Birthday dress!
My LMB draped birthday dress is finished, so thank you to everyone who commented on my muslin! I’ll be having the photoshoot tomorrow so you can see it on my big day itself on Thursday (no, not THAT big day, that’s in September!). I’m really happy with the way the final dress turned out, and the silk jersey is just so gorgeous to wear…
Labels!
My new labels also arrived this week (albeit with an eBay shipping mishap).
For some reason Cash’s aren’t offering the silver/black I had before, so I went with GB Nametapes for this lot. I’m not 100% convinced on the font I chose for “Fehr Trade”, but I love that I could get the URL printed smaller this time around. Considering that the last lot of 120-some lasted me just over two years, I have a feeling I’ll get used to this design soon enough.
BurdaStyle!
Looking beyond my birthday plans, I am super excited that BurdaStyle are coming to London next week, so I (of course!) need something new to wear to their mixer!
I had a trawl through their patterns and decided that just doing a straight pattern was too easy and predictable, so I’m doing an Alexander/Heidi mashup. There’s some serious grainline issues going on in the Alexander blouse, but I think I’ve cracked how to fix it, but there’ll be loads more on that later.
Design!
This is an interesting design challenge taken up by Ben de Lisi – reinventing the hospital gown (you can see the gown in action if you watch the video). As someone who spent the better part of last year in hospital, I started to think about all the limitations he must have had in this design. He had to create something that was durable, low-cost, modest, fit a huge range of body shapes, not have any metal that would interfere with machinery, and be resistant to stains. That’s way more constraints than you’d even have designing a corporate uniform, for example, and for a piece of clothing that goes unnoticed and tossed in a corner. I’m just feeling pretty lucky that I got to wear my own clothes 99% of the time so I wasn’t really in the gowns much at all, because the current old fashioned designs are just awful! I think his revamped one would actually be kinda cute with a matching obi-style belt….
New shoes!
I haven’t been shopping in almost a year, and my regular around-town (as opposed to running) trainers/sneakers were really worn out, so I grabbed a new pair of my favourite Golas on eBay at a discount. They come in a bewildering array of colours but I liked this bright purple suede design best of all.
And then in a completely unrelated incident a few days later, I was wearing my Wolford fishnets with my heeled brogues that I’ve worn a million times with no problems at all, but the bumps on the fishnets really ate a bunch of blisters into my feet on my walk into work. So I had to hobble out to the super cheap shoe shop (the plastic smell hits you in the face on the way in, you know the type…) at lunchtime intent on just getting a pair of £5 plimsolls to get me home, when I saw these turquoise flats. In leather! For a tenner!
And now I’m inspired by how the purple and turquoise colours look together in my shoe pile. It kinda reminds me of my Patrones duffle coat, with the purple lining!
Back to school!
As part of my prize for winning the Pattern Review Lingerie contest, I got to take my pick of their online classes. I’ve been a member of PR for years but have never taken a class since they seemed to focus on the online chats, which are in the middle of the night for those of us in Europe. But as it turns out, the chats are only one part of the class (an awful lot of it is in the daily pdf lessons and the class messageboard), and the very first chat for my The Technique of Underlining Garments class is on Sunday afternoon so I can participate in that, too!
Registration is closed now for it, but I don’t suppose anyone else here is taking it, too? We’re going to be making some half-scale garments which should be fun, and I’m hoping to learn a lot about strengthening coat fabrics and also supporting the vintage silk satin in my wedding gown. And speaking of wedding, I’m setting aside April & May to make the two bridesmaid dresses, and a hefty chunk of June, July, and August for my gown. Exciting!