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The Kinetic Tee pattern – out now!

Please welcome our newest sewing pattern – the Kinetic Tee! This one has been so much fun to develop and draft – it’s an asymmetric tee but due to some (ahem) clever drafting, it’s quick to cut out AND to sew up, and feels really great and comfortable to move in, too.

Move in a workout tee that really sets you apart from the team! This loose fitting asymmetric tee has plenty of interesting seaming in the front and back with slash openings at the left shoulder and right front clavicle. Choose from either a cut-on short sleeve, or dropped shoulder long sleeve in twisted or straight options.

Black soy Longshaw Skirt

I have got such a backlog of finished makes to show you! The problem with working an office job in amoungst spending every weekend at the boatyard AND trying to push out a new pattern (which is 95% done now, I swear!), is that what precious little time I’ve got left goes into sewing instead of actually taking photos of said makes. So I hope you’ll forgive the quality of these photos and instead applaud our creativity in taking them at all!

If you recall, one of the four makes in my Fall/Winter plans was a Longshaw Skirt from Wendy Ward’s book “A Beginner’s Guide to Sewing with Knitted Fabrics”.

Running and Knitting in Iceland

The perils of running a one-woman business alongside an office job and attempting to also have a bit of a social life is that, at times, I have to make some tough decisions regarding my time. So since I’ve been away the past two weekends (prime-time for me to work on FehrTrade), I’ve not had any time to blog since I prioritised my Friday/lunchtimes/evenings to working on the new pattern in development, albeit slowly. But I definitely want to capture the last two weekends away before they fade into memory!

For those of you who have been following my loom knitting journey over the last 18ish months, I’ve actually made something other than socks!

A doubly-recycled denim coffee sack jacket

This blog post title is quite a mouthful but the “fabric” I used has such a great origin story that I didn’t want it to get lost in view of the final jacket. It all started last summer, when I found out that a local coffee roasters here in London had partnered up with a Guatemalan company to reuse waste cotton fibres leftover from the denim industry. They mix the waste denim in with a small amount of virgin, undyed cotton, and produce fabric on giant looms which they turn into coffee sacks. These are then filled with local beans and shipped all over the world, and after the coffee beans are off-loaded, you can buy the recycled denim sacks to reuse however you’d like.

There’s a lot more about the super-interesting process over on Square Mile Coffee’s blog, but as soon as I heard about it, I instantly bought two sacks with the idea that I’d make myself a pair of jeans with it. But when they arrived, I realised that, while the original fibres were denim, the recycled sacks were more like a cotton bouclé, and far too loosely woven to be used in place of denim.

So I pre-washed the sacks, dutifully unpicked all the seams, and thought about making a jacket while the seasons rolled around to something more befitting an unlined jacket (since I knew I didn’t want to cover up the cool coffee sack printing!). A couple of candidate jacket patterns caught my attention, but then I saw New Look 6532 as a free covermount pattern on Sew Magazine and thought it was pretty much exactly what I had been imagining for my coffee sacks.

A tropical print Bettine dress

Like the best comic book superheroes, this dress has an almost unbelievable origin story.

As you know, I’ve been sick with multiple viral infections for months, and have been pretty down about it all. Well, I stepped out of the flat one day a few weeks ago and bam! right on the pavement outside the flat was a Tilly & the Buttons Bettine dress pattern, just lying there! I mean, seriously, what are the chances?

I could’ve just left it there for whomever dropped it to recover, but with rain forecast later in the day I didn’t want it to get ruined and besides, this was the Universe giving me A Sign, and I didn’t feel like I should overlook the only good luck I’d had in months! So I took it home and started fabric shopping immediately.

An upcycled knitting bag and some newly-loomed socks

A few weekends ago I found myself in HEMA (a Dutch interiors, snacks, and household shop) picking up a few things and I spied a cushion cover for a fiver that I liked the look of. I’d been meaning to make myself a project bag for my sock loom and various supplies for a while now, and I saw the potential! I was also too excited to get a Before photo but it’s up online and now I see it’s only £2! Figures!

The cushion cover featured a loosely woven fabric on one side (which I used as the bag exterior) plus a plain canvas on the other (which became the bag lining) and a matching zip so it was excellent value considering the zipper alone would’ve cost me around £3.50!

A velvet slipcover for our sofa

We have loved our sofa since the moment we bought it about 5 years ago, and the bones of it are in great condition, but the fabric the manufacturers used was not fit for every day wear and tear. It faded, took on stains, and the final straw was when the cushion fabric actually wore through (it didn’t rip, the fabric disintegrated).

Two bamboo teeshirts

I had just about a meter leftover from the lovely Raystitch bamboo jerseys I used for the samples on my Craftsy class, and the fabric is too soft and wearable to leave marinading in my stash!

So I pulled out the Loose Fitting Top Block from my “Sew Your Own Activewear” book and managed to squeeze a teeshirt (minus a bit of hem length) out of each with hardly anything leftover!

So I pulled out the Loose Fitting Top Block from my “Sew Your Own Activewear” book and managed to squeeze a teeshirt (minus a bit of hem length) out of each with hardly anything leftover!

A striped pattern-puzzle Atacac tee

I was browsing through my Instagram feed a few months ago when I saw a post by Ernie about some Swedish designers who made absolutely crazy-complicated 3D patterns and I was instantly hooked! I mean, cos you know me and pattern puzzles, right?? If I can’t work out how a pattern goes together by just looking at it, I’m immediately drawn to it!

Atacac are primarily RTW designers but they released a bunch of their RTW designs as downloadable “sharewear” patterns. They’re only in one size (size “3” on their size chart), but this happened to be my size anyway, and as it turns out, this particular tee is quite loose-fitting anyway.

A floral bias top

Happy Friday everyone! I like to buy souvenir fabric whenever I’m travelling, and when I was in Malaga last summer competing in the World Transplant Games I bought one meter of a lovely floral poly satin at a fabric shop we stumbled across in the centre of town.

I’m not usually a floral woman but this digital print really spoke to me for some reason, and now that the weather has warmed up it felt right to cut into it – and what better way to showcase the beautiful photo print than with a little bias top pattern I’d already tested? So I pulled out Burda 6501, which I’d made last summer in a viscose print and worn loads since.