Wide Leg Ruffled Pants in Burgundy Wine Kimono Silk

I have been sewing pants lately.  I made this pair of comfy wide leg pants from 100% pure kimono silk.

The fabric is amazing. I bought it on Ebay several years ago with the idea of making pants, but since it's kimono fabric, the bolt was only 14 inches wide.  So, I had to create a pattern that would work with such a narrow bolt of fabric.

It's a deep burgundy wine color, vintage kimono silk, a nice medium-heavy weight with a wave design woven right onto the weave, and then subtle hand painting to bring out the design. I used every last bit making these pants, and because it's vintage fabric, this pair of pants are truly one of a kind.

Details include ruffles along the hem, adjustable ruching at the on the sides with gathering strings, and two front pockets with gathering strings. The top has a double channel waistband, one with elastic, and a second with elastic and a draw string for a perfect adjustable fit. I stitched everything with both a serger and a regular sewing machine to make this pair of pants last until the fabric wears out, which should be a good long while because it's REALLY nice fabric. Seriously, I'm a silk snob, and this fabric is unusually high quality.

The waistline is somewhere between regular and low. These are very well made and as comfortable as pants can be. If you think you might want these pants, I assure you that your really do. They are amazing. Once you put them on, you won't want to take them off. These pants are for sale in my Etsy shop.  Thanks for looking.

Patchwork Sweaters and Skirts

I've been sewing sweaters and skirts lately.  They say make what you like.  So I made this cardigan hoodie in blues and grays, all upcycled from felted wool sweaters, mostly merino.  This sweater is SOLD.

Here's a purple pullover sweater I made for my sister because purple is her favorite color.  She asked for a V neck, so I made her a V neck.  I've never made a V neck before, but she's happy. So that's all that matters.  It's made from mostly cashmere with some wool.  I hand dyed the two brightest purple fabrics because there just aren't enough purple cashmere sweaters made for my needs.  Both of these sweaters were inspired by the work of Katwise.

I decided that I really REALLY like the scrappy patchwork look in clothing.  When I wear patchwork clothing made from lots of different fabrics, I feel happy, like a well-loved rag doll.  Here is a blue skirt that looks cute with the blue sweater above.  It has a bunch of different fabrics from my quilting cotton collection and a double ruffle trim. 

I made the waistband have a secret tie on the inside.  It's mostly elastic, but with the tie, you can get the waistline just the right length for a perfectly comfortable fit. 

Here is a green skirt, all in cotton with an elastic waist.  These skirts are for sale at Isabella Boutique in downtown Sunnyvale, CA.   The design of both of these skirts was inspired by the work of Obsequies.

This is a close up of the green and gray ruffled hem.  It looks like yellow, but it's really chartreuse. Limy lime green, my favorite color.

I'm about to release a new tutorial soon.  I haven't released a new tutorial in a while because I've been working on one tutorial for about two months. I took the first step photo in October. It's a sequel to Slugs in Love, including a bunch of Cellini spiral variations and techniques. I have taken a few breaks from this project, like when I was beading some older designs (in Marsala), and doing the sewing shown above. 

Now this tutorial is almost done.  There is light at the end of the tunnel! It looks like it's going to be 26 pages with around 130 photos and illustrations, definitely making it one of the longest beading tutorials I've ever written. I was very tempted to break it into two separate tutorials, limiting each to one main project with a variation or two.  But I made 8 different designs all using the same techniques, and I can imagine at least as many more.  So I'm keeping it whole.  By keeping it whole, I found that I could teach a bunch of different techniques that work together. That way, you beaders can combine the techniques to make your own designs for pendants, bracelets and beaded beads. I'm calling it "Snail Shells and Twisty Bits." I really hope you gals will find it worth the wait.  Thanks for looking.

Hyperbolic Felt Lace Bracelets

My new friends and I met for our second "Make Stuff Sunday" yesterday, and we continued to play with felt.  As you can see from my last few posts, I devised a technique for making chunky felted lace which can be used to make surfaces of all types, and I've been playing around with it to see what is possible.

In this post, all of the (lone) pieces in the photos are examples of hyperbolic surfaces, meaning they have saddle points or negative curvature.  Informally, it's a saddle point if the concavity goes up in one direction and down in another direction.  One super cool fact about hyperbolic surfaces is that the geometry on a hyperbolic surface fails the parallel postulate, which is why I think everybody's been calling it a postulate for so long and not an axiom.... but I digress.  In terms of sewing, you might say that a piece of hyperbolic fabric has ruffles, or it flares like you get when you add gussets to a skirt.  This is in contrast to flat fabric (i.e., normal fabric) or something that curls into a ball, like the blue-purple bracelet here...

...or the green-purple bracelet on the bottom of this photo.  The top bracelet is hyperbolic, and the bottom bracelet is spherical with positive curvature (i.e., it's a ball).  I like the way you can stack them into a vase.

This purple and black piece resembles a hyperboloid, but I checked it for straight lines and it failed to have them.  So it's still hyperbolic, but a little too ruffled to be a true hyperboloid.

This is a little crown for a snow queen.  I stitched beads to the felt to look like snowy ice crystals. Like most crowns, this piece flairs out at the top, thereby making it hyperbolic.  It's more or less the same size as the others, and it still fits as a bracelet, but I intended it mostly to be worn on top of the head as a crown.   I think it would look nice with a wedding dress, something blue, and all.

This cute little ruffle isn't a bracelet, but it is an awesome little hyperbolic surface.  More precisely, it's a patch of the hyperbolic tiling by pentagons, where four pentagons meet at every vertex.  It's called the order-4 pentagonal tiling.  This piece was created by mathematical rock star, Vi Hart (she calls herself a mathemusician, but I kind of like mathematical rock star).  After our adventures last week making Seifert surfaces in felt, Vi wanted to felt a hyperbolic tiling.  I gave her some instructions to get her started, and she did everything else.  

In fact, it was her expressed desire to make this piece that led me to devise this technique for felted lace.  This is a nice example of how representing abstract mathematical objects as sculptures leads to more general techniques.  I really love it when that happens.  Math inspires art, which then gives me a reason to write about both.  

The yellow is wool, and the orange is recycled sari silk, which Vi used to emphasize the boundary.  After playing with hers, I kind of want one.   But I also want to make a felted hypercube.  Too many choices...

Hyperbolic Beading No 3

I tried beading another hyperbolic tiling.  It's called Order 4 3 3 Dual, boring name, un-boring tiling.  A picture is worth a thousand cryptic sentences, so here's an illustration of Order 4 3 3 Dual using the Poincaré disk model of hyperbolic space.

This beautiful creature is composed entirely of hexagons.  Notice the center has four hexagons meeting at a point, and if you go out a bit, you can find places where just three hexagons meet at a point.  Compare this with the red tiling below.  This tiling also has all hexagons, but it lies flat.   Here, three hexagons meet at every corner.

If you weave an across edge weave of this red tiling, you get hexagon angle weave.  Here's a tutorial where I explain how to do that weave.

Back to the hyperbolic tiling:  What makes "Order 4 3 3 Dual" hyperbolic (and not spherical or planer) are the four hexagons meeting at some of the corners.  The extra angles jammed into all of those corners is what makes it ruffle when you build it with hexagons that are all the same size.  In contrast, if you wanted to make a spherical tiling with hexagons, you could make them get infinitely smaller at a point like on the Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque dome:

Alternately, you could add some pentagons, squares or triangles to make it work.  This image shows a pentagon near the top right, and I'm pretty sure there's another one diametrically opposite that I can't see.

Coloring:  I fiddled with the coloring a bit in my beaded version of Order 4 3 3 Dual.  In particular, I used gray beads for the blue and red tiles, and yellow beads for the yellow and green tiles.  I also made some rules for the beads sewn across the edges of the tiling depending upon whether the two adjacent tiles are gray-gray, gray-yellow, or yellow-yellow.

Chronologically, the photo below starts with figure 5.  Notice what a ruffled mess I had.  In figure 6, I did a bit to organize the ruffles to show the 4-fold symmetry, but it's still a mess. Figure 6 has the same orientation as the illustration of Order 3 3 4 Dual above.

Figures 1 through 4 show the finished piece.  It's a bit thicker than I'd like it to be for a pendant, but Figure 2 shows how easy it is to string as a pendant. 

Alas, this piece is a little wonky, more than I like.  No matter how hard I try to make it perfectly symmetric, it just wouldn't cooperate.  In my frustration, I just kept adding more crystals.  When all else fails, add more crystals, right?  Still, little wonky bits of beadwork flip this way and that, as you play with it.  I'm trying not to think about it.  I showed it to my friend Andrew, and he didn't mind the wonky bits.  So maybe it's just me.  Anyway, it's done.  Thanks for not reminding me that it's wonky.  I know.

What I learned: Why is it wonky?  I think my largest "core" beads are a bit too big for the space I put them in.  That'll do it.  Also, it's too ruffly.  I couldn't get the ruffles to all fit together neatly.  I think I need to make smaller patches of tiles.  Also, the patch of tiles I used was quite round.  I think if I made my patches more "square" (that's a hyperbolic square), it should be easier to fold all of the ruffles neatly into place.  At least that's the theory.  Hey, you know the difference between theory and practice?  In theory they're the same, but in practice they're different, sometimes.

Want more? I've been playing with beaded hyperbolas here:
hyperbolic beaded bead No. 1 
hyperbolic beaded bead No. 2

Hyperbolic Beaded Angle Weave No. 2

This week, I wrote about beading the hyperbolic tiling (4.5.4.5).  I mentioned that if you take a different patch of this tiling, you can get five-fold symmetry.  To show you what I meant, I beaded the piece shown here.  This time, I also used a much larger patch of the tiling; so it's a lot bigger than the first one.  This side of this pendant shows most of the beaded tiling, including the center of my patch in the center of the pendant.  

This is in contrast to my first example, where you couldn't see the center of the tiling because it was in the center of the beaded bead, on the inside.  Here is that photo again so you can compare.

This is one of the reasons that hyperbolic tilings are so different from spherical tilings, like those we usually use to make beaded beads (e.g., a beaded dodecahedron).  You can almost think of a hyperbolic plane as a sphere that's been flipped inside out.  In a spherical beaded bead, the core bead (if needed) goes on the inside, and the beaded tiling goes on the outside.  In contrast, in a hyperbolic beaded bead, the tiling goes on the inside, and the multiple core beads go on the outside.  With flat weaving, there's no core bead at all.  This all corresponds to the fact that spheres have positive curvature, flat planes have zero curvature, and hyperbolic planes have negative curvature.

If you flip this piece of beadwork over (figure 2), you can see most of the larger beads I added to stabilize the angle weave.  From this side, you can also see (almost) the entire boundary of the patch of tiles.  Do you see the ruffled edge of seed beads zigzaging between the larger beads?  Patches of hyperbolic tilings have a lot of perimeter, and if you want it to lie flat like a pendant, you have to zigzag a lot. 

I had intended the side with the big beads, figure 2, to be the front, including the big blue Swarosvki rivoli in the center, but I think I like the other side better.  In any case, the two sides are very different.  They had to be.  This piece has the symmetry of a pyramid or a flower.  The five-fold symmetry in (4.5.4.5) wouldn't allow me to make the two sides the same, even if I tried. (Correction: I could have made the two sides the same if I destroyed all of the reflection symmetries.  In that case, the finished beaded piece would have the symmetry of a barber pole.)

In figure 3,  you can see what the beaded tiling looked like before I added the larger beads and the rivoli in the center.  At this stage, it also had an unfinished edge.  It was quite floppy and uncooperative, and I had to pose it carefully for the photograph.  Smile for the camera.

In figure 4, you can see how flat the finished pendant is.  With a little doing, I was able to make the finished piece pretty flat, just 12mm thick, which is a good size for a pendant. 

You can see that I strung the cord right through the holes in the angle weave.  There were several holes to consider, and I had to try a couple to find one I liked.  I was thrilled that I could string the pendant directly onto cord because the piece I showed in my last post has no great way to hang it.  It was somewhat of a beaded bead fail, but since it was a prototype, a first try at something new, I forgive myself.  I already have a whole pile of beaded checkers, pretty little sparkly clusters with no good way to string them. Yet beaded angle weaves have built in holes big enough for cord, so as long as you don't cover them all up with the larger beads, you can use them to string the finished piece.  Nice.

More? See hyperbolic beading No. 3.

Hyperbolic Beaded Angle Weave (4.5.4.5)

Last week, I attended the Gathering for Gardner an event held in honor of the late, great Martin Gardner.  In case you have never heard of him, Gardner is generally considered to be the most famous recreational mathematics writer of all time.  He wrote about puzzles and games, optical illusions and magic, mathematical art, poetry, and juggling; he also wrote the definitive annotated Alice in Wonderland, and the list goes on and on.  I grew up reading many of his books. My very first quilt (using a Penrose tiling) was inspired by one of his essays.

This year I got an invitation to the Gathering.  So I eagerly traveled to Atlanta, GA to meet this wonderful community of puzzlers, mathematicians, artists, magicians and so forth, all of whom love and have been inspired by Martin Gardner's writings, just like I have.  It was my first time attending, and I gave a short talk on mathematical bead weaving.  Although I only had five minutes to speak, I presented twenty something slides across a wide gamut of mathematical concepts that I have represented with bead weaving over the years.  (Now, I'm trying to turn my five-minute talk into a four-page paper. Wish me luck.)  I didn't realize until the day after my talk that it was the largest group I've ever addressed, maybe 300 people.  Fortunately, the talk was over so quickly that I didn't have time to get nervous.

At the Gathering, a few women showed their versions of hyperbolic planes.  These included the crocheted coral reef by Margaret Wertheim, the director of the Institute for Figuring; Daina Taimina's crocheted Geometric Manifolds; and the hyperbolic bead weaving of Vi Hart, who you might know from her videos about doodling in math class.  Inspired by their work, I thought I'd take a new try at bead weaving a hyperbolic surface of my own.  To do this, I first noticed that Vi Hart's version shows an edge-only angle weave of (7^3), that is, she uses one bead on every edge of a tiling with three 7-gons around every vertex.  Her version is sparkly, and fun to fiddle with, but it's very squishy and something of a ruffled mess.  It's nice to hold, but difficult to photograph as it doesn't hold its shape. It was exactly this kind of uncontrolled ruffling that had prevented me from trying to bead hyperbolic tilings in the past.  I had seen this kind of ruffled confusion before, in such works as Helaman Ferguson's hyperbolic quilt, and I didn't give it much thought because I like my beading (and quilts) to look more organized than that.

But then I had an epiphany. You see, at the Gathering, Daina Taimina exhibited crocheted hyperbolic planes in a way I'd never seed before.  She used strategic tacking to turn a ruffled mess into an organized structure like I had done in my Dancing Fan beaded bead.  Her crochet was stiff enough to keep the whole piece from collapsing, and the tacking kept the ruffles in place.  It was easy to see the symmetry in Taimina's crochet.  I noticed this tacking immediately as I had never seen someone do that before on a crocheted hyperbolic surface.   I decided to combine Hart's idea of beading a hyperbolic tilings with strategic tacking.  Instead of tacking the edges together, however, I would use larger beads within the folds.  Also, instead of using an edge-only angle weave as Hart had done, I tried an across-edge angle weave because it would give a tighter fit and thus make stiffer beadwork.  I made a patch of the tiling below, namely the uniform hyperbolic tiling that goes by many names, including (4.5.4.5).  It has squares in yellow and pentagons in red.  I chose this one because 4 and 5 are small numbers, so the beads would fit tightly.

What you see in the first photo in this post is three views of the finished beaded bead.  Below you can see what it looked like in progress before I added the largest beads.  I show five different ways to orient my little patch of this hyperbolic tiling, but these are not all of them.  Each illustrates a different subgroups of symmetries of this patch of the tiling.   I could have used any of these as the symmetry of my beaded bead above, and I ultimately chose the one on the bottom right.  A different patch of this (4.5.4.5) tiling could also be used to show five-fold symmetries.

This little experiment made me realize that there are a lot of interesting possibilities for hyperbolic beading that are yet to be explored, an infinite number in fact.  Many infinities.  If you thought there were a lot of different polyhedra to bead, that's only because you haven't tried beading hyperbolic tilings yet.  Try it, because with infinitely many tilings to go, I know for sure that I won't have enough time to bead them all myself.

I beaded another patch of (4.5.4.5) here.

For the Love of Silk Ribbon and Lace

Last time I was preparing to visit my friend Jennifer to teach at her bead shop, Naturally Jennifer's Gallery and Beads, she asked me if I had any clothing that I wanted to tie dye.  See, Jennifer had something around 30 buckets of dye set up in her garage because she was filling a large order of tie dyed t-shirts for a local music festival.  As luck would have it, I had just won a HUGE lot of silk charmeuse remnants on Ebay.  The fabrics were gorgeous, but some of the colors were a bit boring, like khaki, pale lavender and tan, and this was the perfect opportunity to make them beautiful with some hand dying.  Could Jennifer's dyes work with silk?  Sure they would!

I wanted a mottled look rather than a traditional tie dye, so Jennifer taught me to "artfully wad" my fabrics in large plastic tubs.  With over 30 colors to choose from, I poured maybe six different, related colors of dye into each tub.  Here is a photo of one little corner of the purple piece.   Pretty, isn't it?

These dyed silks have been sitting in my closet since Spring, patiently waiting for me to figure out how to use them.  Last night, I was browsing hand dyed silk ribbons on Etsy, and I saw that a few different vendors were selling ribbon with serged edges.  I realized that I could make ribbon by CUTTING strips of of silk from selvage to selvage, and then SERGE a rolled hem on both edges.  OMG!  I CAN MAKE SILK RIBBON AS WIDE AS I WANT!  See, if you've ever shopped for wide silk ribbon, you know it costs a small fortune, often around half the price you'd pay for 45" wide fabric.  Silk ribbon is a real luxury item, especially the wide, hand-dyed stuff, and as a consequence, I don't own any wide silk ribbon... until last night!

On my first try, I made a gorgeous yard of silk ribbon in purple and burgundy with black serger thread.  At nearly an inch, it's significantly wider than the narrow ribbons I own, and the fabric is a bit thicker as well.   Once the machine was set up and the strip was cut, sewing it was pretty quick and easy.  It's a little under an inch wide, over a yard long and I tapered both ends to a point.  I strung some beaded beads on it, but didn't love the way they hung because they weren't heavy enough to weigh down the ribbon,  So, I ruffled the ribbon by sewing a zig zag like in my Doceri drawing below.

I rolled up my silky ruffle to make flowers, folding and twisting it, this way and that.   I made some wiggly lines with it.  I sat at my cutting mat, rather mesmerized by this little ruffle, all soft and squishy with undulating colors that shimmer in the light like only silk charmeuse can do.  I became inspired:  I dug through my bags of lace, cut some pieces, and arranged them under my ruffle.  I tried some ribbon flowers.  Deciding a cuff would be a good project, I found a scrap of black rayon jersey fabric leftover from the lining of my new mini dresses, and I cut a rectangle about 8 inches wide.  Starting with the bottom layers of lace,  I sewed my appliques to the jersey, layer by layer.  I started with hand sewing, and switched to my machine where I could.  After all of the lace and ribbon was attached, I sewed on a few pressed glass flower beads.  Then, like making up a pillow, I attached a lining made from some purple cotton corduroy.  The corduroy lining makes the back soft, adds a little warmth, and hides all of the stitches and thread ends.   I left open a side seam to add elastic button loops, pinned the loops in place and finished the last bit by machine, which you can see running vertically below in black thread.  I finished it by attaching the buttons, sewing through all of the layers for stability.

As I sewed, I just kept thinking about how super girly girl this cuff is.  It's purple and rosy, with flowers, ruffles, and lace.  It's beyond girly.  It's not my normal style for sure.  I've heard people call it a "romantic" style.  My boyfriend called it "too much," but the girly girl in me really likes this kind of explosive overabundance of ribbon and lace.  A little part of me wants to be dressed head to toe like this, maybe just for a little while.  Yes, this style is a bit out of my normal aesthetic, but I like that it all started with a piece of beautiful purple, hand-dyed wide silk ribbon.  Yeah for Etsy.  Yeah for silk ribbon.  Yeah for inspiration.  

Click on the photos for more photos and information about purchasing this cuff.

Sewing mini dresses to go with my bloomers

I love bloomers, short pants (or shorts) with ruffled hems.  In the last couple of years, I have sewn myself several pairs of bloomers (including my black corduroy pair below), and I have noticed that I like to wear them mostly with my longest shirts or my shortest dresses so that the ruffles peak out the bottom.  Unfortunately, I own very few mini dresses, so I decided to make some.  I started with my oldest, dearest mini-dress, and since it fits me so well, I used it to draft myself a set of pattern pieces.  I updated the design by making it a both longer and fuller in the back than in the front.  I also updated the fabric choice from a tiny flower print to pre-ruffled fabric on top and slinky rayon on the bottom.  Both fabrics are 5% spandex to make them nice and stretchy. 

The first one I made turned out a wee bit too small for me, so I enlarged the pattern by a couple inches here and there, and made two more in just my size.  Why two?  So I could sell one and keep one for myself.  I planned to keep the crappy one and sell the other, but I am happy to report that they both came out equally well.  Here you can see me in the purple one.  It's so comfy and I'm thrilled with the fit.

The purple on is a size medium, and the green one is a size small.  Notice the extra seaming in the back to add shaping around the waist and fullness in the hem.

The hard part about sewing these dresses was working with the ruffled fabric.  If you're not really careful, you'll get wonky ruffles caught in the seams when you sew them.  From previous projects (bloomers!) I learned that the best way to control the ruffles is to baste them down so they don't move before you get the seams sewn properly.  I did a ton of basting on these, every seam with ruffles was basted before I pinned it (or basted it) to be serged.  In the past, I used my sewing machine to do the basting, but on these I did them all by hand.  It takes a bit more time, but I got MUCH better results.  In three dresses, I didn't get a single flipped ruffle, which is nice.

These two tops are also different in the hem treatments.  The purple has a ruffled lettuce edge, and the green one has a folded hem with cover stitch.  I'm really not sure which one I like better.  What do you think?

Clicking on the photos will take you to their Etsy listings.