What is exciting though, is that I have a second cabinet for my fabric waiting downstairs for some burly men to come along and haul it up five flights of stairs. Not an exciting photo right now, but once my fabric is neatly stored, my studio will look tidy enough for a photo!

And, and, and..I have finally got my dressmakers dummy. Finally. Sort of. It is currently in a box under a bed at my friends’ home in Holland. Just hoping that it fits in my suitcase next week. She’s already got a name: Paspop. It’s Dutch for dressmaker’s dummy/tailor’s dummy/dress form and is a word I had a great deal of trouble in finding out to help my Google searches in Dutch.

Off to dream..ciao for now. x

I’ll be back  soon with a wee selection of photos from two recently made dresses.

Of course, were I super, dooper organised I would order some of the fabrics on show (Anna Maria Horner especially) to Europe in time for holidays in the old world, but I’m not that organised. Shipping to Egypt is far, far too expensive to even bother ordering anything from here, never mind customs duties payable on arrival. I’m sticking with shopping in the Egyptian fabric market and drooling all over my keyboard!

I’m in an as yet unnamed stage that occurs just before I make something new. It consists of a lot of pacing, even more pondering, a fair amount of staring at fabrics and pulling them out before realising I have ‘not enough’ which soon turns into ‘don’t be silly, just pick something and do it’.

In the meantime, Mr MacTavish likes to cosy up behind the silent sewing machine and wait until the fun begins.

After being given a canvas bag instead of a plastic one in a shop recently, I set about prettifying it yesterday. One hot iron, one piece of baking/parchment paper and hey presto, job done! The baking paper was my addition to what the man in the shop told me (stick design to fabric and hot iron it on), or at least what I understood of what he told me, foreseeing copious amounts of plastic stuck to my iron (not sure if non-stick covers molten plastic).

Ta da!

(It’s amazing how clever I feel for doing, well, nothing!)

The weather is hotting up again. It’s great to be able to work outside, particularly at this time of year as there are a lot of migratory birds around. I move a table and my comfy chair out and enjoy some natural light for the afternoon (with plenty of sunscreen and my shades on) and sew away. How relaxing. Only thing missing is the G&T..but that has to wait until the sun is a bit lower in the sky.

I love making things. I love the serenity that comes from taking a piece of paper, a scrap of fabric, or an ingredient and imagining what it could become. I love watching as it becomes something else and more than ever, I love being the one who is making the transformation.

I don’t always love what I end up with, but it invariably spurs me on to do something else. There are so many products available for crafters/wannabe artists (and the real deal) nowadays that the possibilities are infinite. Large warehouse stores offer everything a crafter could want and a million materials they didn’t know existed. While part of me is toe-tinglingly excited about all of this, another part shrinks: is this not just a warehouse full of a lot of stuff that is there only for us to, well, make a lot of stuff from? Furthermore, while food miles seem to get a lot of press, the fact that most of what is on sale in these warehouses comes from distant shores, is glossed over. Just because it has the word ‘hand’ in it, does not mean that our handmade ’stuff’ is environmentally friendly.

So, in a bid that the fruits of my labour do not add useless clutter to our world, my aim with this site is to make items that have if not an environmentally sound background, then at least socially useful (even if that is just putting money in the hands of a local shop keeper).

We’ll see how this goes. I am not claiming to be an eco-warrier, I just want to minimise the social and environmental impact of what I enjoy.