Brighton Part One: Crap From The Street

Greetings from Brighton. Work is going very well. The play, Keep Taking the Tablets, has been well received in previews, now to kill two weeks doing nothing while I wait for the next show!

I love being in Brighton. I've visited twice before, but in January both times so the weather this time is a massive improvement. I enjoy looking around the fascinating shops and sitting on the beach. The nightlife is pretty vibrant too and we've had a few nights out already.
One thing I've noticed about Brighton, is that it has an interesting "culture" (for want of a better word) where people leave their unwanted stuff on the roadside and others can pick it up and take it home. For instance, if you're cleaning out your bedroom and you no longer want those books, or clothes or furniture, you can just leave it outside your house. And someone, somewhere will find your junk a good home. I've never seen anything like it. The house of my friend Shaun (where I'm staying) is full of cute furniture, interesting vases and other knick knacks, all from the street. Its brilliant!

So when we were walking home at 2:30am the other morning we came by one such by-product of a clear out. Shaun, now a seasoned "recycler" began to look through the piles of stuff. We found:

a set of beside drawers
a candle stand (for the garden)
3 board games
a big rug
a small display cabinet (to hang on the wall)
a vase
some hatpins
one of those fancy jars with the metal handle and rubber seal
a pile of material, including a scarf
an ornate table filled with...bobbins!

AND

a Singer sewing machine


And the sewing machine works! It does something funky with the stitching on the underside of a piece of fabric, but it sews and the light works too. It was a pretty profitable raid. My cut includes some of the hatpins, the handbag (a brown mock-snake-skin affair) a couple of the bobbins (of course), the scarf and the fancy jar (I've always wanted one). Obviously I have to consider what can be brought home in my suitcase. But you can bet that once we get the sewing machine running I'll be knocking up a "street skirt" with the material, sewing machine and bobbins we found.


My cut of the loot :) a handbag, a scarf, a jar, some hatpins and some fabric

The Magenta Machine now has a Brighton counterpart - but I still love my pink pal, all alone in Sheffield. And I thought I'd have to give up sewing for the month I was down here!

Photoshoot.

My housemate Harriet is working on a mock up of a magazine for her journalism MA and her chosen subject is... customising clothes! So last weekend was spent taking lots of photos of my room and projects and ME! Mutually beneficial because she now has content for her project, and I have some new photos which have been taken by another person - no photos at arm's length.
So I found out all the things I have made/customised and we chose our favourites and got to work.



The outfits are very crazy, Hatty needed something that screamed "customised" and I would like to state that I wouldn't go out in these outfits as they are, I'm a bit more subtle!



A couple of these photos are of things I'd forgotten about, like my measuring tape rosette, so it was great to revisit these. The rosette was made by dividing a Christmas cracker tape measure into eight equal lengths, folding each in half and stitching through, with a bead on the top for decoration. I also found out a top with my name in cute print fabrics, which I made last year. Harriet liked this and used it in photos.


In my interview I said I loved bows and loved making them, so we rounded up all the home-made bows in my room:



Glorious.


The final shot is a little foreshadow of my next project.

Stay tuned.

Handbags (Two)

I found a gorgeous leather briefcase/satchel thing in my trusty RSPCA charity shop for the bargain price of £2.50, but it didn't have a strap. So a trip to John Lewis and 40cm of contrasting green fabric was definitely called for. I folded up the material up to make it sturdier and then sewed it up. I attached the strap to the metal rings (still attached to the bag) with some hand stitching and it was done. Flicking through my housemate's latest ASOS magazine and seeing the abundance of satchels made me rather pleased. And there was enough spare material to make a matching wrist cuff too.

Handbags (One)

A good friend gave me a Cath Kidson book for Christmas, which had loads of ideas for customising clothes, pillowcases and bags. It also came with a free canvas bag for customising. So the other weekend I set about making it my own.

My grandma ran a local sweet shop, which was very popular with the school children when my mum was at school. In her memory I sketched the basic shape of an old sweet jar and cut out three pieces in different fabrics.

I arranged them on the bag in layers and sewed them on with felt jar lids. A final touch was to embroider a fitting label for my tribute to Grandma Cissie.