A Tale of Two Ties

Lil man went back to school today. Naturally though we added a bit of excitement by my alarm not going off in the morning [I definitely set one not that Rikki believes me!] Anyway that meant I was woken up by lil man at 8 o'clock. Bearing in mind he has to be at school by 8.45 and neither me or Rikki had slept particularly well, that left us with a bit of a rush on our hands to say the least!!! 

But we made it and now I'm sat without a lil man to annoy me / snuggle me. I've been trying to convince Rikki to watch Moana with me but apparently after six weeks of Disney movies he's not watching anything with a singing, dancing or a happy ending! 

Anyways on to the ties. Me and Lil man made these one afternoon of the summer holidays. The weather was rotten and he was reaching fever pitch so I decided to let him have his first ever proper go on my sewing machine.

Cheifly his job was the lower and lift the presser foot, press the reverse button , take the pins out and guide the fabric. He did really well actually and he listened really carefully to make sure he was doing it properly.

I chose the patterns, Rikkis is made from a pattern from the sew everything book , and Lil mans is drafted to his exact size using freesewing.org. I'd been planning on making them matching ties for a while but I was going to scale down Rikkis tie pattern. Luckily the drafting website saved me a lot of time and effort! 

The fabric I used it a bit thick really but I chose it so it would match my dress. [Wearing matching outfits as a family is way way underrated by the way!]

You can see the difference in scale here. As I said the fabric was a bit thick so it makes quite a big knot, but it did mean I didn't need to use interfacing. The cotton on the inside of the tie tail is just a scrap from my quilting drawer. I didn't follow the instructions on freesewing.org, the website has you sew the end so you can't see the tie lining edge but I was sewing with a small child so I just went for a simpler option. 

I used my labels from the dutch label shop as tie keepers which I think is a really cute feature.

They did take a lot of pressing but we were both very pleased with how they turned out!!! Plus it was nice to see him getting excited about sewing and letting him do something very grown up like sew on my machine! 

In other news:

I'm looking forward to getting back on schedule with blogging and sewing again.

My friend turned up yesterday with some wool, curtain fabric and buttons that he'd pulled out of his mums loft. I love it when people think of me when they find hidden crafty gems or stuff they are getting rid off. 

I went to see my mums neighbour and we had a really great chat. You might say she's the one who properly got me started on the whole loving to sew thing! But I'll cover that in another post!

Plus in that post you will see one of the biggest projects I've ever done [and on the tightest deadline] and its not ever for me!!!

Much Love 

Frankie 

x

Dutch Label Shop Review

When I was younger I wanted to be a fashion designer I mean like really wanted to be one! I kept files of fabric sample and cut up my clothes and spent hours imagining what my very own clothes labels would look like. [fun fact: lil Frankie was going to call her clothing line "franks funky fashion" Which makes me do some serious cringing!]

So when the Dutch Label Shop got in touch and asked me if I'd like to try some of their labels I was like "YES PLEASE!!!!!" 

Okay so the dutch label shop creates custom labels for anybody! Companies can use them and so can home seamstresses and with a minimum order of 30 labels for £16 its really affordable!  

I opted to try their basic woven labels but you can also do logo labels where you can upload your own logo/image and have that printed on a label.

The process of creating the order is really simple, you write what text you'd like on your label, choose a font, they have a really wide selection , and then if you wish you can add a little image and get this! They have a whole tab of images dedicated to sewing!

Now to make sure this was a thorough review I decided to try and two different types of label:

The first label:

-white background [ they have 19 colours to choose from]

-black writing [23 writing colours]

-scissor image

-sew in label

- 100 labels for £34.00 -

The second label:

- pink background

-black writing

- button image [I chose this so I could see how a image with finer lines would look]

-iron in label

- 100 labels for £41.00 -

  

I didn't opt to have the additional layer of white thread used [which is meant to make sure your colours really stand out] and I don't see any issues with the fonts standing out on my label. 

Text wise I kept it really simple by just using my name and blogname. and I love how they look the finish is so professional and I;m actually thinking that I might get a few with Lil mans name on to sew into all of his school clothes!  

They took about 10 days to arrive and came neatly packed into plastic bags, which my husband promptly opened all over the dining room table because he "wanted to look at them" LABELS EVERYWHERE! My only quibble was that their were no instructions on how to use the iron in ones, which resulted in my first attempt being a lil jacked up! But then Lo and Behold a few days later the instructions arrived in my inbox! I guess I should have held my horses but it would be a nice touch if the instructions came with the labels. What I should have done was used their live chat service and asked! I did actually use the chat service whilst I was ordering and it was brilliant, I must have asked a question at 9ish at night and someone got back to me with 20 mins! 

And if anyone's curious you attach the iron ones like this:

position label on fabric, cover with baking paper, use cotton setting on iron [no steam], iron baking sheet for about 15-20 seconds moving iron slowly, wait two minutes and remove baking paper.

So all in all I LOVE them! The quality is amazing and I love being able to show people who made my clothes, ME!!! And I now have 200 labels to sew into my me mades!

And if you want to sew your own labels into your own clothes then I have a cheeky little discount code for you! 

knitwitsowls15     

Will give you 15% off your order for 30 days from the date this blog post went up! Which means if you ordered 100 of the sew in labels you would save £5.10! But remember the bigger the order the bigger the discount! [ I'm not an enabler I'm a helper I promise!] 

Much Love 

and let me know if you get yourself some labels!

Frankie

xxx

disclaimer : whilst the dutch label shop provided me with a gift code so I could purchase some labels all views and opinions are my own and I have not been given any other monetary payment.