Category: Inspiration

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Inspiration

Important Shop Update

Our Shopify pattern shop will be closing near the end of August 2026. To clarify – this blog is not going anywhere, I’m not going anywhere, and you will still be able to purchase FehrTrade patterns via our Etsy shop as well as through our partners Pattern Review and Thread Theory.

This is only the end of the Shopify storefront, which charges a monthly fee, regardless of how many patterns are sold. As I’ve been unable to work on any new patterns while ill, sales have dwindled below the monthly fee, and a recent spate of scammers using our digital products to test stolen credit cards has really soured me towards keeping it open.

Inspiration

My windfall of IWTV fabrics

If you’ve been reading here at any point over the past few years, you’ll already know I’m a massive fan of the “Interview with the Vampire” tv show and the books (the latter for over 30 years!). I’ve made myself outfits inspired by Claudia’s NYE outfit, Lestat’s Wolfkiller cloak, his rockstar S3 outfit, and countless HTV teeshirts.

But, being so ill, I’ve not been able to meet any of the cast or creatives, or visit the sets, unlike all my friends, much to my anguish. BUT! There have been a few auctions of the props and costumes used on the show, being sold to regular ol’ fans as well as industry professionals. The first two auctions were in Toronto and limited to people with Ontario credit cards(!) and who could collect in person, but then a third auction popped up in February in the middle of Ireland, of all places!? It seemed to have a random mix of props from the first two seasons (filmed in New Orleans and Prague, respectively), and offcuts of fabrics from the Prague costume shop from Season 2 (who shared duties with a NOLA-based costume dept).

And I managed to win two lots of fabric, for €10 and €20 each!! Though the shipping cost to get these to me was significantly higher than my bids, it could’ve been a lot worse, because Pack and Send Belfast (who were utterly lovely!) drove across the border to collect our lots, packaged everything up, and shipped it out. So at least mine was UK-UK shipping with no customs to deal with.

Inspiration

Happy 2026!

Happy New Year! At the start of each year I like to look back over my sewing, life, and other events because usually things ended up being better than I remembered (though definitely not true in 2024!). So without further ado, have a read and let’s look back on 2025 together…

Inspiration

Happy 2025! (Year in Review)

I’m not only putting out the Welcome Mat for 2025, I’ve got my little hostess apron on and I’m inviting it inside for a nice cup of tea and a sit down – thats how thankful I am that 2024 IS OVER.

Without a doubt, 2024 has been the worst year of my entire life, and that’s including 2009 (where I was literally days away from death, had chemo, meningitis, spent 8 weeks in hospital, lost my hair, got countless infections, etc) and 2020 (where I spent 9 months shielding in a ~20 sq m cabin and couldn’t leave home for a total of 14 months). Both of these pale in comparison to the endless horror of being trapped in a body that doesn’t work, while watching it distort into some grotesque puddle in slow motion.

I do these Year in Review posts every year to try and celebrate the wins and find some joy and perspective in things that happened over the previous 12 months, and some years it’s harder than others. There were joys here, but every single one of them was hard-won, and only happened because I fought my own body to make it happen. Life is never easy (no matter what it appears on social media), but some years are particularly harder than what seems fair.

So with that in mind, let’s have a look back to see what joys we can uncover, eh?

Inspiration

Happy 2024! (Year in Review)

Sigh. For the second year in a row I’m left thinking “ugh, good riddance to a rubbish year!”. And for the second year in a row I’m facing an unknown future of post-viral fatigue stretching out before me, then months and months of rebuilding my body (and my life) once that finally ends. And life feels unbearably bleak.

But hey, part of the reason I write these posts at the start of every year is so I can look back and at least appreciate the good things that happened – and there are always at least a few things! It’s human nature to remember the negative more clearly than the positive I think, and this reflection and reset helps me remember things in a more holistic way.

Even if I did only have 7.5 months in my year when all the rest of you got 12 to accomplish everything… (yes, I tallied it up and I was sick and bedridden for 4.5 months of 2023.)

Inspiration

10 Year Birthday sale!

I can scarcely believe I’m writing this, but TEN YEARS ago this month I released the first FehrTrade sewing patterns into the universe. Ten years! (Even scarier is that I’ve been blogging for something like 16 or 17 years??)

I’ve got so many great posts about our first decade that I want to share this month but to kick things off, it’s our longest ever sale – for the entire MONTH of December you can get 20% off all sewing patterns if you use code “10FREAKINGYEARS” at shop.fehrtrade.com!

Inspiration

About the pause…

I’m mostly posting these because I have a bit of a backlog of posts building up and I didn’t want to make them even longer than they already are – also one is a swimsuit from July and it’s November now! And because I felt I owed my long-term readers an explanation as to why I haven’t posted in nearly two months…

It’s been over seven weeks since I first tested positive for Covid. In total, I tested positive for 25 days (including a PCR at hospital on Day 24). During this time I had a wide array of symptoms but the worst was a crushing fatigue, at something like 10-20% of normal energy levels, leaving me stuck in bed for 23hrs a day.

Inspiration

Developing the Triumph Suit pattern

The Triumph Suit pattern is not only our first triathlon-focused pattern, or our first Advanced pattern, but I’m also fairly certain is the pattern that was in development the longest. And also very likely the one I nearly gave up on the most times (I don’t deal well with very long-running projects!).

So today I’d like to walk you through a bit of its development process so you can get a feel for the timelines involved and the sheer number of hours, weeks, months, and years that go into something as complex and specialised as this!

I started thinking about a trisuit pattern all the way back in early 2021 (I was still shielding during the time, remember!). It was the first inspiration to hit me since the disruption of 2020. During 2020 I concentrated on updating all of our patterns to be layered and projector-friendly, rather than developing anything new simply because I had zero energy for creativity. It started with me combining two blocks together and drawing out design lines – both on paper and on myself!

Inspiration

Supplies for the Triumph Suit pattern

I’ve had a few requests for a fabric guide for our latest Triumph Suit pattern so today I’ll walk you through all the supplies I used to create the three samples you’ve seen so far (plus an extra you haven’t seen yet).

Exterior Fabrics

Let’s start with the fabrics you’ll see the most of – the exterior fabrics! You can either make the Triumph Suit all from one exterior fabric (like I did for the prototype I wore to London Duathlon last summer), or you can mix and match fabrics. I made the last four samples all from a mix of exterior fabrics, and I colourblocked each of them different ways – there’s so many different possible combinations! It’s really handy to print off the tech drawing on the first page of the instructions and break out the coloured pencils or pencils to sort out which colourblocking you like the most.