Search Results for: goldhawk road meetup acquisitions

Goldhawk Road meetup & acquisitions

I’m lucky to live in London for a lot of reasons, but one of them is certainly the access to great fabric stores and the frequency of meetups at said stores with other like-minded sewists. They usually occur every few months, but with my crazy social and running events calendar, it’s usually really difficult for me to attend. However, this time around, the meetup coincided with a “stepback week” in my running (a planned lower mileage week to give your body a break) so I only had a one hour run on Saturday morning before the meetup. Yes, I realise the craziness of using “only” in that sentence.

In any case, you should go read Claire’s writeup of the day as she organised everything down to a meticulous degree and posted some amazing photos taken by herself and also Dibs!

This post is more about my own shopping and acquisitions from the day, and I know from past trips to Goldhawk Road that I really need to be strict with myself or risk returning home broke and dragging binbags full of fabric behind me. So I came prepared with a shopping list and only £50 cash to spend (in the past I’ve actually left all my cards at home, too!).

Things on my shopping list:

  • Stretch lining for the swirl sheath dress

  • Power mesh in black & beige (for both lingerie & activewear linings)

  • 2m heavy jersey for a travel skirt

Here’s a shot of my total haul. Not only did I get everything on my list, but I stayed within that £50 budget for the day (which included lunch & drinks!).

My first purchase was the power mesh – 1m of both black and beige from A-Z Fabrics for £4.95/m. They had loads of colours, too, and I was glad I bought it there when I saw shortly afterwards that Classic Textiles was asking £10.95/m for theirs! I didn’t buy anything at Classic this time around, but I was tempted by the ponte knits by the door.

A totally 1980s jazzercise costume

Many of you may be frantically planning and plotting what costume to make for Halloween next weekend, but for me, the biggest costumed event of the year was last Friday, at my friend Gez’s 1980s-themed 40th birthday party. Gez has thrown fancy dress parties for years, so I already knew that people would make an effort, but by keeping a small and pared-down wardrobe for myself, I didn’t really have any suitable 80s vintage clothing already. So I knew I”d have to make something from scratch.

I didn’t want to go the full-on Dynasty “hair & shoulder pads” look, so I was a bit stuck until I realised that I could totally do the 1980s Jane Fonda jazzercise look instead! I sometimes have shiny 80s lycra on hand for making early test versions of patterns, but I’d run through all of that in developing the Lightspeed Leggings pattern (poor James!).

A terracotta Hummingbird skirt

The latest in my my upcoming Mexico trip travel wardrobe is the latest Cake Patterns design – the Hummingbird skirt! There are two views included: a shorter pencil skirt with plain back, and the pink view, which has an awesome “tailfeather flounce” in the back. Of course I chose the fancy version, what else!? I’d seen that the orange view sews up quite short, and I was expecting this to be rather long, but it hits right at my knees which is perfect.

I discussed it before when I sewed up their Cabarita top, but Cake Patterns’ “draw your own size” system is pretty cool – here you pick your pattern size based on your hip measurement (my size was a 40), then choose your waist measurement (mine was a 32), and draw a line between them. The only part that got really confusing was figuring out where the darts should be drawn, as there’s numbers and dots all over the place!

The only problem is that I’d cut out my pattern pieces a few weeks ago, and as you’ve seen, I’ve lost a significant amount of girth in the past two months, and when I went to try on the skirt mid-construction, it was hanging off me – seriously, I took six inches in total off the side seams! This isn’t anything to do with Cake’s sizing – this has got everything to do with me dropping a bunch of weight between choosing a size and sewing it up. Happily, I was able to take in the skirt at the side seams and the back darts and get a really nice fit before finally adding the waistband on.

The fabric is a terracotta cotton sateen which I picked up for free (you can’t beat free!) in the swap at the recent Goldhawk Road meetup. It’s definitely best as a bottom weight, and it sews and presses really nicely, but it does have a tendency to fray quite badly. I originally thought the Hummingbird was lined, but then when I realised it wasn’t (and that I couldn’t be arsed to draft my own lining), I decided to overlock the edges of all the pieces before sewing. This prevents fraying, and should prolong the life of the skirt, too.


Worn here with my Prada Trompe L’oeil Sequin Top…

Blue neopreney leggings

You’ve already seen the sister skirt to these leggings planned for my upcoming Mexico trip in a few weeks. I wouldn’t normally make two things out of the same fabric in rapid succession, but I ended up buying the end bolt (3m instead of the 2m I’d wanted) and having two bottoms in the same colour is quite handy when packing, as obviously the same tops will coordinate with both!

These were a super quick but comfortable make using my standard leggings draft from the Kristina Shin book plus my own preferred elastic waistband technique. I reckon I probably had these sewn up in under an hour, and I’d cut out the fabric at the same time as the skirt.

As you recall, the fabric is a royal blue hefty jersey that really feels very much like a thin neoprene – this stuff couldn’t wrinkle if it wanted to! I bought the last of the roll at “A-One Fabrics” on Goldhawk Road, and I’ve still got a little bit left that I think might be fun to mix & match with something like denim or even leather!

A blue neopreney travel skirt

I revealed my Mexico travel wardrobe plans last week, and what better way to start it than with a pattern actually intended for travel! I bought Christine Jonson’s Travel Trio Three pattern a few years ago because I loved the gathered turtleneck, but I’m slowly working my way through the rest of the pack, too. So far I’ve made two different views of the turtleneck already – one gathered and one plain raglan for winter running, but this time around I wanted to try out the pocketed, knit skirt.

Like the other views in the pattern, the instructions for this are utterly excellent. Christine Jonson clearly understand knits and the best ways of finishing them, and she even uses the exact same method I do for elastic waistbands (though I prefer a 3/4-1 inch wide elastic, myself)! I’m seriously tempted to buy more of her patterns with my Adsense money because I’ve really gotten my money’s worth with this pattern!

My only change here was to shorten the skirt by 12cm at the “lengthen or shorten here” line, as the original was mid-calf and felt a bit too dowdy for me. This now falls right at my knees and is just about perfect for me.

An incredibly simple skirt

Last night I reconnected with the magic of sewing. I’d already done a bunch of boat chores, done some alterations to take in a pair of leggings that are now too baggy (great result, but so tedious!), and I wanted something quick to wear. Since I upped my training regime for the British Transplant Games track race tomorrow (omg), I’ve lost a rather incredible amount of weight and girth so nothing fits me anymore. Which feels nice for about 5 minutes, and then it’s annoying because you have nothing to wear in the morning!

So I pulled out a bit of the black and silver lurex ribbed knit that I’d had leftover from my Marie jacket. The fabric was originally from Minerva, but is sold out now in this black colourway. I nearly gave it up in the Goldhawk Road swap, but then I had second thoughts and pulled it out of the bag. I’m glad I did, because it’s become a cute and very simple skirt!


Sorry about the quality – quick photos before work and it was raining, and my hair’s wet from the shower still!

This is literally the quickest, simplest skirt you could possibly make. Not only is there no pattern, but there’s no measuring or drafting, either! I simply took the fabric, wrapped it around myself like a skirt, marked with pins where the overlap was, then cut along the pins.

This gave me a long rectangle, and I sewed the sides together to form the only major seam of the skirt. I wear the seam at the back, but it could easily go at the sides or front since it’s all the same!

The Swirl Sheath Dress

This dress has been an awfully long time in the making. The idea started back when I took the Pattern Magic 2 class at Morley College last winter, where we learned a technique called “Fundamentals: Create three-dimensional forms with design lines only” (it just rolls off the tongue, eh?).

Essentially what this means is you sew up a muslin, draw design lines all over it, cut along these lines, then introduce snips of ease until the pieces lie flat, and there’s your new pattern! I did all this (based on a sheath dress from the June 2012 Burda magazine, which doesn’t appear to be on the US BurdaStyle, sorry) last summer, but then the project stalled when I couldn’t find any heavyweight stretch satin anywhere in Europe, and had to import this gorgeous salmon stretch duchesse from Gorgeous Fabrics.

Then there were further delays as I didn’t have a wide enough cutting table to lay out the asymmetric and strangely-shaped pieces, until a few weeks ago when the Thrifty Stitcher invited me to pow-wow at her studio and suddenly my swirl sheath dress was back on track!

Because all the darts from the original pattern (bar one) are now incorporated into a bunch of curved seams, this means there’s a lot of easing going on, so if you don’t like easing princess seams, for example, you really won’t like sewing this. My easing motto is “pin the crap out of it”, and I’m proud to say that I didn’t have any tucks or unpicking in any of these seams. Though I did use 58 pins on just the lower semi-circular seam!

The current Sewing Queue

I’ve found myself at the end of yet another extraordinarily busy week, one where we’ve been out pretty much every single night, and we’ve had a friend over from the States, too. However, I have managed to make progress, albeit slow, on my swirl sheath dress in a series of 10 minute segments snatched here and there.

Since I bought my silver stretch lining fabric on Goldhawk Road last Saturday, I’ve managed to sew and press all the darts (the lining uses the original base pattern so no swirls inside), attach it to the facings, sew the side seam, and attach it to the invisible zipper.

Here’s the back of the dress hanging flat in my sewing cave:

I did the lining hem by machine, but the coral fabric hem needs doing by hand, possibly in the car this weekend. The right side strap also needs a little bra keeper snap strap to keep it in place as it’s a pinch too long. Otherwise it’s done!

It doesn’t quite fit as well as the muslin did when I made it last summer though, but that’s down to me rather than the pattern – I’ve got a big track race next weekend in Sheffield for the British Transplant Games and my trainer has put me on a training diet to shed as much excess weight as possible before the race, as this translate directly into seconds on the track.

She and I were both taken aback by how successful this has been – I’ve lost 4cm (1.5 inches) off my waist and hips and 4.5kg (10lb) in four weeks! If it wasn’t for the hours of running up hills I’d suggest she sell it as a diet plan (the running would reduce its popularity somewhat!). And really, don’t be concerned, as I’ve been stuffing my face with fruit and veggies and lean meats pretty much continuously all month, so I’m not on some idiotic juice cleanse starvation diet or something.

The downside of this is that all my trousers and skirts are hanging off me (my poor Beignet skirt has a cinched paper bag waist now!) and I’m in desperate need of new bottoms. I was planning on sewing up a few pieces for our upcoming Mexico trip next month(!!) but now it’s clear I need to sew as many bottoms as possibly and just pack tops I’ve got already.

I’m still mentally putting together a nice travel wardrobe plan (which I shall reveal in good time), but my immediate sewing plans are thus: