Search Results for: a black travel skirt

A black travel skirt

I’ve noticed a hole in my wardrobe recently – I really don’t have any plain black skirts that fit me anymore. I found myself wearing my blue travel skirt I sewed up before we went to Mexico last summer an awful lot, and I seemed to get compliments every time I wore it, too.

So when I saw Tia Knight’s very reasonably priced scuba range, I picked up 3m of black to use for both the contrast on my galaxy print sweatshirt, and to make another travel skirt like my blue one.


Not the most flattering tech drawing! It’s more A-line than this in real life…

Like the first blue version, this is the skirt pattern from Christine Jonson’s Travel Trio Three pattern, which surely must be one of my best-value wardrobe patterns ever, as I’ve made the top 3-4 times now, and now the skirt twice, too. Like before, the skirt is shortened by 12cm at the “lengthen or shorten here” lines, which creates a really flattering hem length for my figure.


Seen here with the gathered turtleneck view from the same pattern, which I made back in 2011!

I really love how flattering and comfortable this skirt is – it’s made from a knit with an elastic waistband, but it doesn’t look sloppy at all. It’s also got two really deep front pockets built in to the seaming, and I’ve got no worries that my phone will fall out when I’m jumping around the moorings.

A great basic black skirt

Not every garment needs to be a blockbuster. Sometimes the garments we wear the most are the practical, yet somewhat boring ones that pair well with everything else in our wardrobe. I definitely consider jeans to be in this category, along with the vast majority of teeshirts I make and wear. I’d also consider a good, all-around black skirt to be one, like this skirt, from Christine Jonson’s fabulous “Travel Trio 3” pattern.

I’ve made the top a few times and made this skirt twice already, in blue and then black scuba. But after several years of hard wear, the black one in particular was looking ratty and bobbled so I bought some black ponte from Fabrics Galore to replace the scuba version.

A monochrome Joan wiggle dress

Carrying on from the struggles I had with the Audrey cigarette trousers, you might be forgiven for thinking that I may not want to sew another Gertie pattern for a while, but you’d be wrong! See, I had already printed and taped together her Joan wiggle dress pattern and sourced the fabric so I was committed and ready to make it happen! Like the Audrey cigarette trousers, the Joan wiggle dress was released as part of her monthly Patreon patterns, which I joined solely because she’s switched to a more 1960s beatnik speakeasy aesthetic this year. This dress was inspired by (and named for!) the character Joan in Mad Men, which was one of my all-time favourite shows.

Happy 2021! (My year in review)

What. A. Year! I’m not even going to attempt to sugar-coat things, and any attempt to try and put things into perspective just sounds like a cliché after all this. But for a year where I was essentially under house arrest since March, it’s surprisingly not all bad. Above all else, I’m grateful to have spent the time with my husband and that we both were able to continue our office jobs from home at full pay and remarkable support. My sewing was both a welcome distraction and a balm in this year of chaos and uncertainty.

I’m going to try to use my usual year-end format again, though this was clearly a year that broke all attempts to contain it so let’s do what we can (clearly a motto for the year!)…

Happy 2019! (My year in review)

Happy new year! It’s traditional for me to reflect on the year that’s just finished on the first of a new year, and this year’s a weird one because I’d love to just say “this year sucked”, but there were some fantastic things that happened this year amoungst all the sickness, disappointment, frustration, and hard work. So let’s try and focus on those.

The Sewing Weekender Number 3

No sooner were we back home from Iceland than I was on my way up to Cambridge for my third Sewing Weekender! The first year I was lucky enough to buy a ticket, then last year I gave my “Sewing for Movement” talk as a speaker, but this year I was determined to attend again and set my alarm in order to buy my ticket as soon as they went on sale.

No joke, these tickets were hotter than Glastonbury – we crashed The Fold Line’s site and tickets sold out in like ten minutes despite having doubled capacity this year to 100 places!

Happy 2017 (my year in review)

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!

The #sewdots Falda jacket

Rosie (of DIY Couture fame) created the “Sew Dots, Raise Lots” campaign for the month of October to raise money for the RNIB (Royal National Institute Of Blind People). The premise was simple – sew something with polka dots (because it looks like Braille!), donate to the RNIB, and share on social media with the #sewdots hashtag to be in the running for a huge prize mountain.

I’m not able to participate in every sewing initiative that comes along, but I knew I wanted to be a part of this one, because sight loss is something that’s affected people I love. For pretty much my entire childhood, my grandmother was legally blind from cataracts and glaucoma and I saw how her lack of eyesight isolated her from everything she used to love (like knitting and her independence). More recently, my Dad has suffered from Macular Degeneration, enduring years of regular injections directly into his eyeballs (!!) in order to try and slow the progression of the disease and retain his ability to still at least have some peripheral vision. I’ve also worked closely with the Blind Abilities community in my previous spoken word audio career, and tried to make our service and apps welcoming for the visually impaired. If you’ve got an Apple device, go ahead and turn on VoiceOver for a few minutes and try to navigate through your favourite apps as a visually impaired user would (but they do it way, way faster!)

Cheetah print running leggings

My Fun Sewing Weekend was going so well after I made my galaxy sweatshirt and black travel skirt that I decided to tweak the fit on my Kwik Sew one-piece leggings pattern and test it out on some unsuspecting cheetah-print nylon lycra from UK Fabrics (well, they call it leopard, but I say cheetah!).

I’d made this pattern a few times for myself and many times in classes, but I noticed when I made my crazy cat lady leggings recently that the fit was a bit too loose in places. I totally blame this on my training firming me up further, since the leggings were loose around the hips, upper thighs, and ankles. And perfectly fine at my runner’s calves and quads!

So I shaved off a good centimeter from the front & back crotch curves (meaning 4cm overall), another 1.5cm wedge from the inner thigh on both sides, and then a hefty 3cm wedge from both sides at the ankles. I have tiny, bird-like ankles, and the standard ankle width was just flapping in the breeze… So now my pattern is something like Size Small/XS in the waist and hips & upper thigh, Medium in the lower thigh/knee/calf, and XSish in the ankles. Hooray for custom fit!

These literally took me 20 minutes to cut out and sew together, and I wore them out on my Sunday run around Greenwich Park and back home along the river. These felt so much better for the little fitting tweaks – the cat leggings start to fall down after a few kilometers and pool around my quads (a sure sign they’re too loose above that point), but these stayed in place for the whole 20km run!

A Week in a Day

I’ve been a bad blogger this week. I’ve been doing lots (as you’ll soon see), but working every weekend for the past three, plus the weeks in between, and some out-of-town trips have all really sapped my enthusiasm to write! So I’m taking the lazy option out and catching you all up with a little roundup – a week’s worth of posts in a day…

Like the Wind workshop

Cult running magazine Like the Wind approached me a few months ago to ask if I’d like to run a “sew your own leggings workshop” at the week-long popup they were throwing together at the end of October. I’d known one half of the husband-and-wife team that run the magazine, but I’d never met Julie before this. Once I found out that she not only owns her own overlocker, but bought it when she sewed her own wedding dress with it(!), I knew we’d get along just fine.

We had five runners who’d only done a small amount of sewing before, but had never touched an overlocker before, and certainly not a coverstitch either! They each picked their own fabric from FunkFabrics’ range, and walked home in some very stylish leggings at the end of the afternoon!

Georgina picked a “Gotham” print, so of course she just had to pose with the Batman art in the gallery!

And here’s the finished set! I saw quite a few little “omg I’m so happy in my leggings” dances at the end, which really reminds me why I love teaching so much. Lucy posted a great writeup of the street art tour and my class, too.

There may be another Like the Wind workshop in the new year if we can work out the logistics, but there will definitely be more up at the Thriftystitcher studio in January and February, to be announced very soon! The classes are very similar, so if you’re a runner you can come learn at Thriftystitcher, or non-runners vice-versa at Like the Wind.

But I was so jealous of all their finished leggings that I treated myself to some Funkifabrics lycra this week (it was difficult, but I settled on this geometric aqua number in the end, because it reminded me of a Lamb album cover!).

Random sweatshirt sewing

When I was pulling out supplies to bring along to the workshop, I came across pieces for this sweatshirt that I’d cut out in February when I was trying to deplete random bits of leftover sweatshirting that was taking up too much room in my little sewing cave. The lavender “sacrificial sweatshirt” came out of that same cull, but for some reason I never quite got around to sewing this blue one together at the time.