Return to the set

Remember last April when I told you all about my day on set of the Great British Sewing Bee? Well, that was at the very end of Season Two, and I must’ve made a good impression on the production company because by the time that post went live, I had already begun work behind the scenes on Season Three!

Over a span of about four months, I spent a lot of time working on the Bee with a team of fantastic people, including the Thriftystitcher herself, who heads up the entire behind-the-scenes sewing team. Most of it was involved with the pattern challenges (the first portion of each episode, where the contestants are given a mystery pattern to make). I can’t discuss details of how we produce the patterns, but just trust me that a lot of work goes into each one before the contestants ever see them! A lot of this work was done in the production company’s offices – which are a pretty normal looking workplace, except at my desk there was a sewing machine and ironing board instead of a computer, which was quite funny!

My work involved a lot of sewing, fitting, digitising, but also illustration, too. I did the latter together with Rosie from DIY Couture (whom I’m not afraid to admit is way better at these than I am!). This proved to be great practice for my own pattern line, as the more I did these for the Bee, the better I got – it was especially helpful for someone to say “ugh, that one looks weird, do it again!” Seriously, this helped up my Illustrator skills immensely!


The Haberdashery, empty and quiet

I was super chuffed to see some of my drawings made it into the final tv shows, too! Here I thought they’d only have an audience of ten, at most!

Return to Goldhawk Road!

On Saturday I once again ventured to the ever-brilliant Goldhawk Road here in London. This time I was lucky enough to have Anwen and Isabelle as my partners in fabric fondling, glitter disgust, and pattern and supplier informing. It’s so much more fun to go fabric shopping with fellow sewists, especially if they possess a daughter as patient as Anwen’s and a resolve as steadfast as Isabelle’s (I cannot believe she only bought the two fabrics she came looking for!!).

But really, I wasn’t so bad myself. I’ve only got two lengths of fabric leftover from the previous trip: red corduroy which will still become trousers at some point, and dark heathered grey jersey, which is being made into a pyjamas set as we speak! So clearly my stash needed replenishing and my mood needed lifting so I was mostly looking for quality I couldn’t easily get elsewhere…

From top to bottom, I bought:

Happy 2022! (Year in review)

Happy 2022! As is traditional, I like to take the chance on the first day of a brand-spanking new year to have a look back at the year before, step back, and reflect on the good (and not-so-good) things that happened. 2021 was always going to be a strange struggle of a transition year, but I kinda feel like we had a bit of practice going into it, so my outlook was a little better than in 2020. But as this is a sewing blog, let’s first take a look at this year’s output…

A teeshirt for my Dad and a tribute from/for me

At the end of January my Dad became suddenly critically ill with a list of serious problems as long as my arm. While I anxiously waited for my last-minute transatlantic flight to leave to go over and visit, I needed something to keep my hands busy, so I decided to make him a teeshirt.

I had recently bought some cotton jersey from Girl Charlee UK (who’ve since closed down) in his favourite shade of “Penn State blue” and I used this in conjunction with the Men’s teeshirt from the Great British Sewing Bee Fashion with Fabric book, size Medium. (Coincidentally, I actually made the “perfect” modelled in the book!)

Adventures in and around Berlin

We’ve just returned from a fantastic week in Berlin! Last time we were there was in 2014, finishing a little mini-Eurail trip of Budapest-Vienna-Prague-Berlin with my running Berlin marathon (in my just-released Threshold Shorts pattern – my, how time flies!). This time I just managed to squeeze in a little sightseeing run around the Tiergarten and along the Spree, and it was wonderful how much more relaxed it feels when you’re not stressing about running a marathon!

To celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary, we booked 2 nights at Tropical Islands as a side trip from Berlin. Now, I have no idea why no one outside Germany seems to know about this place, and frankly, we were even umming and ahhing over booking it at all, because it was hard to tell from the website whether it’d be great, or just unbearably awful.

Sewing Bee Activewear week! (and Flash Sale!)

Before you read any further, if you haven’t watched the latest Sewing Bee episode yet, I just want to inform you that there are screenshots from the challenges in this post, but I don’t reveal who won or who lost any of the challenges, so you’re safe to read on!

This week’s episode was all about activewear, and I’ve been SO excited ever since the theme was revealed in last week’s preview. I mean, how could I not be excited! The pattern challenge this week was to sew a men’s cycling top, and it was revealed that none of the contestants had much experience with sewing lycra, either!

“Perfect”, I thought, “what a great opportunity to show the 3 million viewers that sewing activewear can be really accessible, even on your first try!” But Patrick and Esme had other ideas, pretty much talking nonstop about how difficult and fraught with peril sewing activewear is. Umm, guys, it’s really not that hard! I’ve taught loads of people to sew their first leggings and they practically dance out of the room!

Moving and redecorating

After 10 years, I’ve finally done something that I’ve been putting off for a long time – I moved this entire site onto a new backend. This may not sound like much, but I knew it was going to be a really painful process so I put off doing it for as long as possible.

When I started writing FehrTrade.com back in 2006, I set it all up on a great open source blogging platform called TextPattern, and for a few years it suited my needs well. But the web has evolved massively in the past ten years, and unfortunately, the contributors to TextPattern have not, and even doing seemingly simple things like tagging required a bunch of coding knowledge and a lot of crossing of fingers. Don’t even think about social network integrations – they barely existed when the site was created! I kept coming up against limitations in what I could actually do with the site, and eventually I realised I’d have to move everything over to a different backend in order to keep the site going at all (let’s not even talk about the security holes!).

A Great British Baby Grow

If you are in the UK, you doubtless are already aware that the latest season of the Great British Sewing Bee is well underway! Not only have they got a new location (which looks uncannily like the old one in Wapping, but is now coincidentally located right by my office), but also a new judge, with Esme Young replacing May Martin as Patrick Grant’s wing-woman.

I wasn’t able to be as involved on the production side for this season as I was last time around due to my working four days a week at my office job, but I was able to help out with some sewn samples for the latest Sewing Bee book, instructions and illustrations, but also make the odd “Perfect” for the show, too!

A blue and white jumpsuit

As you may recall, I spent quite a lot of time last year working behind the scenes on the Great British Sewing Bee, first for the third series, then for the Children in Need specials, and finally, for the book which accompanies the series. I personally worked on about 60% of the patterns in the Great British Sewing Bee: Fashion with Fabric book, either by sewing up early samples, measuring yardages or trims, or assisting the illustrators with the construction. So it’s probably quite funny that the first pattern I make from the finished book (not counting the green pencil skirt, which I made from the book before release!) isn’t one I really worked on at all – just one I admired across the studio while others made adjustments.

It’s a pattern for a jumpsuit with an elasticated waist and spaghetti straps with a flounced neckline edge. There’s no fussy closures – you just pull it on and off by stepping into it, and I’d definitely say it’s beginner-friendly, especially since the instructions are fully illustrated. The bonus is that you can also make a pair of casual trousers or a camisole top using the same base jumpsuit pattern (also explained in the book).

In my experience, the trickiest part of this entire jumpsuit was finding the right fabric! It needed to be something hefty enough for the trousers, but also lightweight enough to drape nicely at the neckline frill, and I eventually found this blue & white crepey viscose from Ditto Fabrics that’s the perfect weight and resists wrinkling so it should be perfect for travelling. It did fray like crazy though, so I constructed this mostly on the overlocker (serger).

Doesn’t this just scream summer?? In terms of size, I made Size 14 according to my measurements, and it fits really well – no alterations needed (I should point out that the top/camisole has bust darts so should be easy to do an FBA if you need one).

I wore this out to a pub lunch with friends on Sunday, followed by a little walk in St James’s Park (where these photos were taken) and then more pubbing! It was a little chilly, so I layered a grey cropped jacket over top.

A week in New York City

James and I have been talking about returning to New York City at some point for a while now. We last visited on our honeymoon back in 2010 and had a fantastic time. We’ve also since acquired a rather expensive immersive theatre habit and really wanted to see Sleep No More before it closes (I’m guessing later this year). We’d seen Punchdrunk’s London show, The Drowned Man 4 and 5 times over the course of a year, and knew that a similar show, based on Macbeth, would be well worth the trip. So James booked the flights for my birthday and tickets to see it twice in that week.

And then we heard about the immersive show Then She Fell (set in a disused hospital in Brooklyn, based on the works of Lewis Carroll, and limited to 15 audience members per showing), so booked that, too. And then ended up seeing Sleep No More for a third time directly after the second showing. Because it’s that good. Frankly, it’s two weeks later and I’m still kinda living in a dream world in the fictional McKittrick Hotel. Snippets of songs get stuck in my head, people say things that trigger a memory from the show, I look down and see a drip of fake blood on my shoe from one of the scenes… that sort of thing. I honestly cannot recommend either show enough. So, so worth the money.

But this isn’t a site about immersive theatre, nor is it about the excessive amount of cocktails and brunch we consumed, nor the sleep we didn’t get, or the great quality time we got to spend with my cousin in Brooklyn or the many friends who’d moved back there. So I’ll stick to the sewing-related highlights or we’ll be here all day!

Of course I couldn’t go to New York and not visit the Garment District, but my fabric stash is looking pretty healthy these days and I didn’t really have an entire day to kill wandering around. So I enlisted the help of some professionals! Oona and Ginger were my fantastic tour guides through Mood, Spandex House, and the myriad little haberdashery shops in the Garment District, but also in choosing a man creche (err, bar) with great cocktails!


Here we are each holding up our most obnoxious Spandex House purchases. Yes, mine has bacon all over it.