Alterations – It’s Magical

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Mondays and Tuesdays, our in-house seamstress is very busy repairing, altering, and finally perfecting the ill-fitting clothing of the citizens of Lunenburg County. As I’ve tried to communicate with the above photo – it’s a magical process to behold.

Meghan accepts freshly laundered clothing for alteration and does fittings on Mondays from 10:30 – 2:30 and on Tuesdays from 10:30 – 12:00.

This is just one of the fun projects she’s working on here. She’s also teaching a neat course on June 23rd called Get to Know Your Sewing Machine, and working on a line of up-cycled clothing for the Makery to be launched on June 15th. It’s all fun and exciting here, all the time.

 

DIY – Little Leather Pouches

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This week, during our DIY drop-in day at the Makery, we made little leather pouches from the beautiful vintage leather that was a trendy jacket in 1991. Working with reclaimed leather is very easy if you have the right tools and a winning idea.

We used regular fabric scissors and a punch like this one. You might also want to use paper clips for lining up the holes.

I had a simple design in mind, a rectangular pouch with a little flap. To make this, I simply cut out a long rectangular shape, folded it in unequal half – making a flap for the top – and punched holes down the sides.

I sewed the pouch up with a long strip of leather, also cut from the jacket, and made sure I could use the same piece I was sewing with as the chord for a necklace. I used a darning needle with a big eye to sew the leather in a whipstitch.

As usual, things got inspirational and we decided to branch out from our original design and I made the drawstring pouch you see in the image. Get creative and experiment with different shapes and purposes.

Thursdays at the Makery are always DIY days, which means you can drop in for an hour any time between 12 and 6 and make something with us. All supplies are included and we keep these projects affordable – between $5 and $20. Check out our schedule to find out what we’re making next week.

After School Art Workshops in June

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Through the month of June, artist and educator Rebecca Roher is offering after school art instruction for kids. Courses are offered from 3pm – 5pm on Wednesdays or Thursdays.

Rebecca is a NSCAD graduate and an alumna of the NSCAD/Lunenburg artist residency. A resident of the South Shore, Rebecca has been sharing her talents and skills with children and adults through quilting projects, watercolour workshops, egg dying and hula hooping for the last few years. These workshops focus on larger-scale projects and kids will work together and independently to develop their artistic creativity in a fun setting at the Lunenburg Makery.

Contact the Makery for more information or to register:

Info@lunenburgmakery.ca – (902).640.4100

June 8th – Alice Burdick – Jaime Forsythe – John Wall Barger

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We are playing host to a book launch - and we’re really looking forward to it. You are cordially invited to join Alice Burdick, John Wall Barger and Jaime Forsythe for an evening of readings and celebration, June 8th at 7pm at The Makery, 228 Lincoln Street, Lunenburg.

Judge these books by their beautiful covers, below, and read the three poets’ bios.

Alice Burdick lives in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, with her husband and two children. She has also lived in Halifax, Toronto (where she was born and raised), Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula. In the early 1990s, she was co-editor of  The Eternal Network, and assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. Her work has appeared in magazines including Dig, What!, subTerrain, This Magazine, and Who Torched Rancho Diablo? She is the author of many chapbooks and two previous full-length collections, Simple Master (Pedlar Press) and Flutter (Mansfield Press. Her work has also appeared in anthologies and collections of Canadian poetry.

John Wall Barger’s poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope Books) and The Montreal Prize Global Poetry Anthology  (Véhicule Press, 2012). His first book, Pain-proof Men (Palimpsest Press), was published in 2009. He lives and teaches in Hong Kong.

Jaime Forsythe is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and journalist. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including This Magazine, Geist, and The New Quarterly. She is a regular arts contributor to The Coast, and the editor of the fiction anthology Transits (Invisible Publishing). A graduate of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program, she lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Sympathy Loophole is her first book of poetry.

DIY – Knitted Flowers, Make one for your Mum.

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I am so excited for next week’s Do-It-Yourself drop-in project. Thursday, May 3rd from noon until 5, We will be making knitted flowers with Angela Churchill of Have a Yarn in Mahone Bay.

Angela is a great instructor and even beginners can knit these little flowers. As usual, give yourself a little over an hour to complete this project.

Drop by any time between Noon and Five and you will end up with a great Mothers’ Day gift.Here’s Angela’s own pattern for knitting the flower. It’s featured as Stitch of the Month on Have a Yarn’s Website. They are always posting neat patterns and ideas.

Materials: Any weight yarn in a colour of your choice (heavier is better); needles to match
For stem, either pipe cleaner OR green or black yarn for i-chord; if making i-chord stem, you will also need a length of thin wire

Flower:
Cast on 10 stitches, leaving a long tail about 8 to 10 inches
Row 1: Purl
Row 2: Knit into front and back of every stitch
Row 3: Purl
Row 4: Knit
Repeat rows 1 to 4 twice more
Purl 1 more row
Cast off

I-Chord: (you will need either a cable needle or double point needles)
Cast on 3 stitches
Knit 1 row
*Slide stitches to other end of needle and knit another row. Repeat from * until i-chord is as long as you wish. Allow 1 cm for attaching to flower.

Put it together!
Roll the flower, purl sides in, with the stem (pipe cleaner or i-chord) on the inside.
Use the tail of the cast on edge to secure the stem to the flower. Continue up the side of the fabric to further secure it together.
Use the tail of the cast off edge and attach to the inside if the flower. Sew in ends.

If using i-chord:
Insert wire up through the i-chord

Pattern by Angela Churchill

DIY – Mini Notebooks

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Last Thursday, during our drop-in Do-It-Yourself craft session, we had a great time making stitched journals. This project is and is a fantastic way to use paper, buttons and other pieces you have in your craft space.

I discovered that the notebooks I normally use at work and at home are made in essentially the same way but, of course, the ones I got at a stationary store are less personalized and don’t use upcycled materials, like the ones we made at the Makery.

I think I’ll add this project to my regular craft possibilities. There’s and infinite number of creative ways to do the cover and even the pages inside these notebooks.

We made booklets of doubled pages for the inside of the notebooks, then attached them to the covers on our industrial sewing machine.

 

 

 

 

This mini book has a button closure with a tiny triangular cut out of the cover for a really neat effect.

One person got creative and did some machine stitching on the cover of the book, creating a really neat effect with sheer, textured green paper over smooth pink card stock.

These could be made at home using a nail and hand-stitching the binding, a domestic sewing machine with a needle for heavy fabric can sew through a millimetre or two of paper as well. Our  industrial machines are easily strong enough to sew through about 30 pages and a cover, which makes a good sized notebook. Line the paper up perfectly and sew straight down the middle of the “spine” for a great notebook.