Showing posts with label diy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diy. Show all posts

Apr 18, 2014

DIY Dummy Put To Some Good Use: Alpaca Lace Hearts Shawl And Knitting Pattern

Today is the day when I unveil my finished DIY dummy bust shape.

After I finished stuffing and covering Barbie twice with papier mache, I painted it all over with white poster paint. I used 2 coats but she could really have used 3.

I was very lucky with the nice sunny weather here at the beginning of the week, so I did all this outside, where I managed to dry the 2 coats of paint in one afternoon, while worriedly watching and hoping the wind wouldn't blow her out on the uncut grass.

After I brought the dummy home, I noticed the paint was looking a bit cracked, so I covered it with a thick coat of craft glue in order to seal everything in place.

So now I have one bumpy dummy bust, which I dressed using one of my summer tops, to hide all the bumps and not too even white colour.
It's not perfect but it will do for what I need: something that is not me to help me display knitted scarves, wraps, shawls...
It was a lot of time-consuming work, and I resent it a little for all the time I spent making it, dirtying my kitchen, and not letting me knit as much as I would have liked. 

In the end, I am glad I have my display dummy now, and I have already put it to work to display my latest knit of art: the Alpaca Lace Hearts Shawl:

This shawl is available to buy now from my Etsy shop Sophie's Knit Stuff.





















During all this week, I have also worked very hard on the shawl pattern, and I am proud to announce, that after even more time drawing charts on my computer, typing the corresponding instructions making sure there were no mistakes, translating the same instructions in French, and an awful lot of proofreading, the knitting pattern for my Alpaca Lace Hearts Shawl is now also available to buy from Etsy, Ravelry and Craftsy.



I am going to have a cup of coffee now, before I replenish my food supply and clean the house, and then hopefully I will be able to enjoy a nice long Easter week-end.

Happy Easter!

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Apr 13, 2014

Making A DIY Bust Shape: How To Build A Dummy Body Using Chicken Wire

For a while I've wanted to get a dummy body to display the scarves I knit but unfortunately, living on the Island of Ireland leaves me with 2 choices: paying astronomic shipping rates to get a large item delivered to me, or making one myself.

There are a few YouTube videos that show you how to make a dress form: you can get someone to cover you with duct tape, get that someone to cut you out of the shape made, close it up with more tape and fill it with stuffing, newspapers, expanding foam...

Being the only adult in my house (I'm not sure I should trust a 12 year old to have the patience to do all that work: she might give it up, leaving me half stuck for a few hours, and the cutting bit might be a bit tricky - I don't want blood on my dummy!), I decided to use another DIY method to build my dummy body: of course it had to be the hardest and slowest one!

First I got a small roll of small gauge chicken wire in a local shop: you can get some in most hardware stores, you don't need a very large quantity, a 100cm length is enough for an average size bust.

Then I put on my gardening gloves and tried shaping my roll into something that looked like a female body shape:

You really need gardening gloves for this, as chicken wire has sharp bits and if you're a knitter or a crocheter, you need to protect your hands! You might want to cover your kitchen table with newspapers before you start, I left my cheap tablecloth on to protect the table from scratches and the tablecloth is still a bit grey.

Shaping is a bit tricky: you need to pull the holes in the wire slightly apart for wider areas (chest, shoulders and hips), and push them tighter for skinny areas (neck and waist).
I call her Barbie: she's not made out of barbed wire, but her waist is Barbie-like skinny. Hopefully I'll manage to fatten her up a bit, but as she'll only be used for scarves, she doesn't need to look too realistic (she has a bigger chest and tinier waist than me, but the height and shoulder to shoulder width are about right).













Now comes the messy bit: that wire is pretty sharp and not that pretty at the same time, so I decided to cover my dummy body with papier mache.

I started tearing up strips of newspaper in front of my kids hoping they would want to finish the pile and it worked!

Then I got my 12 year old to show me the papier mache mix she had used in school for her art classes: I thought it would be more complicated but it's only a pancake consistency mix of flour and water (messy, but easy enough to clean afterwards).

While my youngest was out playing with a friend (being a bit of a mess hater, I was a bit relieved that she was not around), I enrolled my 12 year old to help me cover the dummy shape with papier mache: it took us about 1 hour before the shape was all covered but it needed more layers so I let the first coat dry outside for the rest of the afternoon.

At that stage I had papier mache over the neck opening but not the bottom opening, which was a good thing because one of my very wise Facebook likers advised me to stuff it with newspapers to avoid it becoming "wonky".

The next morning I turned the bust over using my clean recyling bin: I used clean papers and cardboard found in the said recycling bin, as well as lots of old brochures and magazine pages to stuff the body, because I didn't want to run out of newspaper. Now is the time for me to confess to very rarely buying a newspaper, but I take all the local free newspapers I can get!

After stuffing it, I covered the bottom part of my dummy form with papier mache (still turned up neck down in my recycling bin).













Then after lunch, I added some white craft glue to the mix and added a layer to the front, while at the same time trying to fix some gaps and bumps, before letting it dry on the sunny patch in my kitchen.

I'll be doing the same with the back later on, and I will be painting it when I can rely on the weather to be dry and not as windy as it is today because I'm not cleaning paint stains off my kitchen floor. It needs to be sealed with some kind of paint or varnish (I will be using matte paint I had bought for another DIY project that did not happen and I don't want a shiny dummy when taking my scarf pictures), because I am afraid the smell of pancake batter would attract mice into my house in winter: it will need a thick coat of paint!

If you want to do this in your own kitchen, set aside 2 full days of no serious cooking because this will take over your kitchen as well as your time. I think using a hair dryer on a low setting would help it dry more quickly but I decided to let it air-dry, as I have plenty more things to do in between papier mache layers (I just hope my kids don't step in the papier mache mix bucket or on my dummy while I'm upstairs typing this!).

I'm not sure when I can post a picture of the finished dummy (or list the shawl I finished making, since I'll need this dummy to be finished and completely dry before then!), but when it is, I will let you all know!

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