"All art is quite useless" - Oscar Wilde
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August 04, 2012

Parasol

I made a parasol from a normal umbrella as a commissioned work for my only customer ever :'DDD (I make a lot of stuff for other people, but they are usually presents from me to them).

It's a really easy project, especially since you can do it the pro way or the noob way. I did it the noob way because I'm lazy and the result is just fine!



There are quite some nice step by step tutorials for this project you can find on the internet.

First you have to take the top off the umbrella and cut the threads that hold the fabric to the skeleton. Take off the fabric.

The pro way is to undo some threats of the cover so that you have one of the eight parts that make up the fabric cover of the umbrella. You can use this as a pattern to create eight other parts with your own fabric and sew them together to create a new cover.

I did it the noob way and just put the open skeleton on the fabric I wanted to use and cut around. I'm pretty good at cutting, so no problem there. Plus I saved myself a lot of time and bothersome seams.
I did that twice because I used some nice lace fabric on top of a semi-translucent fabric.

Pinned both fabrics together afterwards and sowed them together. Added two kinds of lace for embellishment. Tadaaa!

Oh wait - the last part is extremely boring and annoying. You have to re-attach the cover to the skeleton by sewing it to the eight arms. I did that three times for every arm, so 24 times. But then I was done, thank god!

You have to be careful, though! The two layers of fabric are much heavier than the original fabric, so be gentle when opening and closing the parasol, don't give it hard waves and better not use it in heavy wind.

The parasol can be tied together with a satin ribbon.


1 comments:

Michelle L. said...

I think it's beautiful!

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