Zintarella

Sometimes I draw things on shirts.

2010-03-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

This tee just surfaced from my fabric pile one day. It was totally plain and whole, and it fit me quite well (unlike most t-shirts that end up in the shirt graveyard), so I rescued it and pondered where it came from.

It had an uneven light purple tone. Laundry gone wrong?

Little ink spots. Frustratingly leaky pen + clumsy writer/illustrator?

Last summer I adopted a bunch of clothes from my best friend's sister. Maybe it was from that time.

Now I recall that one time my mama decided to dye things purple. She had a white bra that had become tinted in a load of laundry, and she wanted to restore some of its loveliness. She made up a vat of purple dye and soaked it in there. It came out quite vibrant and beautiful. Not one to put perfectly good dye down the drain, she set about finding other things to dye and invited me to do the same. So I found a plain white shirt that was sitting in my fabric pile (I presume) and dyed it.

The dye lost its strength with each subsequent object, so my shirt ended up being quite light.

I drew on it with a regular ol' ballpoint pen in order to continue the look of the ink spots.

*regal

2010-03-07T21:09:00.001-08:00

warrior dress

2010-03-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

I made this in a few hours without a sewing machine. It's one full t-shirt cut in strategic places and a piece of another one, plus some strips of other t-shirts used to sew it all together and tie the waist.

In order to sew the thick cotton through the shirts, I first cut small holes with scissors.

kickbutt skirt

2009-06-12T15:29:00.000-07:00

I made this skirt using a polo shirt my friend painted with a cowboy boot and gave to me a few years ago. I matched the stripes with one of my old shirts for the waistband and extra bits.

I love that you can see the shape of the shirt if you look closely--the sleeves are the stripes that are going the other way, and the pocket is still on the skirt.

< fresh > la la la.

2009-06-09T21:01:00.000-07:00

This was made with fabric from a sew-your-own "fashion doll" clothing kit I got when I was a kid. See all the little bits of flattened clothing?

Thank goodness I only thought one of the outfits was cool enough to make, otherwise I wouldn't have had this wicked fabric to work with. The yellow is from an extra T-shirt I had kicking around.

This shirt got some really purty shots happening.

photos by Kendall.

[fresh] david.

2009-06-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

"That's the most David Bowie-looking thing you've ever made" said my roomie.

Thanks to Kendall for taking these photos! xo.

lovely/chaos reconstruction

2009-06-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

this top was made using the tutorial here: http://supernaturale.com/articles.html?id=263

I used my mama's old giant and soft light pink shirt.

the first piece of clothing I ever modified

2009-06-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

I think I stitched this when I was fourteen or fifteen. Screenprinting and embroidery were things that interested me, though I didn't start printing until a few years later. Embroidery was a really accessible technique at the time. I was storing all this energy in my body from whenever I learned something new about design, clothing, and sewing and embellishing techniques. I kept thinking about the boring clothes I owned that I could spruce up, and visions of amazing clothes I should make danced in my head, but I didn't start actually making or altering anything for a while. I just kept thinking about it and how I didn't feel like doing it or I didn't have time or whatever.
Then one day I realized that if I wanted to do these really neat things, I had to actually do them. So I got some thread, a needle, and made a little stencil to frame my stitching. And I finally went to town.

Now the shirt is outdatedly short on me, and I don't want to keep it, but I thought I would document it with a fashion shoot. I'm the model and my friend Kendall is the shutterbug.

Warhol

2009-03-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

I was asked to make Andy Warhol stuff for RareFunk in association with the exhibit at the Children's Museum in downtown Kitchener. I was told that copyright wouldn't be an issue as long as I changed the image a little bit. Warhol didn't even touch some of the works he allegedly created; he had so many people working/brown-nosing for him that he would instruct them on how to make his screenprinted images. He didn't even sign some of his work--he had someone else do it! I picked up this information in Famous for Fifteen Minutes by Isabelle Dufresne, also known as Ultra Violet--one of the Warhol superstars.

Screenprinting is great for mass production, so I decided to go the same route. But instead of doing multiple colours and screens for the image like Warhol, I did just one screen. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, look up a Warhol Marilyn. She has multiple colours: her shading (usually black), her lips, her eyeshadow, her hair, her teeth, and the background are all different. That's done by making a different screen (think of it as a stencil) for each colour. There would be a screen whose holes are shaped like the shading of her face, a screen in the shape of Marilyn's lips...and so on. One stencil is used at a time with the appropriate colour. After the paint is dry, the next colour can be applied. A full Warhol screenprint has way too many steps for me to bother with. So I just made screens of the shading for the Marilyn and banana images using photo emulsion, which I will not explain here, because it's already been done.
Try http://www.instructables.com/id/Photo-emulsion-Screen-Printing/

big bananas.

baby bananas.

bananas on shirts.

stack-o-patches.

Buttons!

2009-03-02T21:08:00.000-08:00

You know how you get button badges everywhere--from people promoting their latest crap, the local politician, or the flea market?
And now you don't like the design, or the person or band, or it was just a horrible button in the first place but it only cost 5 cents so you had to buy it?
Well, you don't have to throw it out.
Just paste wicked stuff onto it.

Stuff like:
-glitter
-rhinestones
-magazine cut-outs
-stickers

These are ready to be brought to the store:
(I sell some stuff at RareFunk in downtown Kitchener and at the Artsblock gift shop in downtown Brantford).

For labels/packaging I use those stupid cardboardy cupsleeves that come on ridiculous throwaway coffee cups. And, no, they are not from my cups, because I bring my own mug when I buy tea. I just find them all over the place. Bah. Please don't give me any. I have a bikeload. Just lug-a-mug, okay?

Couch Dress

2009-01-18T21:40:00.001-08:00

Everybody knows that couch dresses are the new black.
Ha. Ha.
Just kidding.
But...something that should definitely shape up to be more than a trend is "upcycling," reworking, and reclaiming old, preloved clothing and fibres.
We should stop making and buying completely brand new stuff because it wastes energy and resources, in addition to creating pollution.
But a lot of people like change as well as wearing new clothes. Reworking fabric and other clothes is the solution!

Here is a dress I made out of old couch cushion covers that my mom made for her couches. The couches are now plaid (my mom sewed these cushion covers too and says she will never EVER sew plaid on such a large scale again), but I had some covers left over so I put them back on one couch for the purpose of this photo shoot.

Hurrah!

Caftan!

2009-01-18T21:22:00.000-08:00

This is the finished caftan...or photographically chopped parts of it.

The paisley is printed in dark dark brown and not black, which I only discovered whilst trying to buy nice matching ribbon, so I had fun adventures at the fabric store trying to locate the bolt of fabric to make absolutely sure that it was indeed printed with brown because all I had was this tiny little strip of fabric as a sample. And you just can't put black ribbon with dark dark brown. It's not right.

I'm sorry my camera work is crap. My sewing skills are way better.

oooh, neckline details.

Wow, there's a crazy curve in the sleeve cuff. Wow, I'm so talented.

headphones

2008-12-03T13:55:00.000-08:00

My dad gave me these really sweet headphones that he had had since the '70s or '80s. The foam deteriorated pretty quickly and I'd get black bits on my face whenever I used them.

So I peeled the gross foam off, traced it, and made some cushions of my own from fabric and terry cloth bits I had lying around.

The construction is a donut shape with a long rectangle sewn lengthwise along the outside of it. Terry cloth is bunched evenly in the corner that this creates, then the unsewn side of the fabric rectangle gets pulled around the terry cloth and gets sewn to the middle of the donut...if that makes sense.

mr. zebra and lambekin (pron. lammikin) diggin' some beats.

Old T-shirts + Scissors + Knitting Needles = Bathroom Mat

2008-11-30T21:42:00.000-08:00

a pretty simple design--a bunch of knitted rectangles crochet-sewn together.

After I put it in the wash for the first time, it stretched a little crazy-like and some holes appeared. I patched those up by crocheting strips of a green T-shirt into them.

rag rug mess vest!

2008-11-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

Well, winter is in full swing and layering clothes is a must. I pulled my raggy vest out of the closet--I have hardly been wearing it because lately I've been dressing pretty simply. But today I wanted an extra layer of warmth without the extra sleeves.

It's like wearing a body-hugging blanket.

I knitted it a few summers ago using a lot of fabric cut into strips. Most of the fabric was scrap from my mom's or my own sewing projects. Creating the yarn and knitting were both equally important and energy-intensive processes during the creation of the garment.

It was exciting to see how different fabrics behave when cut into small widths. Knits (jersey, T-shirt fabric) tended to curl (I knew this before...but I'm just telling you), though there was a knit that stayed flat (this was cut from a sash made by the company Weekender Ladies' Wear...an enterprise that sold clothing Tupperware-Party-style and has since gone under). Light cotton was nice to work with; I could cut it straightforwardly and it didn't unravel too much. I was surprised by how much heavier cotton frayed. I sometimes had issues deciding whether or not to cut on the bias. Cutting diagonally is supposed to prevent fraying, but this didn't work for the really light cottons. Mostly I just cut along with the original shape of the fabric and didn't worry very much about cutting on or off the bias.

After creating the yarn, I knit a lot of squares with extra-long stitches in the middle that are crossed over each other to form an X. The idea for this technique as well as the whole vest came from a tiny knitting magazine called r2, which was created by the yarn company Rowan. r2 has some pretty neat, innovative, and destroyed-looking stuff. The magazine gave suggestions for configuring the squares before sewing, but I refused to follow the instructions and size specifications exactly because it would be too tedious and pointless.

I was going to make a sweater out of the squares I knit, but when I added sleeves to the body it made me feel fat...which is silly, I know, but I knew I wouldn't wear the piece if it had sleeves, so I took them off. So it turned into a vest! And if you leave it flat on the ground, it looks like a rag rug!

When I pinned the squares together before sewing them, I planned where the armholes would go, but in the end, there were so many holes that I needn't have planned any. I remember during the pinning process I was pretty concerned with making the squares fit together in a way that would be flattering to my body, but looking back now it probably didn't matter. Hell, they're all just fluffy squares and rectangles. How can slightly different placement make them any more or less flattering?
I didn't have to add any special closures either--I just tie some of the loose strands of 'yarn' together in the front.

I really dig how it sticks out the bottom of a sweater asymmetrically.

And that's that.

My First Major Design Commission!

2008-11-18T07:33:00.000-08:00

Well, it might not be major by some standards, but for my 'small is beautiful' ethos, the project I am about to undertake is still exciting.

My mom's friend has asked me to sew a caftan that she will give to her husband for Christmas. I basically have free reign, with a few guidelines. They are:
-no florals
-no plaids, checks, or stripes
-it needs to be washable
-medieval, Renaissance, or wizardy themes are good
-spirals are good too
-it can be as plain or fabulous as I desire

The first step is to get fabric--3 to 4 metres worth. My first stop will be the thrift stores in the area, since I love re-using materials, and they are cheap as well...even though I could afford to shop elsewhere, since I was given over a hundred dollars with which to buy fabric and thread. I don't expect to find anything totally fitting for the project in second-hand shops anyway. But I'll look, just in case.