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Me-Made March

Me-Made March has been in full swing for a month now, and as I stated in February, I’ve been playing along at home, but taking photos of what I wear every day is just completely infeasible for me, so I’ve just kept a record of what I’ve worn instead.

I did something similar a few years ago and it was really helpful in observing what I tended to wear throughout the week and which items I turned to most often. I can’t actually remember the last time I wore an outfit that didn’t contain at least one “me-made” item (not counting weekends, where I live in grotty, boat-DIY clothes), so this challenge isn’t really that challenging for me! It’s what I tend to wear anyway!

March

  1. Tues. Navy blue riding trousers & purple cashmere turtleneck (RTW)

  2. Wed. Taupe corduroy skirt & turquoise mohair sweater (layered over a RTW white long sleeved top) (so yes, I am wearing the exact same outfit as shown in my citizenship post, right down to the same tights and boots!)

  3. Thur. First Jalie jeans & plum and green lace Patrones top

  4. Fri. Foldover wool trousers (so warm!) & RTW black long sleeved top

  5. Sat. Two 40th birthday parties! Burda September cover dress

My Cos “Made By You” Women’s Shirt

Back in November I caught wind that the high-end high street shop Cos were selling sewing kits for two of their classic white shirt designs. Coincidentally, it was right after Black Friday so I managed to buy both with a hefty discount, purchasing size M/L for the women’s and size S/M for the men’s (the RRP for each kit is £29/€35 but I think I paid less than £20 each). Now, Cos label these as “women’s” and “men’s” but to my eyes they’re really both unisex designs, so I’m sewing up both for myself! I decided to dedicate my January sewing to tackling these kits, starting with the women’s one (as voted by my Instagram followers), so this post is to show off the finished shirt!

A monochrome striped rib knit top

Back in May I bought some irregular striped rib knit jersey from Like Sew Amazing (now sold out) at the same time as I bought the fabric for my Burda jumpsuit. I didn’t really have a plan for it, but I could tell it was high quality and a steal at £15 for 1.5m, so I kept hold of it in my stash until a plan presented itself back in early November when I thought to myself – I should definitely make a long sleeved top with it.

I’d been meaning to sew more from the excellent Named Patterns “Breaking the Pattern” book (since everything I’ve made so far has been incredible!), and having most recently made the Ruska knot dress back in March for my birthday, the other Ruska variations were already printed and cut to size. Even though it’s all one pattern, you actually get two fit choices – a looser cut through the body (used by the teeshirt, tunic, and outer layer of the knot dress) or a more slim-fit version (used by the dress and inner layer of the knot dress). Since I already liked the fit of the knot dress, I opted for the slim-fit with long sleeves and a taller collar similar to the dress in the book (I’ll get to that in a second though).

Burda magazine March 2018

First of all, thank you all for your well-wishes on my health. I’d love to tell you that my posting again means I’m feeling better, but it’s more a case of the number of “blog posts I need to write” building up so high that the anxiety levels are outweighing the effort involved to write them. And it’s kinda ridiculous that I’m writing about the March Burda in May, but getting this issue was a drama in and of itself, since for some reason it wasn’t on any of the usual newsstands in London, and then the issue I ordered online got lost in the post, so I had to order another copy off eBay, ugh. But because my March, April, and May reviews are so late, I’ve included links to the pdf patterns on BurdaStyle.com so you can still grab the pattern if you want to.

I made socks

With the book writing and marathon training in full swing over the past few months, I needed a bit of a diversion in my spare time. Because, even though I love them both dearly, when you’re thinking about sewing and activewear and running all day long, sometimes you want to just sit down and not think about either for a bit!

I’ve never knitted before in my life, nor have I frankly had any desire to. I have enough hobbies, and I don’t get excited by yarn in the slightest. I’ve never had any desire to knit a scarf or hat, which seems to be the basic beginner projects you must suffer through in order to learn the craft (a bit like making PJ bottoms in sewing I guess?). But socks are different – yes, I could definitely see the appeal in making socks, but they seemed really complicated to knit, and again, I have zero desire to go through months of learning how to do the basics in order to get to the thing I actually wanted to make.

Burda magazine March 2017

Springtime in Burda’s world means the start of wedding season, and the March issue is traditionally the one filled with wedding gowns and other formalwear suitable for bridesmaids and guests, too. I’m personally in the market for a gown to wear to a gala event in June, so perhaps something will take my fancy here…?

Named Harriet lumberjacket in wool & vintage silk

I am both back from our trip to the States and feeling back on form now, so I’ve started to tackle documenting the absolute mountain of finished makes from the last four months. I have some garments from early January, some made more recently and well, I’m just going to share them with you in no particular order! The photos are a bit more slapdash than usual, but I know that if I waited to do proper photoshoots of all of these then it’d be another 6 months before you’d get to see them!

So I’m going to start with a garment that was the longest in the planning, and also quite possibly my favourite of the early 2016 makes. It all started back in summer 2014, when I bought some fabulous navy wool coating & vintage silk twill from Ditto when I was down in Brighton. I knew I wanted to use them together for a transitional, short coat, but then I had quite a journey in finding the right pattern!


The psychedelic 1960s vintage silk twill lining that was originally made for neckties!

Over the course of 18 months, I ended up making five different muslins before I was happy enough to cut into the wool and silk:

  1. StyleArc Audrey (the silhouette and proportions were just so bad on me. So bad.)

  2. Burda Jan 2015 jacket in size 42 (way too small for non-stretch outerwear, oddly, though Burda’s fit is usually very standard)

  3. Burda Jan 2015 jacket in size 44 (traced ALL the pieces again and it still fit very weirdly)

  4. Patrones 342 No23 dolman sleeve coat (ridiculously tiny sleeves and zero arm mobility even with the underarm gusset)

And then finally I muslined Named’s Harriet lumberjacket pattern, bought during a flash sale during their advent calendar promotion. And I was like Goldilocks, it was juuuuuuust riiiiiight.

A geometric art print teeshirt

Isn’t it funny how the most boring, basic garments somehow end up being the ones we wear the most? Take this top – it was really only meant to be a wearable muslin to test out a new teeshirt draft I was working on last Fall. I wasn’t even planning on even taking finished garment photos of it, as it was a rough pattern (no seam allowances or extraneous notches for my private patterns!) and I just grabbed some fabric out of a bag ready for donation and sewed it all together without much thought.

And it’s ended up being something I wear all the time. Like, I have to make mental notes to make sure I don’t wear it twice in the same week!

Long time readers may actually recall that I’d used this fabric for a long sleeved teeshirt a few years ago. Well, that particular top has since gone off to the charity shop because the neckline was just too low and wide for me to wear more than occasionally, and I hadn’t even worn it enough for the black and orange print to start doing their cool crackle/fading thing! The fabric was originally from Mood via Kollabora, so it’s probably long gone, but everything I disliked about it then I actually really like in this teeshirt. Funny, eh?

Steeplechase Leggings Times Two

Pop quiz – What’s better than an entire Saturday set aside for sewing?

Give up? It’s an entire Saturday set aside for sewing with a friend! Yes, a few weeks ago my friend Sanchia (whom you may recall as my Threshold Shorts pattern athlete model) was all “we need to set a sewing date and make some leggings!” so we found a Saturday we both had free, and she came round to the boat last weekend! Sanchia has sewn before, but hasn’t made leggings in a while, so she selected some fabric out of my (frankly, overflowing with fabulousness) lycra stash, and we used my Steeplechase Leggings pattern to sew her up a pair without any inner leg seaming.


Tablets are perfect partners for Pdf pattern instructions!

And since we were going to be sewing all afternoon, well, I might as well make a pair for myself, too! Since Sanchia chose my FunkiFabrics “Prism” lycra (I had the Flexcite base but it’s also available on their wicking Titan base fabric, I wanted to choose something dark so we wouldn’t need to change threads, so I used some fabulous cityscape lycra that had literally just arrived from Sewing Chest the day before (they have got some great sales on their sportswear fabric pieces right now, just sayin’!).

We had a good chat cutting out the fabric, and then pinning each step together and constructing them assembly-line style, plus a break for lunch, and then she got to play on my coverstitch machine for the hems and waistband finishing, too. By the time 4pm rolled around, we had two finished pairs of leggings!

We vowed to wear our new leggings to Run dem Crew on Tuesday, where we got another friend to snap some photos of us!