2025 Review

At the start of the year I got back into sewing with a vengeance. 

I spent ten weeks creating an outfit based on a Kinuko Y. Craft painting, with accompanying jewellery. This won overall champion of sewing at the Canberra Show.

Then I modified the underdress pattern to make a shorter summer dress.

I duplicated a purchased dress; adjusting the pattern to be a bit more me shaped.

I made two new corsets. I fear the quest to create the ideal pattern for me may be never-ending, but it's a lot closer than it used to be.

I used my contour pants pattern to make some pyjamas.

The year finished with making a butterfly window hanging as a Christmas gift for a friend's 6-month-old. I satin-stitched a thin satin onto a remnant of curtain fabric, then cut away the curtain from behind the image so the light would shine through.

Doubles

Having finished my Kinuko Y. Craft inspired dress, I wanted to reuse the underdress pattern to make something for everyday wear. I've had some crinkly blue satin, found in an offcut sale, in the stash for years, and this seemed to finally be the project for it. I moved the zip from the side to the back and finagled the sleeves so they aren’t quite puffed but hang a bit like a bell flower. Once I figured out the order to sew the bodice (again) it went together smoothly.

The sleeve is gathered into a binding, folded under and held in place by tapes.

I bought a dress earlier this year that I really liked, but it isn't 100% the right shape for me. When I got it home I immediately traced a pattern from it, made some adjustments and sewed it up. I used remnants from other projects, so if it didn't work out it wouldn't be too disappointing but if it did it would be a nice wardrobe addition. 

I think it worked out. 

The original

 

2023 Review

My big sewing project this year was setting up a new sewing room. I have done this before, but then covid meant everyone in the house needed a private office (and I wasn't sewing much) so the sewing room got packed up and turned into my mother’s office. When I began spending more time sewing again, the temporary arrangement of taking over the kitchen table with my sewing machine became less practical, so we rearranged once more and now I have my own room.

Unlike last time, I am now in a furniture owning stage of life. Instead of just moving the old coming-apart cupboards back upstairs, I bought new (matching) cupboards and sewing desk, and everything got sorted. Embroidery stuff is now in a drawer, not a random hatbox; the beads are in the sewing room rather than downstairs with children's crafts; some horrible fabric that definitely won't come in handy one day has been got rid of; and my sewing books are in my sewing room. It's going to take a while to get used to where everything is but it is all consolidated and ordered and I am very pleased.

As far as actual sewing goes, I started the year with a pyjama set. I reused my contour pants pattern and traced new patterns from bought pyjamas.

Then I christened the new sewing room with a Midnights themed outfit to wear to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie.

I ended the year with a spur-of-the-moment jewellery project, recreating the body chain worn by Sleep Token's backup singers at their Wembley concert.

Source

 I took some patterning lessons, the fruit of which should come into play next year.

Also, I finished another Bayeux scene (and started on the next one).

Back in my Sewing Era

After spending a few months sorting and setting up a sewing room I wanted to make something straight away. That week, the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie was announced for international release. I enjoyed the album-themed Eras tour outfit videos that were going round all year and daydreaming up my own options. So now I had a sewing room, an event, a bandwagon to jump on and, of course, a deadline. The deadline was, naturally, the next weekend.

While I am a Reputation girl, every other concert I go to is a Wear Black concert (as is my taste in clothes generally). I wanted to take advantage of Eras as an opportunity to do something a bit different, so I took inspiration from some Midnights looks. 

What made everything fall into place was remembering the white velour coat I made ages ago. Also, because of setting up the sewing room, I had just sorted, re-folded and re-stored my entire stash, so a perfect blue-with-purple-sparkles chiffon came instantly to mind. And I had lots of drapey gold leftover from my gold 30s dress. All I needed to buy was the zip.

For patterns, I started with the lining pattern from my asymmetrical mini skirt and raised the waistline by tracing another skirt that fit well at the height I wanted.

First mock-up fit perfectly, and I think this newly modified pattern has inadvertently fixed a problem I was having with an upcoming project. I flatlined the chiffon, bound the waist, and did a single fold hem to minimise bulk.

For the top I used Knitwit 3900, one of my mum's patterns from the 80s. She used it for me when I was 12 so I knew how it was likely to turn out, and I knew to lengthen it significantly (which ended up being only just enough). I did try to adapt a pattern of my own but succeeded only in wasting one of the two days I had for this. The cowl top I ended up with isn't quite what I had in my head but did the job fine.

All in all – happy with the outfit, happy with the new sewing setup, happy to get back into sewing, (and happy to discover that the trick to enjoying Folklore is to turn it up loud).

2021 Review

If you find yourself losing interest in a long-term hobby, you may be growing and exploring new parts of life, or you may need to see an endocrinologist. For me it was the latter and, now that I am much healthier, the motivation to sew has returned. (And I'm still fitting in songwriting alongside.) Last year, my sewing room was sacrificed to a combination of disinterest and the need for everyone to simultaneously be on private zoom calls, so now a sewing project begins with commandeering the kitchen table.
Here are the dishes for the year:

Appetiser
A simple cotton knit t-shirt, garnished with painted butterfly.

Entrée
Miniskirt with asymmetrical yoke and pleat variations.

Main
Gold chiffon evening gown, 1930s style. Includes bias cut, ruching and 2.5 circles in the skirt.

Dessert
A refreshingly symmetrical selection of contour pants in black and black & red, with coordinating crop top.

For Pairing
Like everyone else who owns a sewing machine, I made a stack of masks this year. I thought I was going to say that "I made masks in a variety of colours to match different outfits" but when I photographed them I realised that of the 6, 2 are gold and 3 are purple, so 'variety' might be too strong a word. But I couldn't wear a light gold mask with a dark gold dress – it would clash.

Palette Cleansers
I have a purple A-Line skirt that I made in a sewing class in 2016 that I have never worn. I like the colour but the cut did nothing for me. I remade it into a pencil skirt, a style that does work for me, and am much happier with it now. (I've even worn it!) The dotted lines on the before picture are where I threadmarked my new seam lines. Thread marking was my number one sewing discovery of the year. I haven't thrown out my chalk, but it's tempting.

I also mended a bought skirt with flawed fabric by adding some flowers to cover the holes that appeared after the first wash.

I did some more embroidery too.

Legging it

Back in Ye Olde Days, Blu-ray was the format of the future. One of the selling points was that you could be watching a movie, decide you wanted the character's coat and, in a couple of clicks of the remote, be directed to the website it could be purchased from. I don't know if this ever actually happened – I never came across it. Fortunately, sewing can do the same thing for any medium. I was reading Batman: White Knight and decided I wanted Harley Quinn's pants. And in only a couple of (hundred) clicks of the sewing machine, I have them.

To figure out how to approach the pattern I flicked through Patternmaking for Fashion Design to see if it had anything similar and found a pretty much exact match ('Contour Pant'), with instructions.

I was prepared for adapting this pattern to be an ordeal. I am a skirt-wearer generally, in part because it is nigh impossible to find pants that I find comfortable, and I have in the past caused a sewing teacher to give up while trying to fit a pants pattern on me.

I first started with Butterick 4297 and traced the pieces, adjusted the lengths, cut each piece down the middles on the colour-block line, and traced the shaping line from crotch-level to knee on both the back pieces, on the new seam edges.
 
Then I looked at the pieces, at the picture and at me; and remembered I had used the pattern before and it was uncomfortable; I thought about how non-stretchy my fabric is… and came to the conclusion that this was not going to work.

I returned to the pattern stash and selected Simplicity 7930 from my mum's collection, a 70s outfit I have admired my whole life, and started over with it. Unlike the first pattern, this did not have the waist marked, so I left the lengths for later, but I had enough information to approximate the knee. Using this, I traced the shaping curve I had developed on the first pattern onto the inside back piece because I didn’t feel like figuring it out again.

I tried to figure out where to put the curve on my remaining quarter (the side back), which looked very thin. I measured it and measured me and measured everything once more and came to the conclusion that there was no possible way this could fit me. By this point, I was sick of this whole patternmaking thing, so I measured the side back piece from my Butterick attempt, found it was about the right width, and decided I would just use it instead. The shaping was already done too.

At the time I was thinking to myself that this had to be a terrible decision, but it's pants for me, so fitting's going to be an awful process anyway, so I may as well start here. I made my first mock-up in some leftover scuba knit (not pictured). When I put them on, I was absolutely shocked to discover it fit right first go, looked good, and didn't appear to need any changes.

So, I guess the lesson here is that if you are having trouble with a garment try combining patterns that are different sizes, from different decades, and for different fabric types, and the garment will get so confused it will just, forget to be difficult?

The only changes necessary were to raise the Butterick waistline to match the Simplicity one which hit exactly right in the back; to lower the Simplicity waistline in the front, where it didn't hit exactly right; and to shorten the leg length.

I had made a top out of red Ponte earlier in the year and I wanted to use the leftovers, so I tried to find a black to match. The top was supposed to be a simple project, but fitting the technically-stretch-but-very-solid Ponte knit nearly made me give up. I ended up adding princess seams to my standard knit pattern by draping it on myself.

The thread marked lines are from the draping and were averaged for the chalk lines (plus seam allowance) I actually cut.

Unfortunately, the red is unusually thick, so I had to settle for a thinner black that is less nice, but it did the job. Neither are very stretchy so I made a full mock-up out of the black before cutting into the little red I had. This mock-up fit just as well as my first, stretchier one. I had planned to take it apart and replace the centre panels with the red, but ended up deciding that a new pair of nicely fitted black pants wasn't a bad move. I had just enough length of black to cut pieces for the colour-blocked pair.

The construction for these pants was all straightforward. Pressing out the seam allowances is very important to how the pants fit, and I still find myself trying to make them lie flat them while wearing. I top-stitched the crotch seam using a twin needle to imitate the lines in the drawing. The waist is bound in the red fabric, also with twin-needle top-stitching.