A royal wedding hat fest

Oh boy did I have fun watching the wedding this morning. Firstly the bride and groom looked stunning and everyone looked really happy. It was a beautiful ceremony and it was great fun watching everyone arrive and leave.

But more importantly the HATS. Oh my word they were fantastic!!!

Kate's done so much for hats in this country - it's wonderful to see a young woman wearing so many beautiful hats and she wears them so well. It's only right that there should be so many beautiful ones at her wedding.

There's a good photo gallery at Vogue here which captures a lot of the outfits. Not my favourite one though...there was a beautiful simple grey dress with a fantastically clean lined hat and I have no idea who it was on - I've been searching for hours but I cannot find it! If anyone can help I'd love to see another picture - I'm pretty sure I saw it while the 'lesser' royals were arriving...

Either that or I'd love to be a bridesmaid in Pippa's dress...

I was so excited by hats watching it that I had to make a little something while I was watching (well, I never can sit still) so here's a little fascinator inspired by the royal wedding, in a nice regal purple.

Mallory

I'd like to introduce you to Mallory.

Mallory is a mini beret in the most fantastic blue-teal I've ever seen.

She is hand blocked on a one of a kind block designed alongside the lovely guys at Boon and Lane in Luton.

She is decorated with hand-pleated petersham ribbon, held in place with tiny, almost invisible hand-stitches.

She can be held on the head with hat elastic or can be mounted on a hair band, whatever suits your wearing style.

Mallory can be made up in another colour of your choice, just contact me on alison@alisonclaire.co.uk.

Mallory is named for my cousin's fiancee. Welcome to the family.

Fascinator Making Class at Robyn's Hen Do

This weekend I held my first fascinator party at a hen do. It was fantastic fun, both for me and for the hens.

I wanted to do something fairly quick but also following current trends. I wanted to do something to capture shape and form and not just to stick a ball of feathers onto a hair clip. I wanted to enable the hens to make something they were proud of and not something they could just pick up in any high street shop.

I settled on a combination of crin and sinamay with biot and coq feathers. I picked out two colour combinations which could be mixed and matched.

Crin is fantastic fun to work with. It's easy to sculpt into some really striking shapes yet always keeps to gentle curves which flatter the face and give a feminine touch. On seeing my demonstration, all the hens chose to make the base of their fascinator this way.

We used the sinamay and feathers to emphasise the shapes we'd made.

I was amazed at the variety of creations, with some uses of crin I'd never even dreamed of. I loved watching the characters of the hens reflected in their designs. There was big and bold, colourful and discrete, flowing shapes and controlled, tailored designs. But most of all there were fifteen smiles around the table.

The class was held in a beautiful cottage in Derbyshire. And without further ado here's some photos of what they produced. The hens are all planning to show off their masterpieces at the wedding in a few weeks so watch out for an update then.

If you are interested in holding a fascinator making party, please contact me on alison@alisonclaire.co.uk

Hats for hair loss

I was recently approached by a family friend recently to make her a couple of hats after she lost all her hair to chemotherapy.

We designed the hat together. She had a couple of hats already but they slipped down over her face without hair to hold them in place, they were itchy or they were too warm to wear indoors.

We chose a super-soft jersey - 100% cotton to ensure it was breathable. It's got about a 20-25% stretch in four directions which allows it to fit really nicely.

The hat's formed of three rings and a circle to top it off. Each has been drafted to follow the exact contours of the head. The front is actually a different shape to the back. Each ring is formed of two pieces. All the seams allows it to form really closely to the shape of the head.

The first was produced in a dusky pink with contrast purple stitches. She was so happy that she requested another three - in a fantastic selection of colours.

So here they are - the colour choices are all hers - she's got a great eye for that. I hope you'll join me in wishing her the best for her further treatment.

A surprisingly Hatty Friday night out

I'm going to start this post with a photo of the fantastic business card holder I got last night:

I got this last night while out with Rich. Due to scouts meeting on a Friday it's rare we get Friday night in London, but we make the most of it when we can. We went to see the FANTASTIC St Albans Scout and Guide Gang Show with the kids on Thursday (check out their website here).

On Thursday night, Rich drew me a map as a clue to where we'd be going

I had no idea, but my colleagues quickly identified it as Aldwych and one of them pointed out that there's no tube station where he's marked, but there is a closed tube station nearby.

We met up and had a look at the outside of the tube station and a little wander around the area (if you're there, take a walk down some alleys as there's loads to see that's set back off the road).

Rich told me we had to get back to Aldwych for 6pm. I guessed that we were taking a guided tour or something, but at a few minutes to six, we were standing in front of a church all alone. He gave me a little print out and told me the church was St Clement Danes - the famous church from the song

The bells rang a few times, we could hear other bells in the distance and we were starting to think 'is that it' when suddenly the famous tune rang out. It was brilliant! Rich didn't know the rhyme before hand so we sang it along to the bells (when we weren't falling over laughing). Great fun.

I was told that this wasn't it - there was more to come so we headed towards Green Park. We looked in the windows of all the shops down Jermyn Street and past Fortnum and Mason. Neither of us had ever been in so we went in to have a look around. It was brilliant - almost as good as Liberty's! We loved the food and chocolate and tea sections, but as we wandered something caught my eye - the hat section.

I'm afraid there's no photos (I was too excited to even try to take some) but I tried hats by Stephen Jones, Philip Treacy, Adrian Howard and Caroline Sinclair. There were a couple I absolutely fell in love with and lots of fantastic inspiration. If you want to see some phenomenal headpieces then pop in and try them out. Fantastic.

Finally, we moved on to 'the last part'. We wandered down back streets and suddenly there was a beautifully lit hotel - Duke's Hotel, home of the martini that inspired Ian Fleming when he was writing the James Bond books.

Now that is a martini. They bring a trolley out and make them in front of you and they can best be described as smooth, perfectly formed and incredibly strong. We only needed one each and sat back and chatted about our fantastic evening.

OK, not as hatty as it could be, but I woke up this morning with a head full of hats and I really need to get off the computer and make them...

Photo Shoot and Etsy Listing

I've put the sinamay headpiece I love up on Etsy - it's inspired me to make so many more and I'm running out of space for boxes under my bed!

It's listed here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/67295613/sculpted-sinamay-headpiece

And here's the photos Rich helped me take (isn't he brilliant)

The Big Christmas Presents

Finally, onto the big Christmas presents I've hinted at over and over and over again.

Rich and I have a blanket I made when I was at uni. It's toasty warm and fantastically cuddly and in the run up to Christmas was in almost constant use in the cold evenings. It was incredibly simple to make - two layers of fleece stitched together - one is black, the other is yellow smiley faces on a black background. It's lasted really well despite being incredibly cheap fabric - at least 8 years of frequent washing.

So we based our Christmas presents for family on wanting to share that cuddly winter evening warmth. We wanted to theme each blanket on something that was important to the people we were making it for. We decided to appliqué a pattern onto each and to back it with a relevant printed fleece.

We hand stitched the appliqués with the blankets (1.6m x 2m) laid out on the floor. We then attached the front and back on the overlocker with strong blue thread to bring out the pale blue background we'd used for each.

We're really pleased with the output, and by WE I mean WE - Rich helped out loads on these - he was chief cutter and did some fantastic stitch work!



First we have one for his parents - a scale appliqué of their boat, Boing. The back is a panel of pirates stitched onto a plain black background:

Right, next onto my parents. There's a story from when my Dad and I went walking in Wales and we found the PERFECT PATH. I mean, this path was amazing - bouncy, every so slightly uphill (down's bad on the knees), the perfect place to enjoy hiking and each other's company. We've searched for years for something to beat it, but nothing ever will. So anyway, here's the perfect path, with sheep on the other side:

Next we have my brother in law and his girlfriend. They're both really into their planes (he's an air traffic controller and she's a qualified pilot) and I'm reliably informed that this is their favourite. It's to scale again and it's a Cessna 182. Rich really took control on this one and his attention to detail really shows in just how fantastic it is (and in the fact that they knew exactly what type of plane it was). The back is a gorgeous print of helicopters and aeroplanes.

And finally we move onto my Aunt's gift. She took a fantastic photo of one of her dogs, Rockett for her Christmas cards. We used T-Shirt transfer paper to transfer it to white fleece and then stitched it onto the background. I did a knot every 4 or 5 stitches in case any of the dogs catch their claws in it. I hope that does the trick. The backing is paw prints.

So there we go, it's been an epic job (although finished a month ago - bad me not updating the blog) but I'm thrilled with the results. Christmas day was magical - we wrapped them up with the patterned side out and watched in joy as they realised they were really personal. They barely believed we'd made them. One of the greatest joys in putting this much effort in is seeing the joy on faces as they see how personal they are. Even thinking about it a month later I'm grinning about it.

More Christmas Stuff

I'm determined to get all my Christmas stuff sorted by the end of January as I've been a very bad blogger this year so far. I'm trying to get the photos sorted for the BIG PRESENTS I made such a deal about in December - they'll come soon.

But for a bit of a giggle, here's the fancy dress costume I made for our Scout Christmas party. We usually get a lot of Santas and another leader is always Santa so I wanted to go for something different.

This took me just an hour or so to make:

It's made from a cardboard box. I opened out the top and cut a hole in the bottom. I used the cut out parts to hold the flaps out at 90 degrees to the box (so that it's open like this:)

I used a grey packing bag wrapped around and pleated to take the shape of the box to make the 'foil case' and stuck brown packing paper all around the outside edge. I used duck tape to make a channel at the top with some scrap fabric in as a draw string.

Finally I made straps out of more scrap fabric (I've found a use for all those bits left over when you use the overlocker!), jumped into it and voila - I was a mince pie!!!

Christmas gifts - cushions

Most of November & December were spent making Christmas gifts, and now that they’ve all gone to new homes I can write about them on here.

Firstly, my mum gave me the remnant of the fabric used to cover some of her chairs and asked me to make her some cushions with it. The fabric’s a large weave in blue and beige (way prettier than that sounds). I decided that the best style to suit my mum’s tastes in decorating was understated and stylish. I decided to create two 40cm square cushions with blue piping round the edge and fairly discrete zippers.

I’ve not made a cushion cover since school – one of the first things we made in textiles – so my first port of call was the Reader’s Digest sewing guide. It confirmed the approach I was considering and showed me the best way to make and insert piping (which amazingly I’ve never tried before).

I took a little sample of fabric to my local fabric shop but couldn’t find the right colour bias binding to make the piping. I could have bought some fabric and made my own, but when you see how much I made for Christmas you’ll understand that I had to cut some corners. I was looking around the shop when I found pre-made piping!!! I didn’t even know that existed! The colour was almost perfect and it was only 55p a metre!!! I bought zips in the beige rather than the blue as that helped them blend into the background.

My cushions were from Dunelm Mill – 38cm square. The Readers Digest book suggested cutting that size plus seam allowance, but that made me nervous – I didn’t have spare fabric so couldn’t cut too small. I decided to add 4cm for seam allowances and do a 1cm seam. I’ll say straight out that this worked perfectly for me.

So, I cut 4 42cm squares. Due to the weave (and wanting things to be perfect for my mum) I cleaned up two edges, cutting along the weave of the fabric first. Then I measured along and cut the squares using the weave again. I then manipulated the fabric (iron and steam) into a square. I did this as the fabric had been sitting around for a while and had got a bit wibbly.

I used the large weave to line up the piping around the edge of two of the squares and stitched it on. Then I set the zip onto one edge of each square, making two long pieces each with a zip in the middle and one end with piping on. I wanted the zip to form part of the back of the cover rather than sticking out so I folded them along the piping line and pinned them together (inside out). I stitched the three remaining sides including stitching over the zips and trimmed the excess. Obviously I left the zips open, ironed the seams, turned them the right way around and popped the cushions in.

Here they are. I’m rather proud of them...