Search Results for: nearly there

A wool maternity coat – nearly there…

As you recall, last week I underlined Holly’s maternity coat and created all five bound buttonholes, but I had the day off work on Friday so I was able to make loads of progress over my long weekend! In fact, her coat is now 95% finished and ready to hand over, so I thought I’d give you a rundown of what I got up to…

I’m making this maternity coat from the August 2008 issue of Burda, but after the first muslin we made some design changes (namely, eliminating the band and gathered sleeve caps) so it won’t look exactly like this tech drawing:

As I constructed the shell of the coat, I took the extra step here to catch-stitch all the thick wool seam allowances to the flannel underlining. I started off just doing this on the sleeve seams as I feel the bumps are most noticeable during wear there (and therefore most likely to get annoying quickly!), but I carried on and just catchstitched everywhere.

I wanted this coat to be as nice for her as one I would make myself, so why not? I also noted that Gertie was asking last week how to make the seam allowances lie flat on her coat – well, the answer is catch stitching!


(I forgot to take a photo of all my stitching before lining it, though, so you’ll have to make do with a shot through the “window”!)

There's no Depression here…

I’m terribly excited to finally have begun work on Folkwear’s 1930s Day Dress! I bought the pattern and both the vintage-print crepe de chine and the contrasting teal crepe de chine (which you may recognise from the kimono top a few months ago, but I set myself a goal that I wouldn’t make the dress until my measurements matched that of my dressmaker’s dummy, unpadded (yes, I realise it’s adjustable, but bear with me here). I’m happy to say that I’ve lost the 4 inchess off my waist that held the biggest discrepancy between myself and Susan (said dummy), and I’m headlong into a new project, thankfully with enough summer left for a vain hope to still wear it before the first frost!

A gold ribbed polo neck sweater

Sometimes my garments start with a pattern, and I buy the fabric afterwards for it. Other times, I think up an item I want to sew and find the pattern and fabric to match it. And sometimes I start with a fabric, and think about how I’d most like to wear it and find a pattern from there. This top is one of the latter.

I bought the “Old Gold” ribbed jersey from Like Sew Amazing (£19.50/m) and I originally thought I’d make a sleeveless tank with a high collar, but when it arrived it was SO SOFT and I knew it should instead be a polo neck (turtleneck) sweater instead.

Tropical cats Duathlon Shorts and Tenacity Leggings

Even though I sewed these at the end of November, they’re my final makes of the year. Despite having a week of feeling “kinda okay” (able to take 15min walks outside) around the end of November, I’ve felt truly appalling for the rest of December and am yet again spending 23hrs a day stuck in bed with post-Covid fatigue. It’s now over 100 days since I got Covid and I still can’t sit up or stand for very long, let along have a normal life.

But now that it’s crunch time at the end of the year, I want to share these before I forget the details, even though I’m not able to share anything more than flat photos of both…

These both started with a photo of a maxi dress that was doing the rounds earlier this year (or last year? It all runs together) with big blue and purple flowers on a black background, with black cats peeking out of the shadows. I really wanted to recreate the fabric on my own, but didn’t quite get to do it. And then I saw a similar print on Creative Market so I purchased it instead, and changed the colours to suit my vision.

Developing the Triumph Suit pattern

The Triumph Suit pattern is not only our first triathlon-focused pattern, or our first Advanced pattern, but I’m also fairly certain is the pattern that was in development the longest. And also very likely the one I nearly gave up on the most times (I don’t deal well with very long-running projects!).

So today I’d like to walk you through a bit of its development process so you can get a feel for the timelines involved and the sheer number of hours, weeks, months, and years that go into something as complex and specialised as this!

I started thinking about a trisuit pattern all the way back in early 2021 (I was still shielding during the time, remember!). It was the first inspiration to hit me since the disruption of 2020. During 2020 I concentrated on updating all of our patterns to be layered and projector-friendly, rather than developing anything new simply because I had zero energy for creativity. It started with me combining two blocks together and drawing out design lines – both on paper and on myself!

Supplies for the Triumph Suit pattern

I’ve had a few requests for a fabric guide for our latest Triumph Suit pattern so today I’ll walk you through all the supplies I used to create the three samples you’ve seen so far (plus an extra you haven’t seen yet).

Exterior Fabrics

Let’s start with the fabrics you’ll see the most of – the exterior fabrics! You can either make the Triumph Suit all from one exterior fabric (like I did for the prototype I wore to London Duathlon last summer), or you can mix and match fabrics. I made the last four samples all from a mix of exterior fabrics, and I colourblocked each of them different ways – there’s so many different possible combinations! It’s really handy to print off the tech drawing on the first page of the instructions and break out the coloured pencils or pencils to sort out which colourblocking you like the most.

A white StyleArc Issy top

Thank you for all the lovely birthday messages! As I mentioned in that post, I actually made a version of the Style Arc’s “Issy Knit Top” before I sewed before my birthday top in the abstract floral jersey. I don’t often sew two of the same pattern in quick succession like this, but I knew I wanted this pattern to be my Birthday Make so I didn’t want to wait around!

For this top, I used a 1.2m remnant of MeetMILK tencel jersey from Lamazi Fabrics in the “shell” colourway (this colour is sold out but there are others!), which is a very pale off-white colour, with great stretch, drape, and recovery.

Happy 2023! (Year in Review)

For the past 15(!) years I’ve posted my year in review on 1 January, but not this year. I lost my sewjo around the end of September so I didn’t really have much to blog about. I waited for it to reappear (as I learned a long time ago there’s no point in trying to force it) and prepped a few projects, tidied a bit, planned a bit, and then fell into a massive “Interview with the Vampire” fandom hole (more on that later), and generally was happier in October and November than I’ve been in a long time (completely unrelated to the sewing) but that’s not the reason this post is late.

This post is late because, despite my best efforts (cycling to/from, FFP3 masking indoors with my CO2 monitor and otherwise staying outdoors) I caught a virus of some sort at the office christmas party which left me practically bed-bound with post viral fatigue for 4+ full weeks (no, not Covid, not flu, not RSV, not anything they swabbed for at haematology, but thankfully not EBV either). Like, 21+ hours a day in bed, and if I sat up for more than 15min to eat or drink, I’d have to lie flat for another hour. So sitting up to type was impossible, and I wrote this in pieces on my phone when I could, not being able to put it all together until I started improving a little bit in the past few days.

So apologies that it’s late, and for the blog silence for the past few months, but hey, 2023 can only get better from this dismal start, right?? Without further ado, let’s have a look back at 2022…