbage walk rules are simple. 

1. Take a walk and collect garbage along the way.

2. Assemble a piece (including backing and hanging mechanism) entirely from the garbage.

The piece above contains some nifty finds, including a fish hook, Port security regulations, the oaktag label, and fishing line, from which the piece is hung. Fishing line was also used to secure the hook to the card.

Stuffed Animals and Quantum Physics

Hobbes (right) and boB

I seldom take requests, but when the request comes from a four-year-old I sometimes give in. In this case, the project involved making a Hobbes doll, an undertaking made far easier by a talented young maker called "seamster," who figured out the pattern and posted it as a free download on Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Stuffed-Hobbes-with-pattern/. Generally I find sewing someone else's pattern a little boring, and in this case the drudgery involved hand-sewing 29 stripes. In the process, I figured the four-year-old's sister, age two, also deserved a doll, so I made one out of Hobbes scraps.

Meet boB, a stuffed animal with a back story involving parallel universes, string theory, a palindrome, the quantum theory of superposition (via Shrödinger’s cat), and a twist on sub-equatorial folklore. Clearly I don't believe in talking down to two-year-olds.

Meet boB

boB's back pocket (note string)

Since the Hobbes doll has its own comic strip, I decided to create a little spiral-bound boB booklet to accompany the doll, a quick-and-dirty process that took about two hours. What does all of this prove? Hand sewing is an ideal realm for letting the mind roam free. Consider making your own nonsense animal and in the process, figure out its story. All of the images used are copyright-free pictures from the Web, except the photos of boB.

Upcycling Fabric Sample Books

Window valance made from designer fabric samples

For those who love textiles, particularly previously used textiles, and are fond of free or very cheap materials, fabric sample books are a bonanza. These are bound books containing a line of fabric, generally used by interior designers and upholstery shops to show clients the possibilities. They look like this:

Fabric sample books

Savvy makers can occasionally pick these up at white elephant sales and thrift stores, and the determined may visit local upholstery, drapery, or design studios and simply ask for sample books that are being thrown out to make way for the new season. The books I just scored at a Carmel thrift shop cost just fifty cents each for an entire book, and contained particularly tempting fabric. However, as anyone who has tried to salvage fabric from these books knows, the paper and glue "frame" backing the fabric is almost impossible to completely remove. The usual solution is to cut out a reduced square from inside the frame, sadly bidding all the wastage around the edge adieu. 

A happy alternative to all of that waste is to use the entire piece—paper, glue, and all—to create a colorful banner or window valance like the one below. The paper backing becomes an asset instead of a hindrance, and helps maintain the shape of the valance or banner pieces.

Fabric sample valance

This particular fabric sample book was comprised of beautiful, transparent fabric in a variety of patterns. 

Pages from fabric sample book.

After cutting pages away from the cardboard binding, the first step was to trim the paper frame border around each sample to 1/2".

The next step was to measure in 1.25" from the edge of two opposite triangle points, and then fold and cut the fabric at those points to create two separate triangles, one larger and one smaller.

Triangles were then arranged along a stretch of wide ribbon matching the window measurement, alternating and overlapping large and small triangles and artfully mixing patterns. Since it's unlikely a stretch of alternating triangles will exactly match your window measurement, stop whenever you can't fit another triangle and allow an equal length of ribbon at either end to complete the window measurement. Stitch everything into place.

Arranging and stitching triangles along the ribbon

Attach the valance to outside of existing curtain hardware. I used Scotch mounting tape, which is sticky on each side, easy to work with, and removable.

Valance in place

If you're curious about the metal mesh screens on the windows full of translucent objects, check out these earlier posts:  Window Fantasies and  Window Fantasy Close-Ups.

This wasn't the end of this round of fabric sample books. Other sets included embroidered silk from China, some embellished with insects, frogs, polka dots, and spirals. I culled through those, cutting the usable fabric completely away from the paper frames, and ended up with a rich assortment of fabric patches.

Fabric sample patches

I've started using these, along with other pleasing fabric from the sample books, to continue the endless patching on both a vintage quilt originally stitched by my southern grandmother and now an evolving crazy quilt, and a quilt I stitched myself that has started to go.

Fabric sample patches on quilts

Time to go out and score some fabric sample books of your own...