Ball gown

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I've been working on quite a few projects over the last few months; the most successful one being this ball gown which I made with my great grandmother (and she surely is the reason why it turned out so well).

Since it is tradition here in Germany to organize a big ball to celebrate graduating high school, I knew in advance that I'd need a fitting dress for the occasion. Usually these kind of dresses start at around ~100€, with the price going up exponentially with increasing quality.
As I pondered on what kind of dress I wanted, I realized that I wasn't ready or even able to pay that kind of money for a nice gown. And it is then that I remembered that I have a great grandmother who used to professionally make wedding gowns - this was the perfect opportunity!
So I asked her whether she would like to work on this with me and she was so kind to agree, emphasizing, however, that she only did it because I was the one who asked. She stressed that this will be the last gown she will ever make. 

So, to begin I had to figure out what kind of design I'd like. Clueless at first, I immediately headed to Pinterest in the search of inspiration. And I was not disappointed. I found a bunch of gorgeous dresses, each prettier and more elegant than the last.
It was hard to decide, but in the end I found a dress which I immediately loved so much, that I ended up using it as the main inspiration for my design.

While the dress in the picture was mainly made out of tulle, we decided to go with mousseline since it is more durable and does not crease. 

So I went to the shop and got some tissue in the color that I liked (which was dark red of course, my favorite!) along with a few buttons for the sleeves. 

Immediately we got to work, and I would visit her for a few hours everyday so that we could sew together. Our workflow was mostly composed of her cutting and preparing the pieces of fabric and me doing the sewing. 

I certainly learned a lot during the two weeks we worked on the dress, but the most important part, as cheesy as it sounds, was all the time I got to spend with my great grandmother. Just sitting next to her in silence everyday, completely focused on the dress we were making together was an odd contrast to the usual sensory overstimulation we are exposed to everyday. Even now as I am writing this entry, I am listening to music in the background. Those moments of total silence and concentration have become very rare, which is a bummer since it is a wonderful experience. 

We would try on the dress from time to time to check if it fit right

 

Everyday at 5pm we would take a small break to enjoy a madeleine together

After two weeks of hard work the dress was finally finished, and I even made myself a choker and a small shawl to go along with it. It was the proudest I had been in a long while and I was extremely thankful to my great grandmother, not only to have made that dress with me and to have taught me so much, but also for spending such a wonderful summer together with me, that I shall forever remember fondly.

Two small updates

 Hello everyone!!

It has been a while since my last life signal on here so I figured that I should stop procrastinating and come back to give a few updates on some projects I've been working on. (Spoiler: they both didn't quite work out...)

The first one is the fair isle sweater that I had been working on. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out the way I intended it to. You cannot really see it in the picture, but the chest part is kind of... wobbly. So I suppose I won't be wearing this sweater in public. 

Still, I'm very proud of it, so I will not be frogging it. It may have been a little naive of me to start out my first ever large scale crochet project with something this ambitious, but it sure taught me a lot! 

The biggest lessons I've learned from this are: 

- plan your entire project beforehand! (this may seem obvious, but for some reason I believed myself to be above this and able to improvise... I clearly wasn't)

- count, count, count!! Always count your stitches per row, you'll thank yourself later. I promise. 

- and lastly: don't start your first project without a guide. Really. 

As for the project with the epoxy resin.. that didn't quite work out either.

Unfortunately we didn't mix enough hardener into the solution, so the resin never hardened completely. 

This little pendant was the most salvageable thing we made, and even that is not really usable. I will have to try and file it down a little do get off the 'sticky' part, I think.

It is a pity since we did end up wasting quite a bit of resin and also flowers. But as is the case with the sweater I crocheted, we did end up learning a bit with this project as well, and we'll make sure to use enough hardener next time! 

It is not all negative though! I have been working on quite a few other projects over the last four months as well, and I'm happy to say that some of them were actually successes! I'll talk about them in a few following blog posts. :)

Art Trade

Receiving artwork from fellow artists (and non-artists!) is one of the most delightful things there is. This is why the concept of an "art trade" is such a popular one. 

According to the urban dictionary, an art trade is "the exchanging of art in any form (though more commonly on traditional media) between one another. Each artist fulfills a request from the other, when complete the artists will give the art to one another in an exchange of works. Both on the giving and receiving ends. With this mutual arrangement, each artist has gained the work of another in what they may deem as equal of value." 

Thank you to @r4ksha on instagram!!

Thank you to @_sirini_s on instagram!!

Over the last few years, I have done quite a lot of art trades (around 100!!) with many different artists. There have been ones where it didn't quite work out and the other side unfortunately ended up abandoning their part of the agreement after I had sent them my finished piece, leaving me empty handed, it has mostly been an extremely fun and fulfilling experience. 

One thing that all these trades had in common however, was the fact that they were all done over the internet, and thus ended with us just exchanging image files. While that is still a wonderful thing, and I am always very happy to see what the other side comes up with, it definitely isn't the same thing as holding a physical painting in your hands. 

This is why, I was very excited to do a traditional art trade for the first time. 

I was originally approached by someone on Instagram, who asked me whether I'd like to do something like this. I was a little apprehensive at first, especially since they were from the US, so I was afraid that I might not be able to afford the price for shipping. However, it turned out that it only cost me around 3,50€ in the end, so I was happy to agree to the trade. 

We quickly worked out the the details of the trade: I asked them to make a photo collage, based around eyes and the lyrics of "I can talk with my eyes shut" by Car Seat Headrest, a song that is very important to me. In return, they sent me a photo of her with her father, that they asked me to paint for his birthday. (This is also why I won't post my side of the trade, out of respect for both their and their father's privacy) 

Working on the painting was incredibly fun, I tried my best to make it look as good as possible. Then came the part where I had to figure out the shipping. As this was my first time ever sending someone a painting of mine per post, I wasn't quite sure how exactly to package it, so it wouldn't get damaged on the way to its destination. Thankfully, I was able to find many resources online, which described different ways to appropriately package pieces.

As I had just painted on some 160g paper, and not a thick canvas, I was was able to just slip the painting into a big paper envelope, along with a piece of carton so it wouldn't bend. I also added a little personal letter in there. 

It arrived around 1 week after I had brought it to the post office, and Gracie was so nice to send me a picture of her dad with the painting, saying that they loved it. This made me incredibly happy. There truly is nothing better in the world than knowing that something you did was able to bring someone else joy, even if it is just something small.

Seeing that she had gotten my little package made this whole little project a lot more tangible, a lot more real, and I couldn't wait to see what she had come up with for me. Around two weeks later their package had finally arrived.

Thank you to @bigveins.d0gbait on Instagram!! <3

I just came back home from meeting with a friend of mine, when my mother showed me the parcel. I immediately recognized their name on it and got really excited. I ran to my room and carefully opened the package, pulling out two amazing collages and a little letter. They even put some cute little cutouts into the package. They had told me beforehand that they would send me to pieces, to make up for a small delay. Though it absolutely wasn't necessary, and I don't mind little delays as they can happen to everyone, I really appreciated this little kind gesture. 

When I first held these two pieces in my hands, I genuinely started crying a little out of joy. I was so overwhelmed by it, that I just couldn't hold back the tears. The thought that someone had worked on these pieces with their two hands, cutting out each little picture and carefully gluing it onto the paper, just for me made me incredibly happy. It's hard to put into words how much this means to me. 

I am incredibly grateful that I got to do my first every physical art trade with such a talented and kind person, and I already look forward to the next time I get the opportunity to do something like this! 

Thank you Gracie! <3

Epoxy Resin

On Tuesday I got to visit a friend to make some little things out of epoxy resin. It was quite exciting, as I have been meaning to try out that medium for a while now. While it was in no way easy to work with, it was definitely a ton of fun, and something I'd love to do again sometime. 

Mixing epoxy resin is hard work

We started out by mixing epoxy resin with hardener in a 1:1 ratio. Since epoxy resin can be very irritating on skin, we had to be very careful and used a plastic cup and little wooden sticks, which we could throw away later, to blend the two. The consistence was rather weird, it was incredibly thick and reminded me a little of honey. 

One had to be very slow and careful when stirring it, as not to accidentally make little air bubbles. This quickly became really tedious, and was easily the most boring part of the whole process. Just stirring it at an agonizingly slow place and still seeing little air bubbles appear was really frustrating. 

When the mixture turned a little white, we knew that we were done with the first step and could finally move on to the next one: pouring the resin into silicone molds. My friend chose to make an ashtray and two flower pots, I went for some little charms, out of which I'll make necklaces later.

There are a lot of options of what one can put in epoxy resin - glitter, acrylic paint, sand etc... I brought some dried flower petals that I had collected over the years, and my friend had some seashells that she had gathered at different beaches, so this is what we went with for this session.

Dried flowers...

... and lots of little sea shells!

Pouring the resin into the molds was probably the most challenging, but also the most fun part of this project. It was here that one could really get creative and come up with some fun designs.

For the smaller molds, we used little pipettes to drop the resin in layer for layer, putting the flowers in between. For the bigger projects however, it was a lot more handy to put the flowers and shells in first and then pouring the resin in directly. 

This is what we came up with in the end, the ashtray and flower pots my friend made on the left and my charms in the right. I'm really happy with how they turned out and I can't wait to see the end results. These will now have to dry for about a week, so I'll post an update then!

- Tournesol 🌻

Second Hand Books

 I love buying things second hand. It's a lot cheaper than buying things brand new, it helps reducing waste and most importantly, the thought of holding something in your hands that someone used to cherish is very comforting. 

That last point holds especially true for second hand books. Seeing the little notes that former owners left in it always feels like sharing a small moment of intimacy with a stranger. Someone before me held this exact book in their hands, their eyes glancing over the same letters, the same words as mine. 

Daniel Goleman, Emotionale Intelligenz

Especially when certain passages are underlined, I start wondering why they chose to highlight exactly that part of the text? What made it so important to them, what was going through their head in that moment? 

 

Even if these things might seem rather trivial, and maybe they really are, it is things like this that make me feel a little connected to the previous reader. It shows that someone was here, a proof of their existence.

Aldous Huxley,  Brave New World

Daniel Goleman, Emotionale Intelligenz

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Siri Hustvedt , Was ich liebte (With chinese annotations)

The third picture shows a page of the drama "A Raisin in the Sun". Every few years our school goes through the books that are lying around in the storage room, and throws away those that aren't needed anymore. Most of them are text books, but there are a few novels amongst them here and there (I have no idea how they even got there). That year our class assisted with this whole process of sorting out, and we had to throw away a ton of books, which was a little heartbreaking. While I had no use for the textbooks, I did take a few novels and such with me. "A Raisin in the Sun" was one of them. The book must have belonged to one of the students before, which is why the book was full of little annotations, translating words and analyzing scenes. 

It was an interesting insight into the way someone else worked with the book. I could see all the words that they didn't know before, and the thoughts they had on the different characters, how they interpreted their relationships. This also reminded me of the books I got from my mother, with which she tried to learn German. They are filled with little translations, and you can follow the path of her slowly learning the language, word for word. There is something incredibly human about it. 

 

Oliver Sacks, der Mann der seine Frau mit einem Hut verwechselte

Lastly, I also found a few books with little messages written at the front. I couldn't quite make out of all them, but it still adds a personal touch to the book. 

This one translates to: "For Doris, best wishes for continued success and happiness in your apprenticeship from Martina (...), Neurology internship, (...), 03.08.2007". 

It must have been a gift from a neurologist, to someone who did her internship at her clinic. I wonder, what became of Doris, if she ever finished her apprenticeship? Are both of them still in contact? Clearly, they must have had a good relation, if Martina gifted her a book? And I wonder, what did Doris think of the book? Did she like it?

It does feel a little weird, almost intrusive even, to hold something that was meant as a gift for someone else. These little messages were never meant for me, they weren't written with me as a reader in mind.

And yet, I am now the one holding the book in my hand, and getting to read it, giving the book a second life, apprectiating the little traces previous owners left behind.

Paul Celan, Die Niemandsrose/Sprachgitter

Maren Gottschalk, der geschärfte Blick

Fair isle sweater

 Hello again!

Yesterday I wrote a little about the sweater that I'm currently working on. Here it is!

It's halfway done by now, all it's missing is the main body.

As I mentioned, this project came with a lot of hurdles, and the hardest part isn't even over yet. 

I first got the idea for this when I was browsing Pinterest for some clothing inspiration and I stumbled upon lots of very cute sweaters. Buying them brand new however is rather expensive, so I'd thought that I'd just make my own one, where I could even tweak it a bit to fit my tastes perfectly. 

I was inspired by the picture of the sweater shown above, so I quickly did some research on how one would proceed to make something like this. I tried to reverse engineer the color chart of the sweater, and ended up with the chart on the right. Of course, I wouldn't be able to make it look identical to the original sweater, since that was probably made by knitting, and mine would be done with crochet, where the stitches are a little bit tilted. 

Fair isle crochet seen from the other side

While doing my research online, I found out that there are numerous ways to do color work in crochet, from fair isle to intarsia. In the end, fair isle seemed to be the best fit for this project, and it is also most commonly used when making sweaters. And so I started to plan the layout of my sweater, orienting myself on an Youtube tutorial for knitting fair isle sweaters, and a sweater of this sort that I already owned. I also noticed that there were surprisingly little resources for sweaters of this kind using crochet. I found one tutorial on Youtube, but I didn't quite like it, since the colorwork only extended to the parts of the arms, and the rest was in one color. I should later learn the hard way, why this was the case.

 And so I planned the whole sweater using the instructions from the knitting video, measured the lengths of the different parts I'd need and calculated how much yearn I'd need. I decided to use a size 3,5 Polyacryl yarn from Schachenmayr, and ordered it from German online shop for wool supplies. 

It all arrived within a week and I was so excited that I immediately got started. However, I soon realized something. When knitting fair isle sweaters, one knits the whole body first, and then cuts two slits on the sides to sew the sleeves onto. The technique one uses to cut holes into knitted fabric is called steeking. It turns out that steeking isn't really a thing with crochet, something I should probably have realized earlier. While there are some ways to cut into crochet fabric, I only found little resources about it online, and it seemed to only work for horizontal cuts. For arm holes however, one would need vertical cuts. 

This is where the hard part began. I pondered a lot on how I should proceed and ended up with the following:

I made a chain loop on each side of the upper part of the sweater and sewed the sleeves to those. This way, both parts were connected a little by their corners. The next step will be doing the crochet in rows instead of rounds, always doing a little slip stitch at the end of each row, to connect it to the sleeve. 

This however means, that I will have to crochet from left to right half of the time, which is an absolute nightmare. We will see whether I manage to gather up the motivation to pull through with this. I'll keep you updated on this fun little project!

 -Tournesol 🌻

Last collar

I still haven't quite figured out how to customize the design of this blog yet, but I already wasted two hours just to tweak some colors so I won't waste any more time on that. (I accidentally made the titles invisible, help!!)

Yesterday I crochet another little collar, which I liked quite a lot. 

I followed this lovely pattern, just like for the other three collars I did. Initially, I was a little scared that it might end up being too small, however it's just the perfect size to fit around my neck! This makes it ideal for sweaters with collars that are a little higher than usual, but not quite turtlenecks (I'm not sure how these are called).

These are the other three little collars I made, the patterns are all from the same channel. (You can click on the images to get redirected to the pattern!) I'm honestly not quite satisfied with the second one, but I guess that's okay, considering it was one of my first attempts at this.

This is all the fine wool I have left, so I probably won't be able to do any little collars anymore (for now at least)! But this also means that I'll get to continue my sweater. I might make an entry about that project tomorrow. While it is a ton of fun to work on it, it definitely also case with a lot of difficulties. 

Anyways, that's it for today!

- Tournesol 🌻