Dancing – it is the best fun!

So… my weekend was fun… how was yours?

Last weekend was the annual Balboa On The River dance camp, set in beautiful sunny Brisbane in Queensland.

My dance partner John and I have been practicing hard for the last two months and I’m ecstatic to announce that we have successfully defended our title and are now the Australian Balboa Champions for the third year in a row. Woooo!! :0)

Here’s a quick peek at what we do…

Yep. That’s a pretty fabulous skirt… even if I do say so myself! It’s a vintage, full wool number that on this occasion was held together by safety pins as I ran out of time to fix it before the competition. Oops. :0)

I also entered the Jack And Jill competition which is where you are randomly paired with a partner. You line up, follows (girls) facing the leads (boys), the dice is rolled and the follows move that many places to get their new partner. You then dance for a minute and a half. Line back up again, dice is rolled and so on. This happens three times. It is basically a test of how well you follow or lead, incorporating musicality and responding to your partner.

Of course girls can and do certainly lead and some guys can follow, but I haven’t seen the reverse in competitions here in Australia. It’s all a little nerve-wracking but a whole lot of fun.

Here’s the second heat of the Jack And Jill – I had a ball in this one, dancing with a guy called Lindsay.

I was lucky enough to have a really great night and I ended up taking home the trophy for this competition as well. Some nights you’re on, some you’re not… I was lucky enough to be on… and I had an absolute ball. So much fun.

I think my favourite part of the weekend is the fact that the judging was done by five of the balboa dancers that I most look up to in the world. They are all from the US and they are all just wonderful. Actually… I’ll show you two of them in action here..

Wow right? This routine just… wow….!! I love their dancing SO much – and they are both really lovely people too.

Anyway, enough of that.

Balboa – it rocks! :0)

Not the usual programme

Hi everyone,

Whilst this has nothing to do with my usual yarns, I found this video so powerful and moving that I just wanted to share it.

Be warned, I’ve just gone through two handkerchiefs on this one. Fllloooooods of tears.

Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Tomato, tomahto – let’s call the whole thing off

Or not. This is my favourite sewing “gadget” – of the extremely low-tech variety.

It’s a tomato… with a strawberry! Random? Well the strawberry, yes… the tomato as pincushion…. not so random.

Widely considered poisonous until only a couple of hundred years ago – even though the Aztecs had cultivated and consumed them for a long time before that – tomatoes were viewed as a symbol of good luck, with many families placing a tomato on their mantlepiece to invite prosperity within the home. The problem with that superstition is that in most parts of the world tomatoes are not available all year round and this lead to the replacement tomato – a ball of red fabric, stuffed with sawdust or sand… ta-dah! Good luck and prosperity: ensured. A safe place to store your precious, pointy, dangerous pins: created.

More useless tomato facts anyone? It’s scientific name lycopersicum means wolf peach and comes from German werewolf tales, which declares the tomato’s family tree of the deadly nightshades to be the dog whistle for werewolves.

I also like the etymology of the Aztec’s tomato name… xitomatl = plump thing with a navel. Hehehee!

Sure, mine is looking a little Hellraisery right now…

… or a strange, spiky red Saturn but I love it and just might put it on the mantlepiece anyway just because it’s so darned cute! :0)

As for its strawberry emery earring… there’s not a lot of information on why it’s a strawberry but my guess it’s a convenient colour for your leftover tomato scraps and an easy shape to make up – and small enough to be economical to fill with your emery grains. Yep, the same emery used on emery paper for sanding and emery boards for… well, sanding your fingernails. Jab any blunt or rough pins and needles in your strawberry to sharpen them up a tad.

There’s a sentence I never thought I’d use. I don’t usually advocate strawberry violence… I like them… especially when dipped in dark chocolate!

The most troublesome skirt I’ve ever made

Hula Bob is a friend of mine… he’s been hanging around for about five or six years now but he had recently developed a problem… his skirt was disintegrating in the sun… which isn’t great for a hula guy.

When we first met, his skirt was made of a lime/fluorescent green hair-like material… which lasted about… oooh… five or six years before crumbling into nothingness…

He had also developed a bit of jaundice, looking decidedly yellowish instead of tanned… so a quick paint job and it was onto the skirt.

The crumbling hair stuff just had to go and so I purchased 10 metres of green raffia… and that gave the stingiest, thin skirt you’ve ever seen – you could totally see his spring and everything! I should add at this point that Hula Bob is about 20cm tall and sits on the parcel shelf of my car, wobbling at fellow motorists, not some odd dude who likes being painted and wearing disintegrating hair skirts…

Anyway… raffia is a right witch to sew… you get it nice and thick and even and it squirms around and lets itself get flattened out by your presser foot and… ugh… it’s not fun. Bob’s undercarriage, where his spring meets his torso, has a little stepped in section, so that first ugly spare skirt was tied on that under section and glued up the wazoo… not Bob’s wazoo… I’m just sayin’ I used a lot of glue.

I then bought another 10 metres of raffia, folded it over and over a million times to get the right lengths, sewed a straight stitch through them and then encased the ends in a grosgrain ribbon… except of course the raffia kept moving and slipping out of the ribbon and… ugh… it’s not fun.

For something different and so I could say I had used the stitch on my machine, I picked the stretch stitch that kind of looks like a vine with leaves. Much like Marilyn Monroe, Bob was then sewn into his skirt, given a trim around the bottom and tah-dah… just like new…

Yep, there are two black lines of stitching peeking out from under his ribbon waistband which would ordinarily give me the twitches but honestly, I just wanted to see this project done and have Bob wobbling in his rightful place in the car again… so they stay and become “a design feature”… much like I say there is no such thing as a wrong move in dancing, there are just new ones… unless it involves pain and/or blood, then it is definitely wrong.

So that’s Bob’s story… a new skirt – this time closer to grass than his previous one. Here’s hoping he’s good for at least another five years.

20 metres of raffia in that little skirt… I know, ridiculous, right?? I can’t imagine how many you’d need for an actual person-sized one. I just know I won’t be volunteering to make them anytime soon! :0)

Burning things: fun but not that helpful

Hello all,

For some reason I hadn’t really thought about my suit material until reader Laurie asked me what it was.

As I got it in the “assorted fabrics” area, I’d never known what it was – just that I liked the colour, weight and feel of it.

My More Fabric Savvy book by Sandra Betzina suggests burning a small snippet of fabric and observing the fabric, flame, smell and ash to determine fabric content.

Sounds simple – and fun on a chilly winter’s day – but was it? Let’s just say I won’t be giving up my day job to become a fabric identifier (if anyone was ever paid to do that for work).

The results…

The first attempt, the fabric didn’t really burn – it just kind of melted away from the flame and smelt a bit like burning paper… but that didn’t really fit any of the categories listed in the book, so I lit another match.

This was a much more successful burning, with a yellow, slightly spitting flame, but then the fabric kind of melted onto the tweezers and I was so engrossed in the flame that I forgot about the burning match in my other hand… doh.

As you can see, it definitely melts, it’s brittle – there’s no real ash to speak of, no smell, burnt with a slow, yellow, slightly spitting flame.

The book lists acetate, acrylic, cotton, nylon, polyester and wool as having some of these properties but I don’t know which fabric’s properties cancels another’s when combined.

For example, if you combine cotton with nylon does that mean you’d get cotton’s burning paper smell or nylon’s “celery smell”.

So, I’m left guessing… and I’ve decided to go with a cotton acrylic… that is, of course, a total guess. :0)

Acrylic – melts (but keeps burning after the flame is removed which mine didn’t), leaves a brittle, black bead and has no smell.

Cotton – burns quickly with a yellow flame (mine was slow with yellow), keeps burning after flame is removed (mine didn’t), leaves soft, grey ash (mine didn’t), smells like burning paper (did the first time but didn’t seem to the second time – maybe I was smelling the match…?)

See… confusing.

Maybe Spotlight was right in naming it “assorted fabric”… it’s assorted alright!

Anyone else got any ideas? Better informed than me would be good (and pretty easy as you can see I’m just guessing).

I tell you what I do take away from this experiment though… I’ll make sure to stay away from any open flames… having a fabric melt onto your skin is a particularly uninviting proposition! Mind you though, the slowness of the flame makes me think this is probably one of the safer of my outfits… I’ve never had a flaming accident before so its not something I’ve personally ever considered… and flammability has never been on a list of reasons to buy or not buy an outfit or fabric before… and if I’m honest, it won’t be in the future either. :0) but at least I’m aware of it now…

Evidence of Simplicity 4911 being finished!

Hooray! It’s been months – nay, years! – since I first started sewing this suit and although I officially finished it a couple of weeks ago, it is only now that I’ve taken photos that I feel it is truly finished!

And so… without further delay… Simplicity 4911…

To recap, it started as this…

It now looks like this!

I apologise for the non-smilingness of this photo – really, I’m ecstatic that this has turned out so well – but my camera was playing silly buggers and had just NOT taken three lots of self-timer shots, so I wasn’t really sure this one was going to turn out either (and the self-conscious ‘this is weird’ posing had started to kick in)… :0)

Contrary to the photo evidence, the back of the skirt hem isn’t longer than the front, the camera is just perched quite low. Besides the collar weirdness that I mentioned in a previous post ( ) I also decided to lengthen the sleeves about an inch. Some of my dancing partners have made mention of my ‘freakishly long arms’ but I seriously think they were just making excuses for not getting themselves out of the way in time to avoid a whack. Remember follows, it’s always the lead’s fault. :0)

I also had a bit of trouble with the waistband and after struggling with it for about an hour I just ditched it and made my own. I think the likelihood is I may not have cut it correctly because I just could not make it work… hmmm… that’s the same story as the collar situation. I see a pattern here. :0)

Once I got the camera working correctly, I went to town on the shots, so here’s some more.

I call this one ‘Nevermind About The Top Of My Head, Check Out My Remix Shoes!’ I think my dance teacher would be happy with the shape of that hanging hand too… pity I can’t remember to do it when I’m actually dancing. This photo also shows the nipped in waist… that curve also gave me a bit of gyp. One of the peplum sides does kick out a little funny, but I think I’m probably just being too critical… I’ve decided I won’t worry about it until someone points at it and screams in an overly dramatic fashion. Then I’ll think about worrying about it…

Not a terribly illuminating shot of the suit, but… I liked it, so here it is. Oh, and if you are wondering, the white ruffle is not connected to the suit at all. It is a gorgeous ruffle-fronted blouse I picked up at one of the Way We Wear fairs a couple of years ago in Williamstown here in Melbourne.

And here’s a picture of the blouse… but don’t look at my weirdly large hand.

What’s wrong with you?! I said not to look at it! Honestly…

Just jokes, just jokes. One final picture… in this I was trying to show the lovely vee at the bottom of the jacket… but I think the packet illustration still show it better.

I hope you have enjoyed the pictures… I’d love to say I had a ball making this suit, but I didn’t. Some bits of it were a little tricky and maybe if I sewed more regularly than I do then I wouldn’t have had any trouble at all… doubtful though… I mean, this IS sewing, right? However I’m more than happy with the end result.

In hindsight, if I was going to make this again, I’d look at lining it to give it a little more weight. Without lining and in the light material I used, it is definitely not for chilly weather. Mind you, the way this Melbourne winter has been making me feel for the last three months, nothing but an electric blanket and flannelette sheets makes me feel warm. Still… only two days to go until SPRING!! Finally… :0)

Success!! A finished project!

Finally – I now know what I have to do to finish something!

Unfortunately it involves getting sick and sniffly, but at least I know!

The upside is that Simplicity 4911 is now in the fully finished pile!

The downside is that I’m so sick that I can’t bare to put the suit on to take a photograph!

I’m away for about a week – my Dad is having triple bypass surgery on Tuesday so I’m making the trip north tomorrow and then travel to Canberra for a dance weekend – but once I get back I promise to do my hair, throw the suit on and take a picture or two… and then post them of course.

Hooray for finished projects!

And this is exactly how much thread I had left over at the end of this project! Lucky eh? Usually I am minus a foot – although how would a photograph of that differ to this one? Anyway… it all worked out!