Dip dye

Happy New Year, readers!

To help fight those winter blues, I’m going to show you a few projects that I did for my summer holiday wardrobe back in September, starting with a rather nice blouse.

This 100% cotton blouse is so thin it’s pretty much cheesecloth. I bought this in the St Francis Hospice Shop in Romford for a very reasonable £3.00.

P1100188  P1100232

It’s size 14 but I’m going for a loose fitting look so I left the size as-is.

P1100230

Dip dyed garments were very popular with DIY bloggers over the summer as the ‘ombre’ look was so popular, so there are a million tutorials out there about this; here’s my take on it anyway. Continue reading →

Happy Diwali!

Happy Diwali to those out there celebrating! This year I was invited to a Diwali party at my friend’s house, and she encouraged all the guests to come in Indian style outfits. Of course I jumped at the opportunity to wear a sari! And me being me… of course, I am making one.

Making a sari is not that tricky. In its most basic form, it’s around 5 metres of material with some trim sewn on, plus a sari blouse which is very fitted and does not reach the waist, and a basic underskirt with a drawstring. The hardest part is really the blouse; my friend told me that these are always custom-made for the wearer. The real difficult part is in wrapping yourself in the sari, making it look good, and not just like you got tangled in some curtains. Luckily I had my friend (an experienced sari wearer) to help me.

Anyway… after many months searching for 5 continuous metres of fabric in any charity shop, I went to Walthamstow and bought 5 metres of (new) chiffon-y curtain fabric from the Textile Centre. It’s cream and teal with flowers printed on a woven satin-y pattern (more pics below). I also picked up some muslin for the underskirt there. Further down the high street, searching for trims, I stumbled into a shop which sold pretty much ONLY Indian-style trims. It was like Aladdin’s cave… completely incredible. I will definitely be back. The trim I settled on was teal and gold, quite wide, and £1 a metre. There were 8.5 metres left on the roll, and I took it all!

So, the sari blouse. They are usually cotton, but I’m cheating a bit and using a stretch fabric. I picked up this ugly blouse in the Scope shop in Walthamstow for £3.95. It’s a perfect cream colour to match my ‘sari’. It’s a kind of permanently crinkled polyester which stretches a LOT.

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Pattern Magic: Union Jack

I didn’t do a Halloween costume this year (check out last years’ costume here), but hopefully this makes up for it.

Here at Charity Shop Chic towers, any excuse for fancy dress goes! My friend J, who is American, hosted a party a few weeks ago to celebrate living in the UK for 7 years. The Anglo-American dress code was ‘red, white and blue’, which gave us a lot of scope… obviously I wanted to go as something British. Something patriotic. And something red, white and blue…

For raw materials I selected this rather boring blue men’s shirt from the British Heart Foundation shop in Balham. I paid £2.99.

The shirt itself is quite a heavy synthetic material which has a wierd texture to it.

With this project I am also taking part in the Sew2Pro Pattern Magic challenge, in which we are attempting different makes from any of the three ‘Pattern Magic’ books by Tomoko Nakamichi. I have been a fan of the books for a long time but have not had any success with the really rather complex patterns thus far, so it’s got to be time to give it another shot.

I’m attempting what looks like one of the easiest patterns in the book – ‘Like a Jungle’. It divides the front bodice into four overlapping segments.

Can you guess what I’m going to do with this? That’s right – a Union Jack!

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Carrie Bradshaw Month 2: Drunk at Vogue!

And for the Grand Finale of Carrie Bradshaw Month (2)…. one of my favourite ever Carrie outfits!

But first… this story starts with a coincidence. It’s often tough to find things in charity shops when you have something specific in mind. I had been looking for pinstripes for quite some time, but they had been eluding me, until I found this:

It’s pinstripe material! It’s so rare to find material in charity shops here that I grabbed it and ran to the cashier as quickly as possible. This was in the PDSA shop in Whitby and I paid £2.49. The original label was still attached, telling me that the fabric had originally been bought at a shop about 50 yards away on the same street and that it had cost £3.50.

Unfortunately, the label couldn’t tell me what the material was made of, but I’m guessing wool-mix.

Here’s the coincidence part. After searching for pinstriped stuff for so long and striking gold at PDSA, not 5 minutes later I came across these babies in the Scope shop, which is practically next door!

They are mens pinstripe suit trousers and they are 100% wool. I paid £7, which is rather a lot. They were carrying a label which proclaimed them to be especially high quality.

Of course, I had the pinstripe material in my hand from next door so I was able to compare them in the shop, and happily, they are a very decent match (better in real light than in the photo below).

The outfit I had in mind is the absolutely fantastic suit worn by Carrie when she goes for her first meeting with her new editor at Vogue! This is a personal favourite for me and I was delighted to finally have the chance to attempt this.

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Carrie Bradshaw Month 2: …and isn’t afraid to ask

Readers, despite my diligent searching over the last 6 months, it turns out it is actually incredibly hard to find a tutu in a charity shop in this country. Who would’ve thought, eh?!

So I had to resort to a vintage shop to find this baby… £14.99 from Rag n’ Bone in Deptford.

I’m sure you all know what I have got in mind for this…

Continue reading →

Carrie Bradshaw Month 2: Love Letters of Great Men

OK, so this jacket doesn’t look like it has heaps of potential, but bear with me!

The swing tag is missing, but I paid £4.99 in the British Heart Foundation in Whitby.  It’s Marks and Spencer, size UK 20, so plenty to work with.

For this remake I will also be using…

…one large full-skirted light grey skirt. This one is size 16 and came from the Children’s Society Shop in Upminster. For this I paid £2.49.

So, what could kind of outfit could be drawn out of these two unusual garments? Read on to find out…

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Carrie Bradshaw Month 2: Your girl is lovely, Hubbell

This is the third post in a series I’m doing about Carrie Bradshaw. You can read the rest of the posts here.

One of my favourite moments in Season 2 is in episode 18. Carrie and the girls discuss how her relationship with Big has parallels with the 1973 movie “The Way We Were“, starring Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. She heads over to the Plaza hotel where Big is leaving his and Natasha’s engagement party and the rest is a total pastiche of The Way We Were. She even tells him, “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell,” not that he gets the reference, of course, before getting back into the limo and driving off with ‘the idiot stick figure with no soul’.

In this scene she wears a beautiful silk slip dress, cut on the bias, which I read somewhere is by Christian Dior.

The dress is really, really low cut. You can see underwear peeking through the neckline in a lot of the shots.

To make a dress like this, I needed something white and cut on the bias… enter this yucky skirt!

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Carrie Bradshaw Month 2: Scout

This is part two of a series in which I pay tribute to everyone’s favourite fictional fashionista. To read the other posts, click here.

For my next project, I chose this red and white skirt from season 4 episode 7. The location is ‘Scout’, Steve and Aidan’s bar in SoHo.

The skirt is Prada spring 2001 RTW and it was also styled with a black long sleeved top on the catwalk.

I’m making my own version from…. tshirts, of course!

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Carrie Bradshaw Month 2: CARRIE’S BACK!

CARRIE’S BACK!

Yes, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen, because I enjoyed April’s ‘Carrie Bradshaw Month’ feature so much, I’ve decided to do a sequel. Only this time, it’s going to be bigger and better. The pictures are going to be shot ON LOCATION IN NEW YORK CITY!

That’s right, Charity Shop Chic is going global! :) I will be posting this series throughout this month, so stay tuned for more coming up shortly.

For my first trick I will be attempting to recreate a white jersey dress in the manner of this Halston Heritage number that she wears right at the start of the sequel. Of course, I am using my favourite source of recycled cotton jersey… old tshirts!

I picked up these two white men’s tshirts at the Cancer Research shop in Whitby for £3.50 apiece. One’s marked large, the other small, but crucially they are both completely plain.

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Designs on Denim: Part 6 (of 6!)

This is the final part of the denim series, at least for now… hope you have enjoyed reading.

It’s a good old denim jacket!

Again this came from Thrift Town in San Francisco ($7.99). I had several denim jackets that I was looking at, trying to decide which one to get. I eventually settled on this Calvin Klein jacket in traditional indigo blue. It’s really well worn; the cuffs are falling apart and the collar is fraying. It’s so well worn that the denim is really soft to the touch and not at all cardboard-y. It just feels good to wear!

Continue reading →