As part of my Summer break, I like to take some of the time to do things around the house/ studio.  And as my machines are in the shop for their annual tune up, those things involve organizing, purging and / or repairs and updates.

So this afternoon project resulted in 2 great new looking chairs, which were put to use right away last night as we had some company over to help sort our DVD collection.

Note – found out at the end of th evening that teenagers do actually think differently – even really well behaved, polite, articulate ones. While they put all the DVD titles starting with each respective letter together, they chose to not sort within that subset. So, we will be taking some time/bribing someone else who is as OCD as we are, to finish the job at some point in the future:-) …Pad Thai, anyone?

Okay, back to earlier in the day…

I began with looking at the chairs I have been suing and turning a blond eye to all of the cracks in the vinyl for a drew years now.  While they are good folding chairs, it was time to either donate or recover.

I took a few minutes to search online for techniques and scanned a few other posts, which were much more succinct than this one, and realized how easy it would be.  Quick journey into the fabric bins to find some options, and narrowed it down to two. One of each was the final choice!

and so it began:

Tools:

• screw drivers – one to remove screws, flat head to remove staples
• pliers to assist in removing staples
• scissors to cut your fabric
• fabric – enough to cover your pieces, extra if using a print / design that needs matching
• interfacing or muslin if you want an in between layer
• staple gun and ¼ inch staples

1 – Unscrew the sections to be recovered.  If there is a finish layer, mine had a thin layer of vinyl stapled on, remove it carefully too.

2- to contain the rips, I used a “primer” layer of stiff interfacing – it was handy.

3-decide on fabric placement – prints look best centred , stripes/squares and al other fabrics, pay attention to the straight of grain  – use it as your guide whether placing square with it or on the bias.

4- start in the centres and work your way out to the corners. Practice with the in between layer to see how the curves will work etc.

5-Mark the screwholes to help later reassembling and trim excess fabric as needed.

6 – replace liner, or fins a nice way to hide the fabric edges

7 reassemble the chair and admire your work!

in 2016 I was finishing off a number of clients from Luxe Bridal, and Christine was an amazing woman who wanted her dress to have sleeves that matched, and there were some bodice and hem adjustments that happened too.

I do not take “before” photos as who wants to have photos of themselves posted in a dress that does not fit – I like people to look their best!

So thank you to Christine for sending me this lovely selection of photos from her big day!

posted with permission!

And I had used her dress on my instagram feed as well, I was so pleased with how the addition of the sleeves looked!

Remember those sleeves on my cutting board? Behold! Another personalization of an already gorgeous wedding dress! #bridalseason #couturier #redesign #bridal613

A post shared by Tracey A Vibert (@tavcreations) on Aug 7, 2016 at 7:15am PDT

Pink is on my colour scheme; orange is on @wtl ‘a. Perfectly transitioning sunrise today! #happyanniversary #morningwalk #findingbeauty #appreciation #nature #myottawa #keeplookingup

A post shared by Tracey Vibert (@halymaottawa) on Feb 21, 2017 at 4:14am PST

So, today at about 11:15 a.m. we will hit our 19th year together…

I feel this urge to go on and on with words of wisdom and advice for all of the folks who are choosing to get married, but I also think I can be concise and simple.

WTL would say, as he often does, “Marry your best friend.”

I agree and add, ” Appreciate every day with your chosen person, and tell them.”

And make the time and effort to do fun sh!t together!

I tried adulting and it was fun, but I’m going back to my happy place now.

My “ambition” when I first decided in Grade 10 that I would become a fashion designer/ couturier/ sew for a living was to have a comfy home studio and work from there.

My vision involved a house rather than an apartment, but I like living downtown in Ottawa, so apartment living it is.

Since I moved into our present apartment 2.5 years ago, I’ve been trying to reconfigure my studio situation. For 17 years, I had the perfect layout, but that apartment building became a chaotic landlord mess and we moved.  I share our large open living/dining area with my husband’s office and our living room.  It works, but I’m still finding the best layout.

When given the chance to work in house with Luxe, I took advantage of the offer. and things evolved through a few incarnations, with constant changes, but no steady need to have fittings in huge gowns in my home space.

Fast forward to June 2016, I had signed a short term lease on a studio space in Mooney’s Bay area that worked well with Luxe brides, for whom I was providing alterations services.

The store closed in July.

Without missing a beat, my clients continued to come to me at the Ridgewood/ Mooney’s Bay studio location and some found it wonderfully convenient.

But things continue to change and evolve.

I was approached by another bridal salon to assist with their growing alterations aspect and they are SUPERCLOSE to my home studio. While it’s still early, I am cautiously optimistic.  The work lining up for 2017 makes it logical to stay in my home space and focus on the sewing.

Something I can mention now – the business I was subletting from, came to let me know they were closing and my lease would be ending in early 2017 from their time frame.  And with a 30 day notice in our agreement, I had a week to consider my options – but mostly “when” would I move home.

Thus, on December 1, I gave my notice and scheduled my  move during the holiday break.

I don’t enjoy moving, but I am looking forward to coming back home!

I’ll be taking some time off from sewing from December 23rd to January 3, for both family holiday stuff and actually moving and resettling.

Please keep me in mind for your colourful design needs – I’ve been SO HAPPY designing new pieces for clients this fall in bright glorious colours! I want to keep that flowing while I still help brides in their white and ivory dresses look gorgeous!

Pre-Halloween 2016 and my Husband and I having the usual discussion,

“What do you want to be for Halloween?”

” I dunno, what do you want to be?”

And so it goes, for about 2 weeks until finally an idea pops into his head and he says it out loud.

Background: We have been attending the same extended community event for 20 years now, and we tend to try to go with the theme of the evening and be creative. For 10+ years of attending the Annual Witches Gathering Charity event, we have been judges and for the past 2 years we decided to take a break.

In 2015, the theme was Dancing Between the Worlds and we went as Quantum Foam and String Theory:

We were told it was a bit too esoteric for the first year as not judges.

Previous years, we were judges in these:

So, on to this year’s theme:

To the Bottom of the Sea…

Tom’s idea: Anglerfish

And the research part of this adventure began and I called it #myscienceproject.

I looked up images and realized there were so many different types of Anglerfish, I could be totally creative.

Now, it’s also a couple costume, so I started to research the appearance of the male versus female and learned a whole new batch of information.

The Oatmeal describes it best – please check out : Go there and come back! After you finish laughing…

Okay,  Are we back now?

Once I decided on a general concept for the female Angler Fish – Angela, I started to research construction methods and found an amazing number of Angler fish halloween costumes out there already. Go google Angler Fish costume images after you are done here!

Once I clarified  whether he wanted it on his head or torso, I could choose what size to make her and construction began.
I was so pleased that we had just received a new couch and had packing cardboard available, as well as many shipments from a certain online company that packs their cardboard boxes with oodles of brown craft paper – which I keep and use for patterns mostly – provided me with lots of clean paper to use with my chosen method:

papier mâché

Step 1 – Create a cardboard skeleton:

I sew for a living – you may have guessed that – and I like to “drape” when I create original pieces , so I pretty much draped the shape and cut away cardboard into darts to curve it, and used mostly masking tape to “baste” it together for the first fitting.

Step 2 – Add some extra support pieces as needed:

I added wire to the bottom to help me have a defined edge and used duct tape to hold it in place – this is a hat making skill that normally includes stitching the wire in place with a blanket stitch and then adding a bias wrap to hold it smoothly in place. I swear. #millineryskills

I also added a bit more duct tape through the seams and started prepping it for the embellishments:

The lure mounting was the top segment of a 2 litre pop bottle.

The separate lower jaw, I created by folding the corrugated couch cardboard – which gave me the perfect base to insert the dowel teeth. The dowels were small diameter craft dowels that I could cut with my power cutters < stronger than scissors>, and I inserted them into the tunnels in the corrugated cardboard.  For the upper teeth, I created a narrower version of the folded over jawline and did the same thing.

The spines I created by hot gluing super fine wire to white yarn.

The eye sockets were created by gluing two safety seals from the inside of juice cartons onto the body – I was able to get eyes that fit exactly into the perfect circles created by the seals, but if I had not, I was planning to fill the seals with hot glue and have translucent eyes.

I did have most of the structure  as solid as possible with tape before starting the paper and glue/ paper and flour steps, so the first layers were strengthening and building up of features.

Step 3 – getting messy:

The recipes:

Day 1:

half glue, half water.

The first layer I did with white glue and water – I found the plastic tray from a frozen dinner was PERFECT as a tray – it’s big enough to run the strips of paper through it and was just the right size for making a good amount of mix. Most recipes online tell you to only make enough paste for one go at a time. This was the perfect amount and sized – just about 3/8 inch depth in the tray gave me enough paste to do a first layer and that dried family quickly.

Day 2:

1 cup flour, enough water to make it a paste the consistency of crepe batter.

Again, I used the tray and a small whisk to make it smooth. The brown paper works great to sculpt the extra thick parts and I keep the lower jaw and fins separate so I could work on the body, put in front of the window with a fan blowing on it while I worked on the jaw, and fins,  and switch as needed.

Once I had built things up to my liking for musculature, I let it dry overnight and the following day I created the skin texturing with a final layer of paper and flour mixture.  Scrunching the paper creating vertical lines along the length of the body and fins gave the look I wanted.

PAINTING!

Acrylic craft paint worked great and I used sponge brushes to get the base black on.

As I was applying the black, I realized that I would not be able to easily get into every crevasse of the folded paper so I just went with it. The colour of the Anglerfish is either dark brown of grey, and this was creating a great version of it by having the brown craft paper texture offset by the black.

I then added metallic gold to give it a great sheen and added depth and reflection.

The teeth I painted plain white – keeping it simple. and I added a line of hot glue around the teeth after the painting, to keep them stable but also added an extra layer of texture and wetness to the jaw.

Finally, I added a thin coat of orange glitter paint – it was what I had – to the inside of the mouth.  Cool, eh?

The lure was created with lighted wire from my hubby, that has a power pack for lighting it. I rolled it into a ball, inserted that into a small plastic bag, tying it with a twist tie. I wrapped about 10 inches of the light in paper and taped that into a flexible tube with duct tape  and then wrapped the entire segment in electrical tape.  I created a tiny cardboard funnel for the end that would insert into the mount and taped it all. a bit of gold paint on the black to blend it in along with some hot glue and there it was!

Inside I ran it through a cardboard tube along the “spine” of Angela, and bundled the remaining light cord into a black fabric pocket in her tail.  The entire body was them zip tied to my hubby’s bike helmet and some extra duct tape locked it in place.

Super industrial velcro holds the jaw in place to allow some adjusting  as needed, and then gold paint on a black garbage bag creates her belly – it’s only on with masking tape to make it quick to remove if needed.

In between the big job of creating Angela, Randy was made from a cardboard toilet paper tube, stuffed with a few cotton balls, held together with masking tape and a couple of layers of paper and flour. I painted him with glow in the dark paint and black .  He’s a finger puppet to make life easy for me!

Test shots of Angela once everything was ready:

The Glamour Shot of Angela and Randy:

The Boudoir Shoot by Darner Media:

And finally-

Angler and Randy at the Annual Witches Gathering 2016

Winners! Judges Favourite “New Nightmare”

Hi again,

I’ve had some very interesting adventures over the past five years as I had wandered into a new realm of wedding dress alterations by the generous invitation of the ladies of LuxeBridal.   As I strode boldly into that world, I had to choose how much time I would have to design and create original pieces and how much time I would give to a really steady flow of work and income.

There was an ebb and flow for a while, and then in the fall of 2014, I gave myself over to that path and mainly have been working on white – so much white – pretty, sparkly white, but again, so much white.

And I did so with gratitude and an adventure seeking joy as my background in making garments that are customized both in design and fit, allow me problem solving skills that helped tackle the most interesting challenges!

The journey began to spiral around again to me returning to my natural habitat last winter as the decision to shift back into running things on my own terms was broached, and by June 1st, I had signed the lease on my 2nd studio space, and was gratefully tracking time for myself again.

If I learned anything about working with other people, it’s to let them do some of the work once in a while to allow them the awareness of how much time things can take, and how much attention to detail I can be very OCD about – thanks to Maddy and the ever colourful Laura for the times they helped with the lace! Lisa – she knew better!

And then, mid-summer, Luxe Bridal quietly announced it’s closure and while I am still happily helping out their brides who have not yet walked down the aisle, I know I now am back onto my own track and seeking new adventures in creativity and sewing!  But does everyone else know that?

There I was yesterday having had two conversations that brought me up short.  I was asked who my favourite designer was – I don’t have one – and I babbled on about how I’m not a fashionista  < that skill lies with other folks, including one of my longtime clients who I love to see what she puts together!>. The bottom line for me is that truly, I don’t have a favourite designer.  I am inspired by the things that other designers < known or otherwise> do and use that influence to generate ideas and  fun for both my clients and myself.

The other conversation began when a client, with whom I am venturing into a new realm again, calmly said, as we booked a number of fittings in order for her new outfit to be ready for her wear date, “I guess you don’t make things from scratch as you mainly do alterations...” , presumable in reference to needing so many appointments.

And my heart broke.

I then had to explain myself. I had to justify the number of fittings I prefer to have in order to ensure all of the details are in place. I had to point out that before 5 years ago, I only occasionally did alterations and mostly MADE dresses, costumes and other exciting pieces.  But she only has known me for a couple of years, and had no way of really knowing the depths of my creative powers, because I’ve been focusing them into a very narrow beam

So I realized this morning I wanted to yell to the world –

I’M BACK

So bring it on!

If you need some custom work,< or yes, I’ll still do alterations!> email me at tracey@tav-creations.com or fill out the contact form!

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Two new garters for a client to choose from – a fun diversion from being swathed in tulle and crinoline on a hot day!

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