That Seventies Dress

First post in about two years, lets see if I can do this better in the future, fingers crossed.

So a while ago I got a bunch of sewing patterns that my grandmother found in the attic. All of them are a bit out of my normal time period, being from either the 70'ies or the 80'ies. I haven't yet photo documented all of them, but here the one that I've decided to try out together with the fabric I've decided to go with:

Vintage pattern sweetness. Hippie chic here I come (hopefully)

I'm quite sure the pattern is from the seventies. Some of the patterns I got from my grandmother has never been open, but this one has and most of the pieces has been cut out. I wish my grandmother had added a scrap of fabric from the dress she made from this pattern, I would have loved to see that. I don't dare to hope that the actual dress is saved somewhere, if she ever finished it, but seeing the fabric choice from back then would be awesome. I have to ask her one day if she remembers the dress.

 I copied all the original pattern pieces onto pattern paper, though they don't seem fragile I see no reason to ruin the originals with more needles or tearing, so to be on the safe side I just copied everything. I really want to save these patterns for the future, so when working with them I always try to handle the originals as little as possible. I know this is not for everyone, but I'm the type that copies all of my patterns, I'm just annoyingly thorough. Sometimes I even annoy myself, when I get impatient and just want to sew NOW.

The fabric is this flowey/drapey cotton I got on sale some years back, though its more greenish irl.  I'm going for view A , but with a shorter skirt. I love those fluffy sleeves. I have a ton of dresses with short or no sleeves, so this is going to be a nice addition. I have a lot of red ric rac leftovers from another project so I'm going to try to copy the look quite closely.

Look at that, nifty hem marking devices and old school metal wire dressforms called Donna-Stilina. What is not to love?

The pattern is just called 5974, but on all the pattern pieces there is printed the name Koko, so I think that might be her name, even though it doesn't say so on the pattern envelope/paper-front-photo-thingie. In the instructions there is an add for a dressform kalled Donna-Stilina and a device that should help you make an even hem called pusta. I love this, since Stil patterns were Swedish it all ties delightfully in to something quite Ikeaesque. Those Swedes can't help themselves, names are needed for everything.

As of now I've made, what I had hoped would be, a wearable muslin. I measured the bodice to make sure that it would at least be big enough and went for it. How that ended up is for another post. I've also begun cutting out and assembling the pattern in my chosen fabric, I will take pictures in the morning so I can share progress, but right now its 2 am and I should be in bed.

I made bias tape!

Sorry for the silence, came back from Lisbon about a week ago and have had about no time at all since then. Today I have created bias tape though and it's beautiful if I must say so myself. Its the first time I've ever done it and I think it's surprisingly easy. I got some help though, from this blogpost, which was an awesome help (thank you).

Beklager den stilhed der her bredt sig her på bloggen på det seneste. Jeg kom tilbage fra Lissabon for snart en uge siden, men har haft rimeligt travlt siden da for at sige det mildt. I dag har jeg dog fået lavet en lille smule: skråbånd. Jeg er ret stolt af mig selv, det er første gang jeg har lavet skråbånd selv og jeg syntes egentlig det er ganske nemt, jeg har dog fået noget hjælp fra denne blogpost.

And now, pictures/Billeder:

As you can see I went for some black and white gingham, the bias tape folder I used makes 25 mm wide bias tape, which is fairly wide.

Som det kan ses på billederne endte jeg med sorte og hvide skovturs tern (på tilbud i stof 2000), jeg brugte den bredeste af mine skråbånds foldere som laver 25 mm brede skråbånd, hvilket er forholdsvis bredt.

I ended up with 28m of bias tape, and since I paid about 47 kr. for one meter of fabric it ended up with being about 1,7 kr. per meter (about 0.3 $/0,22€/0,179£). I don't know what I'm going to use all that gingham madness for, but I might have at least one project in near future that it might suit. This brings me to another thing, I'm going to bring a tutorial soon. It's going to be three or four posts long, so you might even think of it as a sew along themed thing if you want to. Its going to be exiting.

Jeg endte med 28m skråbånd, jeg gav cirka 47 for en meter, så det giver 1,7 kr pr. meter. Jeg aner ikke hvad jeg skal bruge alt det ternede skråbånd til, men jeg har formegentlig mindst et fremtidig projekt det vil være meget godt til. Hvilket bringer mig til et helt andet emne, jeg laver snart en tutorial. Den bliver over tre eller fire posts, så man kan også tænke den lidt som en sewalong hvis man har lyst til det. Det bliver spændende.

By the way, I went fabric shopping while I was in Lisbon, I will make another post about that soon, with tips and tricks, maps and pictures to.

Jeg var selvfølgelig ude og købe en masse stof i Lissabon, jeg vil lave en post snart med gode tips og med et kort og nogle billeder.

Sneak peek on one of the fabrics I bought (this I bought for my mother).
Noget stof jeg købte til min mor, jeg viser mere senere.

Packing and stuff

I've been trying all day to get my act together and start packing my suitcase. Instead I have had my head buried in a book (Someplace to be flying - Charles de Lint, if your curious). As always I'm in last minute, since I'm flying out tomorrow to Lisbon. It's going to be the first vacation together with the boyfriend. Does anyone know some places I should go in Lisbon? Any good fashion museums, flea markets or streets filled with fabric stores? Maybe something else?

Jeg har brugt min dag på at (forsøge) at tage mig sammen til at pakke. I stedet for har jeg brugt min dag på at læse (someplace to be flying - Charles de Lint, hvis du er skulle være nysgerrig). Som altid er jeg i sidste øjeblik, eftersom at jeg flyver til Lissabon i morgen. Det bliver den første ferie kæresten og jeg tager sammen. Er der nogle der kender nogle steder jeg burde tage hen i Lissabon? Et modemuseum, et kendt loppemarked eller en gade fyldt med stof forretninger? Måske noget andet?

OOOH and now for a preview of my newest dress, I'll reveal the completely finished product in another post, but now for sneak peeks. / Smugkik på min seneste kjole!

It's my second go on this dress, or really 1.5 go, since the first time I only made the top part since I already had the skirt finished. I have really gotten into fifties dresses lately, and have now added a new thing to the of things I always look for in secondhand shops, vintage patterns. Maybe I should ask my grandma if she has any I could get/borrow.

Det er mit andet forsøg med det her mønster, eller egentlig mit halvandet forsøg, eftersom at jeg kun brugte overdelen i første omgang og kun har brugt skørtet her anden gang. Jeg er blevet virkelig glad for halvtredser kjoler her for tiden og har nu tilføjet endnu en ting til listen over ting jeg altid kigger efter i genbrugsbutikker, vintage mønstre. Måske skulle jeg spørge min farmor om hun har nogle mønstre liggende, som jeg må få/låne.

Well on account of future projects I passed about two hours Wednesday with washing fabrics by hand (we don't have a washing machine). I took a picture of my wet fabrics hanging in our courtyard. I loved the wonderful colour display.


Nåh, når det kommer til fremtidige projekter, så brugte jeg cirka to timer i onsdags, på at vaske stof i hånden (vi har ikke nogen vaskemaskine). Jeg tog et billede af mine våde stoffer der hang til tørre i vores gård. Jeg elskede den eksplosion af farver der var som de hang der.

Is there someone who can guess what one of my great fabric weaknesses are? It might be colourful printed cotton.

On a last note. Look what came to my door today, a new iron. A red iron none the less. Sewing will be even more fun from now on! / Se mit nye fantastiske RØDE strygejern, nu bliver det endnu sjovere at sy!

Summer vacation coming up.

This is going to be a long word filled post, so I'm going to start of with a picture, just to make sure that this isn't going to be a words only post, since those are boring. / Det her bliver en lang ord smøre, så jeg vil lige starte med et billede, bare så det ikke bliver alt for kedeligt.

This is a picture of me, at the beach, in december, and it was freezing cold. The picture is taken by Thomas.

So tomorrow (or later today really, since its past midnight) is the last day before the summer vacation starts for me, this does also mean that I have and exam. So why am I blogging instead of studying you might ask. Well, it's partly because I'm right now living in denial, simply, partly it's procrastination.

I've been thinking a lot about where I want this blog to go. How I want it to look and in general about the blog. I've thought about which types of blogs I like to follow and read and such things.

Things I want to change:

• I want this blog to look nicer, tidier and more eye pleasing. Right now it's neither. There are a lot of things that bothers me. The way images sort of jump around the posts and aren't equally spaced are a big one of these. 
• I would also like the opportunity to sort my post via a menu at the top of the page, my thought is I want people to be able to look at just diy's/tutorials and stuff like that. 
• I would like a decent banner.
• I want to take better pictures. I have already started a process for bettering photos by ordering a small tripod, this will help me a little. A second thing could be getting better at asking the boyfriend for help, getting him and his far superior camera into action.
• A huge load of other things that I have currently forgot.

The big problem is that I have a hard time figuring out how to do some of these things. When I google stuff I get more questions than answers and so on. I might solves this by just asking some of the kick ass bloggers I admire for help. I really hope that some of the things will get better during the summer.

To the second subject for this post. What do I want with this blog? Well I want to share and give back some of the awesomeness I enjoy from other blogs, I want to be part of this community and maybe give some inspiration to others like I get inspiration from awesome blogs.

I have made a list of some of the traits the blogs I follow and like have:

• Cool diy ideas and tutorials.
• Inspiring pictures and ideas, others as well as the blogger her/himself.
• Re/upcycling ideas.
• Home made clothing. 
• A edge of some sort, whether it being goth/retro/vintage/recycling/hippie/silly/childish or some other thing.
• Personality of the author shines through.

I will keep these in mind as I go along with my adventure here on Kill Me With Color.

/cheers Sofie

Danish version after the jump.

New wardrobe - allmost a walkin

I've got a new closet, or in reality it's not new, I just rearranged it, getting more space with the ones I had already. The closets are about 20 years old and originates from my parents old apartment on Frederiksberg, later they moved with us to my parents house where they all so moved around. Finally they have moved with me to my apartment. Talk about reusing your stuff. They aren't the prettiest sight I've ever seen and actually not that roomy, since they are to deep to utilize reasonably. Next step is probably some white paint, since they have a yellowish glow over them. Right now though, I just feel like I'm in heaven with all the space that got created.

Here's the result in a Gif, more pictures and explanation (including Danish part of the post) to follow after the jump.

New light

I've been creative today (I was creative yesterday too).
Today I created a lampshade for the new living room/bedroom (we haven't decided yet, but what the hell). I must admit the idea wasn't my own, I followed the tutorial from The 3 R's blog. Though I chose to colour mine, I really need to choose between the British and the American way to write colour/color word soon, but it's not that obvious from neither the photo or in reality unfortunately. Well the colour/color of choice is green.
And here my version is, a little more messy than the original I think.

I really like it.
And in daylight:

It reminds me slightly of old sixties laps like Koglen by PH and the Pineapple by Frank Kerdils.

What did I make yesterday? Well, that must be for another post.

Tues-diy, dress

I bought this dress in a second-hand shop last year, the thing I fell for was the bold pattern. I started some serious remaking and came up with something wearable and cute!

First a couple of before photos:

Not something you would like to wear? Me neither.

Then the big cut and sew adventure started, it's not the first of this kind of dresses/cleaning smocks I have re-sown

 

I chose a baby-doll look, i measured myself from my shoulders and to right under my breast's, a couple of centimetres seam allowance and snip snip.  

How to cut off sleeves without losing to much fabric.

 You have to cut of the sleeves before fitting the top, it gets weird and clumsy if you don't.

Fitted, it can be a bit hard to fit stuff to yourself, if you can get help get it! 

I made the shoulders narrower with pleats, you can choose to just cut of excess fabric depends on what kind of look you're going for.

There is a big hole where I didn't take any pictures, but the finishing steps was:

1. Adding the sleeves again, pleating them at the shoulders (the armhole became smaller after the fitting) that gave them a puffy look.
2. Drawing and painting the anchor on the skirt (important, I did this before sewing the skirt and top part together, SO much easier)
3. Adding the skirt, making sure it started where I wanted (right under the boobies ^_^).
4. Making a belt  of the residue fabric.

DONE:

Who's pale? I don't know what my camera did, but I kinda like it!

In a more normal light.

Tues-diy, jar-dyeing

This is not my project, but I really like the outcome. Found it on BURDA-style through their newsletter:

Link to tutorial and more pictures

The shoes are what I like the most!
I'm defenately going to try this at a point, maybe with yarn!
Wow that was a lot of post's, you can really feel that I don't have any classes on Tuesdays (I know it's after 12 and not really Tuesday, but I'm in denial of that).

Wishes!!

I have a dangerous addiction, ASOS, like so many other girls!
When I checked my mail today I found one of the usual ASOS update mails and fell a little bit in love with this dress from reverse:

Link

I shouldn't even look at ASOS, I'm fixing my apartment and using money on that!! 

OH I fell for this as well:

Link

SO cute, the for the button corset belt thingie is amazing!

On the apartment front: I am almost at the point where I'm going to paint all the cabinets in my kitchen red! YAY

Outfit

I'm the biggest copycat ever, I'm going to start posting outfits from time to time, when I put something together that I'm particularly pleased about. Today it's this outfit:

Cap: H&M.   T-shirt: Monki.   Dress: unknown discount label (with new red buttons)

I know, I know, horrible mirror picture! I promise that when I move into my apartment I will come up with something better! And I will start saving money for a real camera! But for now It's all I have.

 Well admitted, a necklace would spiff up the outfit, and i really need to knit some red legvarmers, since It's to cold to wear a dress right now in Denmark without legwarmers.

Yep, no make-up, since I'm just going to spent the day fixing things in my new kitchen and make it ready for painting (and waiting for delivery of my oven) there's no reason for make-up. actually I often have whole weeks where I don't do make-up, mostly be-course I would rather sleep ten minutes more in the morning!

Tues-diy, sorry

I know, I'm horrible at this right now, my studies are taking a lot of my time, and even though Tuesday should be the day where I'm well rested and filled with energy, but after 8 hours at work and 6 hours of sleep that just not near the way I really feel. So, even though I want to share some great pictures of my home knitted socks I'm going to share some old picture one more time. Hopefully there will be nice colourful sock pictures!

It's mostly handmade, but some parts are sewn on machine. Anyone said steam punk pirate?
I got inspiration by searching on Tricorn on google, crafters, etsy and so on. It makes me happy every time i look at it, but I still need to find a really good way to keep it on the head, and some nice hairstyles to wear it with.

Tues diy: Oz disco shoes

Oh, it just hit me, It's Tuesday! My connection to the world is rather small these days since I have exams. I Passed one earlier today and i have one on Thursday.

I would really like to share some new diy's with you (my probably still non existing readers), but the time issue (exam/reading up issue) makes it hard for me to find time for finishing anything (I have one and a half sock, some peices to a watermelon earrings and a watermelon necklace, half of a embrodery with skulls and an airship, and so on!)

But here is and old project, some green glitter shoes that looks like they could be in the wonderful, green city of Oz:

I have a pair of ruby red ones to! Dorothy, YES somehow I don't have any pictures of them, I will might add some later.

I will try to update sometime around the weekend, when my exams are finished!

Tues diy: VHS clutch

Sorry for the late Tues diy post, but since there's probably not anyone following this blog yet I think well all survive.

What to do with all the VHS films that you're not really going to see ever agian?

I made this, and got this idea a couple of years ago, thought I would make a Instructables.com, but never really got around to it (like a lot of other stuff). I think that maybe i sort of stole the idea from a girl who made a wallet with a cassette tape, but I can't find the instructions in my giant bookmark library.

Well for some photos:

It took a lot of hard work with a sharp knife and a lot of hot glue, it has some problems with the zipper be course I'm a idiot who got hot glue in the teeth's of the zipper, but it works and it looks awesome, if wasn't so much work I would make a ton of them with different colours of felt lining!

Qiuck diy

I know it's Wednesday, but I just made this quick diy that I really want to share!
Took around 10 minutes to make, easy!

Inspired by a picture I had on my computer, think the original is topshop, well its grey and oversize.
Well MORE skulls of doom to the people!
YAY

Choose diy

Well I haven't posted since some time in the middle of last week, and I thought I would make it a weekly thing to post one of my diy's on Tuesday, and call it Tues diy, as in choose diy (not the most clever word play I ever came up with, but then again English isn't my native language). It won't be a how to, but more show off, but if I created it from some instructions I will link to them.

First of I'm going to start with this:

Its a dress I created a year ago, it's inspired by my mom's partisan dress (the sewing runs in the family). They are really different and I don't have a picture of her dress, but the idea of using partisan/palestine scarfs was hers/mine/ours/mine/some other persons (??) idea. Well i really don't know and i doubt were the first ones drawn to the graphic woven scarf's.

And if you thinks this looks freezing I can assure you, I could not feel my toes afterwards!

Over and out
Sofie/Kill Me With Color

First Post

Woaw okay, I finally pulled myself together to actually write my first post.
This blog has been planned for an eternity and I've been pushing this post in front of me for moths, mostly be course I haven't made a description of the blog and I'm not at all happy with layout.


So a lot of change is going to happen, but probably not in the first couple of months be course I'm secretly a slacker.

Well as a short introduction I can tell you that the intention with this blog is an outlet/show off of my creative DIY/style/inspiration stuff-ish and maybe a little advertisement for my (quite empty) Etsy shop.