May is lingerie month for the Stashbusting Sewalong group, ably led by Andrea who has been designing her own bra blocks, which I find quite intriguing. Anyway, I’ve made a couple of underwear sets.

This set was made with some of the scraps left over from my Nettie bodysuit, with the addition of a bit of lace to turn them from pedestrian undies to what I hope can be classified as lingerie.

As a participant in Me Made May and pledging to only wear my own makes, I’ve been a bit stretched for underwear so made another set as well to relieve the pressure on the laundry.

I made both of these sets whilst camping and remembered to take the blue lace for the blue set, but clean forgot for the others. However, I found a tiny scrap of lace in my box and cut out the flowers and sewed them on. I do have to confess though that the lace on the undies covers a tiny hole that I found in the fabric, which I darned prior to sewing on the flower.

When I dyed the blue fabric I hadn’t realised quite how much I had. I found that I had turned 5 metres of pink fabric blue! I couldn’t think what I would do with all that blue, so cut off a couple of lengths and thought I would dye one brown and the other I would dye in the Shabori style. I had no idea how to do this, so my first iteration was a bundle like this

Luckily, I lost my nerve before I threw it in the dye pot, and decided I should look at a tutorial or two. A quick search on Google turned up pages of tutorials but they all seemed to take small pieces of fabric. I had 1.5 metres that I wanted to do. In the end I saw something on Pinterest (I didn’t note the site, sorry), which appealed. I folded the fabric, concertina style, down its length and then folded it into triangles. I was so engrossed that I forgot to take photos – duh! When I had a stack of triangles I cut two plastic triangles the same size, put one top and bottom to act as resists, and bound it all with string, much more neatly than in the photo above. I then put it in some brown dye and the results were much better than I was expecting, and I think it looks much better in reality than it does here.

I had planned to make another Nettie with this, but the pattern is too big for such a small garment, so I have put it away for another project. This won’t be my last such attempt at dyeing.

I’ve also been knitting. My friend Thelma has gone on a long trip round Australia and I knitted her a pair of fingerless gloves so that she can be creative even when it is cold.

when Archie saw them he asked for yet another pair, but only likes grey, so a rummage in the wool stash turned up some grey wool which met his rigorous requirements and he declared himself happy!

In a nutshell: Underwear is the Cloth Habit Watson bra and bikini set. The blue is made from scraps of blue knit and some lace scraps. The flesh coloured set is made from a remnant from Knitwit. The fingerless gloves are from a pattern I’ve had for years and I have no idea where I got it. All materials used were from my stash, so I’m slowly getting through it.