These are the final garments I’ve got to show you from my “Sew Your Own Activewear” book – for now, anyway! And it’s fitting that I’ve saved these to the end because I wore both of these shorts hard all summer long, and I wanted to show again how you can mix and match features to make garments that work for you. The thirteen designs in the book were only ever intended as a starting point – you have my full permission and encouragement to change them up, repurpose bits of one design onto another, and make what works for you and your chosen exercise!
So in that spirit, last summer I decided I loved the Cycling Shorts design, but I wanted them for running. So I didn’t increase the back rise (a cycling-specific adaptation that’s not needed for running), and I also left off the chamois padding and silicone hems for similar reasons.
I sewed up both pairs at the same time, assembly line-style, because I like running in biker-length, tight shorts when I can, and I liked the versatile design of the Cycling Shorts. I gave myself bonus points because all the fabric for both pairs came out of my “lycra scraps” stash bin, so they were essentially free! I just love it when I can use up the ends of some great fabrics – and some of these were leftovers from samples I made for my athlete models, so these shorts meant I got to wear some of it, too.
The blue and purple pair are made of scraps of Funkifabrics lycra from my stash – the paler fabric is leftovers from Emily’s Rashguard sample in the book, and the darker purple I think was leftover from one of the samples I made to accompany the Threads article I wrote!
I wore this pair to run the 25km Douro Ultra Trail race in Portugal last October (in unseasonably hot weather), and they stood up well to the heat, dust and sweat over the 3 hour mountain run!
The orange pair are again made from scraps in my stash, with the creamsicle swirls Funkifabrics lycra leftover from the Close Fitting Bottom Block Jade wears with the Hoodie in the book photoshoots. The solid orange supplex was leftover from my VNA Top I made a while back, so it was great to use up the oddly-sized leftovers finally!
I’m not quite sure why I hardly got any photos of the orange but I really did wear them a lot last summer! I know I wore this pair at least once on the bike, too, because there are some black marks on the side of the leg where another rider’s tyre brushed my leg while we were all tightly bunched together at a set of lights (and it’s not come out in the wash). Don’t let anyone ever tell you cycling’s not a contact sport! 😂
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about each of the thirteen “Sew Your Own Activewear” designs over the past three months! It was really hard for me to keep everything under wraps for so long, but it meant that you wouldn’t have to wait as long to sew up a design you really liked the look of.
If you’ve made something from the book (no matter how much it deviates from the original design!) please do share it using the hashtag #SewYourOwnActivewear and pretty please leave a review on Amazon – you don’t have to have bought it there to leave a review! Great reviews really do help convince others to buy, but also to get wider distribution around the world, and hopefully even some foreign translations!