I'm still here...!

I haven't gone anywhere... In fact, I have a pile of recent makes to be photographed, a To-Post list as long as my arm with recipes, projects and even a knitting pattern or two. Like a messy bedroom with its entire wardrobe strewn about the place, I don't know where to begin! Truth be told, all my blogging efforts have been concentrated on the By Hand Blog these days. With only a month to go before we launch our first collection of sewing patterns, we've been working day and night stitching samples, putting together sewing tutorials and DIY projects for the blog and going over our instruction booklets for the millionth time.

In order to break my blogger's block, I thought I'd look back and share my favourite DIY's and fashion hacks we've been coming up with here at By Hand Studios...

Quite literally a 10 minute project, the Doily Tee project shows you how to add a pretty vintage texture to a plain t-shirt - and use the technique shown for any lace insertion project too.

We had such fun with this! Designing and printing the fluorescent Aztec tiled pattern onto some scrap calico then stitching it up into this tote bag that I use every-damn-day! Never will I have a need for someone-else's-logo canvas tote bag again. Another super quick tutorial.

A black top, an empty spray bottle and some bleach is basically all you need to fake your own Christopher Kane collection; I'm even considering giving the Galaxy treatment to a few metres of black/navy fabric...

In this tutorial, we break down and explain the equations you need to know in order to make up a full, half and quarter circle skirt. Not being the most mathematically minded person, my brain felt completely and utterly frazzled after writing this post! It always seems so easy as I'm making the skirts, but as soon as it comes to writing it down in comprehensible words... baffling. I think we finally nailed it though!

So there you have it - a little glimpse into what's been keeping me so busy and absent from this space. Not abandoning the SmS ship by any means however, and I promise to be back soon and tackling a serious backlog of Summer makes as well as bunch of projects planned for the colder months to come. No rest for the wicked today though - off to London Fashion Week now to parade myself around in outfits made from our soon-to-come sewing patterns! 

For those of you interested, I'll be posting sneaky peeks on the By Hand Blog, 

tweeting @byhandlondon and Instagramming @Elisalex // @byhandlondon.