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Fabric Shops and Sewing Magazines in Buenos Aires

We’ve been back from our Argentina trip for a while now, and now that the “holy crap I’m a world champion and world record holder!” glow has subsided a bit and I’ve had time to unpack all my goodies, I wanted to share with you the sewing-related finds from our time in Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, and Iguazu Falls (all three of which I heartily recommend visiting – even if you don’t like tango! I really don’t care about tango, but the food and cocktails in Buenos Aires were out of this world!).

Fabric Shops in Buenos Aires

Handily, the fabric shops in Buenos Aires were concentrated in one small area near the centre, so it was really easy to just pop over and buy some fabric souvenirs, even if you just have an hour or two spare in your schedule (as often happens if you’re in a city for work or on a guided tour).

The shops were much smaller than those in NYC or Goldhawk Road, but they contained a surprisingly wide variety of fabrics, and prices were cheap (but not ridiculously so). It was a pretty laid back atmosphere – no pressure to buy, but employees were around if you wanted something cut.

I paid $260 pesos (about $25US or £18) total for the 3.5 metres of fabric I bought. Prices weren’t marked on any bolts that I saw, so I have no idea of the individual prices of my fabrics, and the fibres were only loosely labelled in sections – “algodón” (cotton), “seda” (silk), etc, so you’ve got to be good at identifying fabrics by feel!


My purchases – 1m each of the printed and grey lightweight jerseys for me, and 1.5m of the coral sweatshirting to sew a Kimono Sweat for my mom

Lengths are in metric measurements (“meters” or “medio”, for half), so just know your lower Spanish numbers or hold up fingers, and most shops have calculators at the tills to just show you the price in pesos if you’re not great with your higher numbers in Spanish. Like pretty much everywhere in Argentina, the fabric shops are cash only – it’s really rare to find anywhere that takes payment by card, though cash machines are fairly easy to find in major cities.

My bias silk 40th birthday gown

Happy 40th birthday to me! Since it’s a big birthday year I kinda felt like I just had to celebrate big, too! So we rented the whole of a private members cocktail bar near Kings Cross, invited a bunch of people, laid on pizzas, and let the rest just happen! Every year I like to make myself something special to celebrate my birthday, and I felt like I should sew a big, glamorous dress for myself to feel like a total star at the party, too.

I happened to have four meters of gorgeous copper-coloured silk satin (charmeuse) in my stash which I’d bought from Truro Fabrics back in 2015 with the intention of sewing a gown for the World Transplant Games gala dinner in Argentina. But I didn’t quite have enough time to sew it before we left, and the silk has been in my stash ever since. I still had the receipt in with the fabric, too, and the price reflects the incredible quality of this silk – I’d paid about £75 for it.

So many Raglan Tees!

Since the Raglan Tee design from my “Sew Your Own Activewear” book is a particularly quick one to sew up AND it works well for activewear and casualwear, I ended up making three for myself over the past year (though I had even more planned in my head!!)

I kinda jumped the gun and showed you my kitties & bunnies version last year because I was too in love with this Stoff & Stil fabric to wait for the book to come out!

Patrones 56 magazine

It’s been a while since I had a Patrones magazine to share, but I kept an eye out for them while we were in Malaga last month. Eventually I found one on a newsstand in the centre of Malaga, but they certainly weren’t as easy to find there was they were in Argentina, which is more than a little odd considering it’s a Spanish magazine. It comes sealed so the pattern sheets don’t get separated or lost (as they’re not stapled in place like Burda), but it also means you can’t peek at the styles before you buy.

Anyway, if you’ve been following along with my reviews over the years, you might recall that they used to do knockoff patterns of seriously high fashion designers, then there was a fallout and they stopped being able to name any non-Spanish designers (so no more Gucci, Prada, Paul Smith, etc), and around the same time they also started to produce compilation magazines made up of a bunch of old patterns and photos lumped together. The only way you could tell the difference between the latest styles and the “latest” compilation was to look at the issue number, as the “new new” were in the 4-500s and the “not really new” had very low issue numbers.

Patrones magazine 342

While we were in Argentina in August, I kept my eyes peeled for Patrones issues whenever we passed a newsagent. It didn’t take long before I found this one on a newstand in Mar del Plata (and 343, which I already own), likely from last winter but who cares? Patrones do the best coat patterns, and this is a Coats Special!! I’ve made so many of theirs in in the past, most notably my winter coat (still my main winter coat several years later!), the silver tweed jacket I throw on in summers, and my duffle coat, which I wore until it was literally in tatters. I’ve got some wool coating burning a hole in my stash right now, so it’s likely I’ll look to Patrones for this coat, too.

I was mostly drawn to the top, but the Armani blazer is also worth a note for its razor-sharp lapels! On first glance, the top has a shape very similar to a lot of other patterns (like that Lekala top I made a few years back) but a closer look reveals it’s actually got two layers – a satin layer underneath and a gauze layer on top.

This menswear-inspired sheath dress would be a great alternative to the clichéd skirt suit for business meetings! Apart from the curved waist seaming, I love the waist-lapel – it feels more like a blazer than a peplum (which we’re all so over by now, right?). This also reminded me of Charity Shop Chic’s recent spectacular Dior-inspired refashion, too.

Ok, now on to the coats feature, and, ignoring the bubblegum pink colour, I just love this dolman sleeved cocoon coat! It fastens with a hidden zipper placket and only uses 2m of wool, which is conveniently the exact amount of my navy wool coating… This is now top of my list to muslin!

Look magazine – August 2015

I briefly mentioned the Argentinian pattern magazine, Look, when I told you all about buying magazines in Argentina last month, but it’s time to take a deeper look into what’s inside!

I totally love sewing pattern magazines – you get so many fashion-forward styles for such a low price, and it’s fun to see what fashions are like in different parts of the world. So far I’ve bought pattern magazines from Germany (Burda!), The Netherlands (KnipMode and My Image), Belgium (La Maison Victor), France (Fait Main), Spain (Patrones), Italy (La Mia Boutique), Brazil (Manequim, Moda Moldes, and Molde & Cia), and now Argentina, how exciting! It doesn’t matter if I can’t speak the language the magazine is written in – as long as I can translate enough to pick the right size and fabric, and identify the pattern pieces, I can sew together most garments without instructions (though usually you can just look at another similar pattern’s English instructions and follow along with those instead). The Google Translate app can translate most text on-the-fly if you point your phone’s camera at the magazine text, too, which saves you from having to type in all the text yourself.

But back to Look! This was the current issue when we were in Argentina in August, along with a “mother and baby” issue from the previous month which I didn’t bother to buy (having several kids pattern magazines already and nieces and nephews into adult sizes now). This particular issue just captured my heart, as it features a huge amount of SS15 runway designs! Remember back in the 1990s and early 2000s when Burda used to do International Collections magazines knocking off all the runway looks? Well that’s precisely what this issue of Look is all about!

I’d say a good half of the patterns in this issue are straight off the runways. Look is a bit different from the other pattern magazines in that the instructions are in a separate booklet from the glossy magazine and the pattern sheets. This means you kinda have to have both open at the same time to see tech drawings next to the runway photo, but is a bit easier than flipping back and forth in the same magazine. If you buy Look on a newsstand, make sure you get all three pieces! Even though the instructions are in their own booklet, these are the briefest I have ever seen in any pattern magazine, so clearly they’re not intended for beginners…

Another observation – like Manequim magazine, most of the Look patterns are only offered in one or two sizes, and the sizes are tiny!! Like, Japanese tiny. Which is strange because even in Buenos Aires the people on the streets seemed to be fairly normal European-sized… Seriously, I’m a size 48 in this magazine, which means I could only fit into one or two of the patterns in this entire issue. (By comparison, I’m a 42 in Burda, La Mia Boutique, La Maison Victor, and KnipMode, and 44 in Patrones and Manequim). Usually with Manequim, most patterns I like are either in my size or a size up or down, which makes it easy to just fudge into fitting, but grading up a bunch of sizes is just too tedious to me.

La Maison Victor magazine – Sept/Oct 2015

I’ve got a big stack of magazines from Argentina to scan and show you, but I wanted to get this one up first while it’s still current in case any one wants to order it for themselves (yeah, it’s quite good!). If you recall from last year when I bought my first issue, La Maison Victor is a Belgian sewing and knitting pattern magazine that publishes bi-monthly (up from quarterly!) in French, Dutch and German and features fully illustrated instructions for each step, too.

I was really impressed with my first issue so I was keen to try and buy another while we were in France for a wedding a few weeks ago – I was pleased to see that it was fairly easy to find. If you’ve got friends or relatives travelling back to the UK through Eurotunnel (where you drive onto the train which takes you under the English Channel), the WH Smith at the Eurotunel Calais Terminal has stocked it every time I’ve looked, and so is a good bet for directing others to buy for you.

La Maison Victor offer patterns for children as well as adults, and they seem to have a good balance of patterns for both boys and girls. Here we see a boys cardigan with buttons and a nice shawl collar, made from sweatshirting instead of the usual sweater knit. This issue also includes a button-down long sleeved shirt for boys as well as a girl’s sweatshirt that could easily work for either gender.

How much do I freaking love this Top “Dusty” with its asymmetric shoulder pleating! This design is SO me that I’ve already traced and cut out fabric for it… but because I don’t fancy the sleeveless bit or the facings, I’ve just traced out the Front and frankenpatterned my basic teeshirt block to it so I can give it long sleeves and a neckband. Also because someone on instagram made it and said the neckline and armholes are really low, and by making it match my teeshirt block, I’m avoiding any potentials there while still keeping the shoulder pleating.

The dresses for this issue are fairly boring, if you ask me, but then again, I’m bored by 90% of the dress patterns I see available anyway, so maybe I’m not the best judge of what women actually want to sew… Classic, or boring? It’s a fine line I suppose.

Simple Sew banded bamboo tee

Thank you all so much for your words of encouragement on my last post. I am pleased to report that I feel significantly better than last weekend already, just by eliminating some foods, which definitely points to it being a nutritional issue than anything more serious, thankfully. I’m already very much looking forward to adding foods back in one by one in a few weeks to see which is the culprit, though! Because of everything in September, I didn’t have time or energy to document or post about the few things I made which aren’t top secret, like this quick knit top!

I actually made this the day we landed back from Argentina. I worked out a few years ago that if I get even a few hours sleep on an overnight flight and then force myself to stay awake through the day I arrive, I’m recovered from jet lag the following day. So once the laundry was on and my suitcase was unpacked, I wanted something easy to sew that would keep me awake, and this little pattern was staring me in the face.

This Simple Sew pattern came free with the September issue of Love Sewing magazine that I’d bought before we went away, and it seemed a perfect mix of easy enough to sew on jetlag, and not requiring me to buy anything. Simple Sew patterns seem to only exist as magazine covermount patterns as far as I can tell, and I don’t see this #015 Jersey Top listed on their site, either. If you want to buy it for yourself, I’m not really sure what to suggest!

I shopped my stash since this only required a meter of fabric, and I came up with this bamboo jersey from Jersey Fashion that was leftover from my Kimono Sweat View B sample – I wanted to be able to give my athlete model Lorna a choice of colour and she chose red, so the teal was left for me. It’s super soft and drapey and really lovely to wear, so just about perfect for this top. For something different, I chose some contrast orange ribbing for the neck and sleeve bands, but since this was offcuts from a ridiculously long vest (tank) top I’d been given at a running event, I didn’t have enough for the hem band so I just turned and coverstitched that instead.


Worn with my birthday jeans from earlier this year

Even in my jet-lagged haze, I could see that the sleeve drafting was wack on this – the hem comes to a point at the seam! Seriously, did no one sanity check this pattern before releasing it? Even if you weren’t trying to attach a hem band (and were just folding under and twin needle stitching), this would be a massive problem.

Burda magazine September 2015

I actually received this issue before we left for Argentina, but in the mad rush to finish sewing my bikini and get all the other posts ready to go, I just couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to talk about this issue. And then I couldn’t really be bothered to complain yet again about the dirndlpalooza issue yet again, for another freaking year. Yes, I could almost just copy/paste the comments I get every year when I complain about the dirndls, but it’s just too exhausting to complain all the time. Let’s just say I’m sick of the dirndls taking up space in a global magazine every single year which could otherwise go to clothes the vast majority of their global audience might actually wear. If Burda sell so many dirndl issues (one of the arguments), then why haven’t they just produced a one-off 100% dirndl compilation of all their past patterns and sell that every September? I’d be thrilled!

But dirndl complaints aside, let’s take a peek inside this issue before October actually lands in my mailbox!

Two interesting patterns here: on the left, I really like the exaggerated cowl neck tunic (ut I’d definitely substitute in regular knit sleeves instead!) and, on the right, a great short skirt, similar to Maison Fleur’s Fit and Flare Skirt.

Oh. My. Gorgeous! This is such an elegant sheath dress! The subtle seamlines and shaping are just so masterfully done, and they’ve chosen a great fabric to showcase it, too. You may have missed it, but I also love how they shifted the sleeve seam to be at the front instead of the usual place at the inner arm.

I’m not a fan of the dress but the peacoat and biker trousers are great (also a longer version of that coat is available). Which reminds me that I still have some wonderful navy wool coating and silk lining ready for a jacket, since none of the 3(!) muslins I made for it last winter passed my stringent tests…