Hokey Croquis & Fashionary tech drawing help

Last year I was sent a complimentary Hokey Croquis fashion sketching notebook as a thank you for being a contributor to the BurdaStyle book, and I never quite got around to telling you about it. Not because the product isn’t nice, but mostly because I haven’t done much drafting or designing until now where Ive needed to make my own tech drawings!

Hokey Croquis is a very sturdy, nicely designed, spiral bound notepad with pre-printed female croquis (those are the little drawings of female silhouettes), which you just draw your designs on top of. Then, you can scan in the page, fiddle with the contrast on your computer, and their lines disappear.

HC have really paid attention to the little details here – the book closes with a nice, pink ribbon, and included with the book are some classy stickers to customise the cover. I’ve noticed that Fashionary.org have a similar croquis notebook for sale, but they also have some free pdf downloads, too. I’ve not had a chance to try their book, but the croquis included in the pdf are a bit small for my liking. I think they’re great for getting a bunch of ideas down without wasting precious, thick pages in a book, but for making the final tech drawings, I think the larger, HC forms are better.

A bit of everything

Housekeeping time! I’ve got lots of little bits to update you on, either with my in-progress project, upcoming things, or small projects I managed to gloss over at the time…

So in no particular order:

My purple coat

Progress is slow on my purple jacket/coat from the Winter 2011 MyImage magazine, not because of anything to do with the coat, but because life keeps getting in the way. I’ve finished the shell and I’m onto the lining now, so I’ve just got to finish constructing the lining, attach the two together, flip, and sew the buttonholes.

I’d prefer to do the buttonholes on my vintage buttonholer attachment, but the templates I have aren’t big enough for my enormous (2.5 inch?) buttons. Anyone know a clean way around this? Can I set the buttonholer to do double-length holes somehow?

In any case, I should be able to finish this coat this weekend and (hopefully) get a photoshoot in. Not long now before I can do evenings photos again – it’s already light out when I go running before work!

Gift update

My go-to baby gift is to sew a changing mat, with a hand towel on one side, and nice fabric on the other with big, deep pockets and ties to fold it all up. I had two baby boys arrive in January, so both sets of parents got changing mats with this awesome Alexander Henry vintage robot fabric. 1 meter of it wasn’t quite enough to stretch to the pockets, too, so I filled in with some scrap denim.