Toots for kake@sunny.garden account

Written by Kake on 2025-01-16 at 19:29

I want to embroider some leaves and vines on the next linen top I make, and it turns out that Inkscape’s “pattern along path” feature is very clever! I’m not sure I love this placement though (suggestions are welcome).

[#]Embroidery #Sewing

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Written by Kake on 2025-01-07 at 13:39

The in-progress photos of my hand-dyed patchwork that I previously put on Mastodon are no longer available here since strangeobject.space was shut down, and I have some new ones proving that I did in fact actually finish making them into a cushion cover, so here they are. (This is just one cushion cover — it’s different on each side.)

[#]Dyeing #Patchwork #Quilting

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Written by Kake on 2025-01-03 at 17:37

Experimental strip-piecing with the contents of my “too small even for patchwork squares” scrap box. The backing (not visible) is made from partly-cut-up polycotton pyjamas that had been sitting in a carrier bag in a friend’s house for more than 20 years.

Not sure what (if anything) I’m going to do with the neutral+neutral+colour pieces. If all else fails I’ll join them onto my unfinished-but-already-in-use gazebo curtain. The “purples” square is going to become part of a bag.

[#]LowWaste #Quilting #Sewing

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Written by Kake on 2024-12-30 at 20:04

If you’re looking for a new year’s resolution that will make your life nicer instead of more stressful, I recommend the one I did a couple of years ago, i.e. eat at least 52 different flavours of crisps. If you tell enough people about it, some of them will send you crisps! It happened to me! Here’s my wrap-up post: https://nou.dreamwidth.org/90532.html

[#]crisps #NewYear

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Written by Kake on 2024-12-20 at 13:06

Experimenting with fake pintucks using a twin needle. The ripples in the non-pintucked parts are a bit annoying, but possibly a thicker fabric would have fixed that, or maybe a stabiliser of some kind — there will be future experiments along those lines.

This was inspired by an article by Jean Liittschwager in issue 78 of Threads Magazine.

[#]sewing #embroidery

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Written by Kake on 2024-12-19 at 16:36

OK, what can I do with 500g of dark muscovado sugar, bearing in mind that I don’t like sweet things and my threshold for “is this sweet?” is very low?

[#]Cooking

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Written by Kake on 2024-11-30 at 14:42

Thank you @solderandchaos for resurfacing the Kolam-A-Day website by @anu1905! This was fun, and I only made one mistake.

https://post.lurk.org/@anu1905/112146394878395407

[#]KolamADay

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Written by Kake on 2024-11-28 at 16:10

Mending some linen trousers, before and after.

Incidentally, if you do a fair bit of hand sewing, whether that’s for mending or embroidery or something else, consider getting yourself a headlamp with USB charging. They start pretty cheap and you won’t regret it.

[#]Mending #Sewing #Embroidery

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Written by Kake on 2024-11-27 at 13:54

I love it when someone reads one of my local history articles and then gets in touch to share their own stories of the things I was writing about.

In 1968, Jerry Leech and Anne Statter launched a folk and blues night in the basement of a West Croydon cafe. Half a century later, Jerry saw my article about 79 London Road and sent me his memories of taking buses around South London to paste up advertising posters, coffee machine mishaps, and punters queuing along the street:

https://london-road-croydon.org/history/0079-shadi-bakery.html#1960s-the-hungry-i

[#]Croydon #London #MusicHistory #LocalHistory

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Written by Kake on 2024-11-25 at 19:58

Every time I think M&S food can’t get more ridiculous, I am proved wrong. This is the “build your own Christmas charcuter-tree” — it is a real thing that exists on the Ocado website: https://www.ocado.com/products/m-s-build-your-own-christmas-charcuter-tree-645421011

(For the avoidance of doubt, I would 100% absolutely eat this, but I wouldn’t pay 25 quid for it.)

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Written by Kake on 2024-11-24 at 18:53

Experiments with curved piecing. The fabric is scraps left over from toiles (test versions of clothes patterns), and I was following a tutorial written by Helen Butcher: https://www.littlepatchpockets.co.uk/patterns/tutorials/freepatterns.html

I have a dyeing experiment — my first green! — currently sitting in its soda ash solution (this is what makes the dyes bond to the fibres) ready to be rinsed and checked tomorrow. I’m hoping it’ll come out a shade that will go nicely with some of my existing pinks/blues/purples so I can make some of these blocks in actual colours.

[#]Quilting #Dyeing

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Written by Kake on 2024-11-23 at 11:55

If you were thinking “Kake, you should have mended that jumper a while ago before it got into such a state” then you would be correct.

The sleeves on this were knitted flat and then seamed up, and I think I need to stop doing that in favour of knitting them circularly, because “rip and re-knit” would have produced a nicer result and not taken much longer, given how close the break was to the cuff.

[#]Knitting #Mending

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Written by Kake on 2024-11-22 at 17:53

New instance, new #introduction — hello, I’m Kake, I live in South London, and I like making things.

I make all my own clothes (except for socks), and I make patchworked textiles using my own hand-dyed fabrics. Sometimes I embroider them.

I’m part of the creator team on the Discworld MUD; in other words, I help to build a game that’s set in an immersive world made entirely out of words, and I do this with a mix of creative writing, bad puns, programming, bugfixing, and esoteric knowledge of a 30-year-old codebase. http://discworld.starturtle.net/

I’m good at cooking, but I’m mainly interested in simplifying it so it doesn’t take time away from the other things I want to do. I like to develop fast-to-prepare recipes with vegetables and pulses and wholegrains. I’m an omnivore, and I generally prefer fish to meat.

I spent several years writing an ongoing local history of the land and buildings along a road near my house, but I put this on pause after the pandemic started, when I ran out of the material I’d already researched. One day I might pick it up again. https://london-road-croydon.org/history/

Also, in no particular order, and not limited to: trans people are valid, immigrants make societies better, it’s OK to be fat, the Fediverse has a racism problem, women are not second-class citizens, Israel’s genocidal behaviour is an outrage, disabled people have value.

[#]Sewing #Quilting #Dyeing #Embroidery #Cooking #Discworld #InteractiveFiction #GameDev #London #Croydon #History #LocalHistory

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