The Martha Machine
I can’t say I am a giant fan of Martha Stewart. Oh I know, she’s done great things to encourage craftiness, which I’m always in approval of, but as a presenter, she’s pretty lacking. Now that Australia has digital TV, in amongst the Corrie repeats we have the Martha Stewart Show, and I don’t get the fuss. I tried to get the fuss, and I can’t.
First of, uh, all she’s uh.. um not.. uh that eloquent with uh her presentation uh style. I know public speaking is a tricky deal, especially when you’re being internationally broadcast. I know also that “keeping it real” often means skipping the autocue, but seriously, if you can’t get through one sentence without an “uh” “um” or “ooh” then maybe you should be working from notes.
I can overlook that as a personal style, I really can. What I can’t get my head around is how wealthy she is, and how she reminds her audience of her wealth. “I had guests over for dinner, and it was a disaster. I had to send them out to look at the stables while I fixed it”. “Today we’re looking at peonies, which are a beautiful flower and so easy to grow – here’s one of my gardening team from my farm to explain” “This is my property in Maine, it’s about 600 acres…”. Okay we get it, you’re rolling in cash. I suppose if you’ve got it, then flaunt it, but it does get old really fast.
As for WHY she’s rolling in cash, I suggest you go look at the Martha Stewart Range in any craft supply shop. I can get glitter at my local discount store for a buck. OR I can buy the exact same glitter with “Martha Stewart” written on it – same size box, same quality glitter – for $4.95. I can get plain, flat fabric flowers for less than half the price of Marthas’ range. A burnisher – used for making crisp folds in paper is $14.95 from Martha. Christ on a cactus, no wonder she’s got gardening staff.
Finally, I take issue with her “crafting”. I totally agree that making hand made items should be accessible for anyone. Crafting should not be an elitist activity. Anyone should feel that making something is something they can do. However, when you’re the “crafting queen” and your idea of “making easter baskets” involves hot gluing premade birds to premade nests with premade eggs…
So there’s why I don’t watch the Martha show. Coz she shits me with her expensive supplies and her 47 farms and her gardening team. If anyone needs me, I’ll be up to my elbows in fabric, making stuff.
WIP Wednesday: Dolly
Whatever the time stamp may say on this post, I am writing it at 11:56pm, therefore it’s still Wednesday. I know I skipped last week. The reason for that was I has just frogged attempt #1 at this project, and therefore had nothing to show. NOTHING! Nothing but a pile of crinkly crochet cotton. Oh the humanity.
What am I working on? Well, this:
Okay so that kind of looks like Muppet Surgery. What you can see there are the legs of a doll I am making for Jane. I’ve had SO many tries at every part of this doll I am no longer stressing if it doesn’t look like the picture. Right now I just want to get it done. Once it’s finished, it’ll be a nurse in a black dress holding a syringe behind her back. If it sucks, well I’ll just give her a gift card or something.
I had to actually BUY pink yarn for this, btw. I thought I could get away with using what I’d found at Savers, but the thicknesses were too variable. Dammit, now I have three balls of pink yarn.
Clearing the cobwebs
I think we’ve established I have too much yarn, and I tend to buy yarn without any good reason for doing so. However, last night, as I sat in a puddle of self loathing, I suddenly thought “Right! I’ll make myself something” so I zapped over to Spotlight. I was after a kind of lumpy, stringy, handy dyed yarn which is about $20 a pop, but delicious. I’d put off buying it in the past because of the price, but I adore it. Sadly, due to the impending Christmasness, most of the yarn was off the shelves in favour of tinsel and plastic reindeer. I did pick up some utterly delectable cleckheaton (I love cleckheaton) in three tones of orangy red, so I will make myself a wrap out of those.
Since leaving Second Life, I’ve had an utter explosion in creative juices, and I find it’s something I can do that will really lift my mood. Even just crocheting a line of a scarf or something is a wonderful mental break, especially when in the dumps like I get sometimes. I’m trying to something a little bit creative every single day, and for the most part I’m doing that. Not by any means anything huge – I’m not doing a major oil painting every evening, or finishing an afghan every three days, but just a little something or other to keep the brain active and happy.
I do have oil paints I have yet to try, so I may crack those open this weekend. Can i paint? No. I can barely draw, but who cares. Getting over the idea that we need to be perfect at anything before we do it is a hard one, I’ve had many discussions with people about that. For a long time I shied away from doing anything new because I simply couldn’t bear being terrible at something. I think jumping in to painting, crochet or anything else is a good cure for that.
I also love the all absorbing nature of sewing, or sketching, or writing. Losing all sense of place and time as you work on something that fascinates you is a wonderful thing, and a perfect mental break. What you walk with at the end might not even be anything like what you were aiming for, but it’s yours and it’s new and you poured energy and care into it.
For those reading who are not “creative” I urge you to try something. It doesn’t have to be a big investment, a pencil and a small sketchbook should be under $10. Find something that totally absorbs your mind and soul and do it as often as you can. We live in a stupid, fast paced world full of mass production and angry people and bad drivers and god knows what else. Curl up with yourself and create a small something. It’s good for you.
Of Ankles and Frogs.
The many moods of PollyFrog. I finished her today with the coconut buttons for her eyes. The material is from a skirt I picked up at Savers for $3. Whoot whoot cheap fabric! She came out super well, her limbs are nice and dangly and her body is very firm and snuggle-able. I put a bag of plastic pellets in her butt to allow her to sit which she does pretty well, though sometimes you have to thwack her into place. She’s really rather dee-vine darlinks.
The other thing I did today was crack my ankle – again. As a teen I had very weak ankles which would give up on me when walking down steps or slops, leaving me to fall in a heap at least once every couple of weeks. Seems like this is happening again, as two mornings this week I’ve cracked it getting out of bed. Today it actually made a noise when it did it, so that’s new. I know it’s directly related to my weight. The other day when it happened I was mostly alright, except for when I’d been sitting. Then it would give way as I stood up and send pain up my leg. This morning and until lunch time the whole lower leg throbbed. It’s better now I have it braced. I’m waiting for the other one to go now, which it will as it’s been aching for a while. Oh the fun of a collapsing skeleton!
It always starts in the left side, which the physio pointed out is again about an inch lower than my right. Which is a sign I really do need to pull my finger out and get some weight off as I was aligned quite nicely for a while.
Saturday Bedspread Day
Fairly full day today. Matt is back from his holiday (no I will not say vacation) so I got to hang out with him properly this morning rather than at the mercy of the phone godlets. Then Mum and I went to Savers because she saw a shirt there yesterday that would go with the skirt I cut out last night. Sadly, someone else had nabbed it, but I managed to pick up a few nice shirts, couple new pairs of jeans and 2 headscarves as well as more ties for my tie skirt project.
Once I got home and tossed the new stuff into the wash, I settled down to make me another skirt from a bedspread I picked up at Savers months ago. I’ve been meaning to make this forever. Again, it’s a cheaty hem (I kept the decorative hem on the edges). It wasn’t originally going to be a jeans top, but as I was sewing I realised that the jeans I had on were REALLY overdue for throwing out. Knees and inner thighs were gone, and I was keeping them around as spares, so I took em off and hacked the waistband off to use here. This is good because I am not good at waist bands, so reusing the jeans was handy. The legs are in the ragbag waiting for something to be used for.
So, overall, a productive little day. Hope yours was goodly too 
The Cheater Guide to Good Hems
I suck at hems. I really seriously do, I am terrible at them. I have two skirts currently shoved in a cupboard until I can be bothered trying again to make with the non droopy hemline. Which may explain why I prefer to hack other things to bits to make skirts out of.
Peek at the picture (you can click to see the full sized one, we have the technology). The waist “band” is an old pair of jeans, and the panels are made from the legs of several pairs of cords. I love how this came out, and I LOVE that I was able to cheat totally on the hemline and simply use the prehemmed bottoms of the cords legs.
The major tip I will pass on to you is if you ARE going to recycle the hems of an existing something, when you sew your panels together, sew from the bottom up. That way you can match your hems perfectly, even if you’ve been a bit slapdash with the measurements of your panels (which I always am). You can fix any unevenness in the topedge very easily when you sew your waist section on, it’s a lot harder to tidy up mismatched hems.
As for making the above skirt, it’s really just a gored skirt but with the top measurement for the gores taken from the width of the bottom of the jeans section, if that makes sense. I’ll try that again. Instead of measuring your waist and dividing by X number of panels, you cut the legs off the jeans and measure the width of the new hole, then divide that.
To find the maximum width of your gores, measure the bottoms of the legs of the cords, and pick the narrowest. These gores are cut on the seam to give me extra width, but if you like you can cut down the leg. Narrower gores, less of a seamed look. Up to you.
I’m not going to go into technical detail here, simply because when I made this thing I ended up with a spare gore, so I’m clearly not the person you should be seeking advice from. Apart from the hem tip, that’s awesome advice :nods: