Mafia History: Cushioning Part I

The mafia loves Ikea as such we go on Ikea convoys but that's another story and not that entertaining so we won't worry about it now. But in Ikea they sell cushions and the Mafia does love a good cushion. To that end and one point we brought back the cheap Ikea cushion pads ready to cover.

Probably one of the easiest things to sew are cushions a nice square straight line perfect for training. So we began making cushion covers in training for the epic sewing session of epicness (See Mafia fashions part I).

As we ran out of cushion pads so the cushioning stopped or so we thought.

We were commissioned to make some curtains for a friend of ours and while we were there Reme's mother asked us to turn some old pillows into cushions for Reme. So one of the stranger weekends of the Mafia happened. More to the point a new art of cushioning making inners as well as covers started.

The beautiful mafia curtains and cushions.

So we branched out. The world was our cushiony oyster. Our next commission came from Fergus. A full Isle of Skye tartan cushion set.

There are only a limited number of old pillows in any persons life as such the shredding of duvets are vital. It works out much cheaper than buying on the roll stuffing and so we get to have many hours of duvet shredding.

The Duvet

Shredding the duvet.

What happens when you shred a full duvet

The inners for the Fergus Cushion

 What happens if you leave a mafia with a room full of fluff

Cutting out the cushions

Full range of cushion cover parts

Sewing time with donkey (the machine not Jacks!!!)

(Finish product to appear later)

So this is the beginning of the cushiony adventure more to follow with epic tales of the monster cushions and Kasun's cushions.

Mafia History: Mafia Fashions Part I

Becca had a great interest in dress making having been taught it from a young age and having had access to very cheap fabric. As such she started teaching Jacks how to sew, first making a dress for a wedding. (I'll try and dig a picture out at some point). After this came the Halloween costumes. Granted we weren't going for too complicated, just a shirt each but unfortunately after 6 hours of sewing shirts to find your task isn't finished as at 2am someone else decided they wanted a shirt. It was progressing nicely until, we sewed the body panel to the sleeve panel on both sides causing a sort of twisted shirt that you have to kinda contort yourself to get into. (I have to point out that at 2am when you have 4 rectangles to sew together it does get rather confusing.

The mafia and two of the shirts.

Another photos of the lovely shirts

After this adventure alarm bells should probably been ringing about fast bulk production but then the idea came. It should probably be mentioned here that it should never be said the Mafia does things by half.
We have a Christmas dinner at work every year. The previous year everyone had dressed smartly to go, but this year we were due a new group photo. Our previous group photo had been taken ages ago and everyone was wearing a red T-shirt so this got onto the discussion about how to coordinate the picture. The discussion started on what to do when Jacks came up with a brilliant (that might have been the gin talking at this point) that we would make all the girls a dress and all the boys a bow tie/tie in the same colour fabric. So the hunt began for the fabric colour and outfit for everyone. Eventually we decided on purple and so the sewing began.

There are many photos from this point in the adventure which will eventually appear on this once we've dug them out. There were many evenings crawling on the floor cutting out. Many evenings of jamming the poor sewing machine that didn't know what had hit it. (Lace fyi is horrid to sew). Many evenings of fitting dresses to people and taking in. Many people and fingers were stabbed with needles and pins (and feet for that matter). There were rushed hems to get it all finished.

One thing to take away from this is that gin and sewing doesn't mix (certain bits of tie were quite difficult to distinguish after the gin took effect). Also that making 5 dresses, 10 ties and 2 bow ties in 2 months is a vast undertaking. Still at least the result wasn't too terrible.

The lovely conglomerate and their fancy outfits