A long time ago I got (slightly) into sewing—around the time I dropped out of college, I guess. Who could blame me? All those fun colors and patterns of cloth; the ability to make things that fit YOU rather than some anorexic model (and in any material you want); the ability to make fun things like cloaks. Unfortunately, I was never very good at it and ended up more or less abandoning it.

Now that we’ve fallen in with some SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) folk and my husband is picking up fighting (he qualified as a fighter just a couple of weeks ago), we’re giving the sewing thing a shot again. We got a good sewing machine at the beginning of the year. To be honest, the first two things we made really weren’t that good, but we were working with a sub-optimal downloaded pattern and a (very!) short deadline, not to mention we’re beginners. So we haven’t given up.

It was my husband’s birthday not all that long ago, so I spent some time hunting down historical clothing patterns for him. I found some great stuff at Lost Coast Historical Patterns. A couple items were backordered, but the lady who runs the place has been great about shipping one out as soon as it came in, and keeping me apprised of progress on the other (and asking to make sure I wanted to keep it on order), so I highly recommend these folks.

This weekend we’re hoping to go fabric shopping for a few things. I also picked up two basic sewing books—an idiot’s guide (naturally!) and one other. I’ll let you know how they work out.

Here’s my collection of photos-so-far from a few of those SCA practices. My husband is the one in the plain white tabard that doesn’t really fit him (not to mention it’s borrowed and we’d like to be able to give it back), so you can see why there might be a need for us to pick up a little bit o’ sewing:

In slightly different news (but still related, in the clothes vein), Cafepress decided to have a contest involving Fourth of July patterns for their new military hats with embroidered patches. We did three designs for the contest, and a design for the Fourth of July in general. For us it was a theme of, we’re tired of seeing the country so divided. We’re all one people, no matter our gender, ethnic background, country of birth, profession, sexuality, religion, etc.:

   

And finally, we’ve posted two new book reviews, of two absolutely fantastic books. One is Cherie Feather’s sizzling The Art of Desire. The other is Virginia Kantra’s surprising and stunning Sea Witch.

Tags: book reviews, Cafepress, Fourth of July, patriotic, photographs, SCA, Sewing & Crafts, T-shirts

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under Cafepress, Sewing & Crafts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.