dressing up

Hi there everybody. I’ve been working a lot on patterns lately and long periods doing all that tech stuff leave me stir crazy. I'm hanging to be doing some hands on creative stuff. Before coming into the studio this morning I popped into Vinnies (our local thrift shop, from “St Vincent de Paul”) as I do all too often, and collected some more “resources”. Looking at the goodies strewn on the studio worktable I decided to take you on a creative journey with me for the next few days as I make a coat starting from scratch.

For months I’ve been collecting lots of “doona covers” (Australian name for a 2 sided bag that goes over a quilt and gets removed for laundering)and have gotten some really fabulous ones. I’ve already sold 3 of my upcycled transformed versions of these. 

second hand doona cover

I’ve always used 2^nd hand sheets and covers for testing my prototype versions of patterns and when collecting these have found some that are just too nice to use for experiments.

Today I’ve busted out one of those covers, as shown in the picture above. I’ll cut the inner lining of the coat from this and still have lots of fabric left over. Unusually this doona has patterned fabric on both sides so the amount of fabric that can be potentially recycled is huge...thats about 5m of 3m wide fabric. More often doonas are found with the pretty fabric on the outside and lighter weight plain fabric on the inside.

The next picture shows a stack of upholstery fabric offcuts I’ve bought from thrift shops in the last 3 months. I picked out the colour coordinated pieces I want to patch together for the coat project.

pieces of vintage upholstery fabric offcuts collected from thrift shops

The next step is to stencil on some of these pieces and in the next blog I’ll show what was done.