Today is the end of the competition to win a Patrones magazine, and since I don’t have a cute kid to draw a bit of paper out of a hat, I’ve instead turned to the cold, indifferent statistical knowledge of a random number generator to decide the winner…
And comment #27 was Julia!! So congratulations to her and thanks to everyone who entered. If I get any other bits of serendipity I’ll share the love again in the future…
First of all, WOW, I seriously am floored by the amount of entries to last week’s giveaway! That’s far and away the most popular competition I’ve ever done so thank you all so much for your interest!
But alas, there could be only three winners, so I pulled out the very reliable Random.org to select them (my usual way of simplifying this is to just do a straight draw against the comment numbers, and if the number turns up of someone’s who’s commented to say they’re not entering, then I just draw again. But that doesn’t happen very often!).
So congratulations to Ann, Margaret, and Cris! It just goes to show how impartial I am that the last winner is actually my sister-in-law’s mother, but she won the random draw fair and square, honest. So congratulations, ladies, and your guides will be sent out from Australia very shortly.
While the builders are working on renovating the main part of our boat, I’ve mostly been holed up in our small, self-contain captain’s cabin meaning that I haven’t been doing as much sewing as I normally would (for the dust, disruption and that I can’t be anywhere near them for shielding reasons!). So I’ve been getting a lot of loom knitting done! If you don’t know what loom knitting is, Google is your friend!
I love loom knitting socks in particular, and I’m normally pretty quick with them these days, but I actually cast these on in Oct 2019! Why so long? Well, mostly because I quickly paused them to work on my loom knit sweater. Once that was finished, I picked them up again and they came along as quickly as I’d expect for a nice and simple repeat.
After the success of James’s pandemic trousers (he’s barely taken them off since I gave them to him!), I decided that I needed some elastic-waisted joys of my own to wear while working from home (and relaxing from home, and eating from home, and socialising from home, and everything else from home!). And then I realised that I actually already had a casual woven trouser pattern (complete with separate drawstring waistband!) that I had printed onto A0 a few years back and never sewn – Seamwork Moji!
A few weeks ago J and I took a long weekend away in Amsterdam, but the majority of these patterns actually came from a different trip he’d made for work a few weeks earlier. It turns out that the newsagent inside Rotterdam station is a haven of sewing pattern magazines, who knew?? So rather than do a post on each of these, I thought I’d pull out my highlights, and take the chance again to explain how accessible the pattern sheets and instructions are for non-Dutch speakers…
And just as I thought this review would bring me up to date with the latest Burda, they go and release the June issue (which I have already, and will hopefully be reviewing soon!). As with March and April’s reviews, I’ve included links to the PDF versions of each pattern here so you can still get it if you really like a design, as I realise that the magazine itself may not be available anymore.
A few months ago it occurred to me that I had a lot of 1 metre cuts of woven fabrics languishing in my stash and that I’d really like to have a good, basic shell top pattern in my arsenal to turn these into wearable woven tees or tanks to wear with jeans or skirts. So it was excellent timing when Colette Patterns re-released their free Sorbetto pattern, and I thought I’d give it a try.
We may be in the peak of summer here in the Northern hemisphere, but in Burda’s world July is the last of the summer issues, normally full of floaty beach wear and rectangles-masquerading-as-clothing but there’s surprisingly a lot to like in this issue, too…
Woohoo! It’s a fresh new year! Each year I like to take the first of January to look back on what I’ve sewn in the previous year. So while this post is a celebration of the new year, it’s also a look back at what I’ve been up to in the last twelve months, which I always find to be a helpful exercise!
I only bought this fabric from Abakhan Liverpool only two weekends ago but I’ve already sewn it up and worn it already!
As you’ll recall, I was pretty restrained upstairs at my first Abakhan experience, but then I went down into the bargain basement, and saw this ombré teeshirting! Even then, I could see it was quite thin with very little stretch but I loved it too much to let it go! I paid about a fiver for the length (about 1.5-2m?), and there’s probably enough left for a second tee, too, to be honest. So this is quite the bargain make!
