I moved, and a lot of stuff changed.

Hello all. Some of you may have noticed my long absence... well, I'd like to believe I had a few regular readers anyway.

So why the radio silence? I moved to a new city, moved in with my boyfriend, set up a sewing/millinery workshop at home, got a new website for the business, lost my best friend (she didn't die or anything; she just fell out with me spectacularly), and I had some sort of commitment/quarter life crisis thing.

I am now resident in Liverpool... here it is:



Except I haven't actually seen that bit yet. That's the city centre waterfront, I live in the suburbs and haven't had much chance to explore yet, despite having been here for a few months.

I have a garden!

Complete with punk rawk laundry. It actually looks smaller here; it's about 8x20 metres, it's bloody huge and we have to cut the entire thing with a strimmer (that's a weed whacker, for you Yankee doodlers).

I'm trying desperately not to become some sort of vapid suburbanite. Our next door neighbour mops and disinfects his patio, he doesn't even have a dog.

We put up lots of shelves for all our gubbins...

I dyed my hair blue...

I started making 1950s inspired bags, available on my shiny new website alongside all my fancy millinery at www.kalandrajane.com...

We adopted a super cute lazy leopard gecko...

...and I went on loads of adventures in my little orange tent, trading at festivals and weekenders.

That's a very brief catch up... I've been really busy and it's been kind of hard to keep up with everything without having to think about blogging too! More sewing/website/lizard/Summer fun details to follow soon, ladies and gents.

Goodbye little Scamp... why I haven't blogged in a while.

I don't know if anyone will have really noticed my absence, and some of you are connected to me via facebook and instagram so will already know, but the reason I haven't blogged in so long is because my beautiful Scamp got very poorly toward the end of last year, and died on November 12th.

I really had no  motivation and nothing to write for a long time - first I had a really eventful Summer and just didn't have the time, then as the warmth started to fade away, so did my little chap. We found out that he had very advanced liver disease, he'd been keeping his pain well hidden from us. He went through a couple of months of scans, antibiotic and steroid treatments, and was placed on a special diet food, but he continued to lose weight and become more listless and uncomfortable, until in the end it would have been unkind to prolong his suffering any more.

My business and personal life have also suffered, hence I'm skint so I've not had any fun purchases to share with you all, and have been under a lot of stress with finances. I'm also currently in the process of finding a new place to live with Paul, in a different city and a better house where I can have a home studio to welcome dressmaking and millinery clients. I'm rebuilding the Kalandra Jane Designs website from scratch (literally - I'm going to be teaching myself to code from the ground up), it's going to be a difficult journey but hopefully things will be progressing soon!

I'll ease back into blogging gently and hopefully soon it'll once more be a productive creative outlet for me, and a source of interest and entertainment for you. Anyway, I've got a couple of fun things to look forward to in the next couple of weeks and it's my birthday on the 31st, so I promise more cheerful blogging to come!

In which I have a fangirl moment over NOFX, and show you my amazing skirt.

I just realised I haven't blogged in nearly a month! I'm sorry, my dears, it's not that I've had nothing to report, I've just not had much motivation, I must have needed a little break but am back now!

Last week we went to see NoFX at the Ritz in Manchester, they were amazing! They have been my favourite band since I was about twelve, I've seen them twice before but they've gotten into the habit of doing crappy metal festival gigs like Download rather than proper tours, so I jumped at the chance to see them in a smaller venue (the Ritz only holds a few hundred at most). This is where I was standing. Support was from Snuff who are still going strong, Paul was more excited to see them than NoFX, being a child of the early nineties punk scene rather than a whippersnapper like myself.

Curse you, Showsec!

Last time I saw NoFX, in 2006 (or maybe it was 2007) they weren't that good, possibly due to their excessive intake of tequila-soaked carrot sticks and cocaine, but this time they were spot on. I got a place right down the front - see those blue, red and white blobs in the bottom left in front of the speaker? That's our friend Paul, my Paul, and my fantastical voluminous beehive hair. The hair that prompted Fat Mike to take a break from playing and singing to compliment me on it and gaze at it in wonder, and which contained such copious levels of backcombed, hairsprayed fuzz that it protected my head like a crash helmet when I got booted by a crowdsurfer.

Here is my plectrum from El Hefe, he was highly amused by my fringe and eyebrows.

Here's my outfit! Teal Me First and the Gimme Gimmes glittery cocktail print shirt which I bought when they toured about four years ago, this is Mike's other band, punk rock cheesy covers supergroup! This has been in my sewing pile ever since, I have only very recently gotten over my deep fear of wearing colours other than black and red on my top half. This was a man's shirt, I took it completely apart and remade it girl-shaped. (Side note: I've just noticed their UK dates for this year are the sodding Reading and Leeds festivals. Honestly, I will be so annoyed if they don't tour outside those dates, Reading and Leeds are total crud, extortionately priced festivals for gap-year students and stupid girls in Wellington boots and floaty hippie dresses, where you are likely to have your tent set on fire by public schoolboy hipsters off their faces on chemical toilet fumes or get hit in the face by a flying bottle of piss.)

Drunken blur action.

 
Yellow tartan skirt with braces! This is actually version two, I made one in September and loved it, but I made it a bit too tight and the loose weave fabric just pulled away at the seams. This is hopefully a more robust version that can accommodate the strain of encasing my gigantic rear. This is probably my favourite thing I have ever made, I have worn it every day since, it needs to go to the dry cleaner - there's only so many times you can air something out before it becomes a bit wrong to continue wearing it.

Sweaty! With Kel :)

New fruit hair tie from Clare at Dolly Cool, it's got an AVOCADO on it! My vegan joy knew no bounds when I saw its avocado goodness, and Clare was lovely enough to let me have it after we did a stall together at Big D's Ink, Iron and Hot Rod Show. This was from vintage fabric that she also made into a fabulous circle skirt!

At last, I return!

Hello people of blogland, I am delighted to say that I finally have my computer back, after three weeks of stone-age living while my laptop spent time at some enormous Tesco corporate repair centre, presumably partaking in electronic enemas and resting its shattered nerves. Apparently they had to replace the motherboard, I'm just glad it is still under warranty, I can do without having to shell out hundreds of pounds on basically the most expensive replacement part a computer could ever need.

I've got plenty of news and completed sewing projects to show you, but unfortunately since the government banned all light bulbs over 40 watts and I am now lit by the dingiest, cheapest bulbs available, my house is no longer suitable for photography after dusk and you will have to wait until grim, frosty daylight slithers over us for me to capture images of the aforementioned sewing projects.

In the meantime here is a picture of the fabric I'm using to make this year's Christmas dress, and the vintage pattern I'm using.


I think Americans call this type of fabric doublekint, I'm not sure if we have another name for it here - it's not something you see commonly in fabric shops in the UK. The houndstooth side will make up the body of the dress, and I'm going to flip it and use the plain black side for the collar. I'm also modifying it to have three-quarter length sleeves as this will be a Winter dress.


If you fancy this design and happen to be a vintage size 20 1/2 (41-35-45) or are able to resize patterns, there is another copy of the pattern available on etsy here. Mine has the cute 50s envelope too!