Category: Inspiration

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Article, Inspiration

Sewing fun in Virginia and Baltimore

We’ve just come back from 10 days in America visiting my family spread across three states. My parents moved down from where I grew up in Pennsylvania to be closer to my brother and his family in Norfolk, Virginia a few years ago, so our first stop was down there to visit my immediate family.

I absolutely took the opportunity to order a few fabrics online to be shipped to their house before we arrived, since I knew the in-person fabric opportunities weren’t great down there. I have a limited space for my fabric stash (on purpose!) and that space is pretty full so I made a conscious effort to only buy a few fabrics that I had specific projects tied to.

Article, Inspiration

Happy 2019! (My year in review)

Happy new year! It’s traditional for me to reflect on the year that’s just finished on the first of a new year, and this year’s a weird one because I’d love to just say “this year sucked”, but there were some fantastic things that happened this year amoungst all the sickness, disappointment, frustration, and hard work. So let’s try and focus on those.

Gallery, Inspiration

Kinetic Tee – meet our athlete model!

One of my favourite parts of the pattern development process is deciding who our athlete model will be. I absolutely loving selecting people who not only show off my designs in the best way possible, but also hopefully inspire you all, too. I’ve always used real athletes instead of professional models, and these are folks with day jobs, dreams, dramas, and goals just like you and me. I always get a little nervous asking if they’ll model for me, but I’ve yet to have anyone refuse, so I’m not sure why I feel that way!!

Gallery, Inspiration

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.

Inspiration

Activewear Sewing Myths

After years of sewing my own activewear, producing 13 patterns, teaching multiple classes, and even writing my “Sew […]

Inspiration

The Sewing Weekender Number 3

No sooner were we back home from Iceland than I was on my way up to Cambridge for my third Sewing Weekender! The first year I was lucky enough to buy a ticket, then last year I gave my “Sewing for Movement” talk as a speaker, but this year I was determined to attend again and set my alarm in order to buy my ticket as soon as they went on sale.

No joke, these tickets were hotter than Glastonbury – we crashed The Fold Line’s site and tickets sold out in like ten minutes despite having doubled capacity this year to 100 places!

Gallery, Inspiration

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!

Inspiration

Listen to me on two new podcasts!

For the record – I freaking love listening to podcasts. I listen while I sew, walk around London, and before I go to sleep some nights. I mean, my last job was even at a podcast company!

So I was super excited when two new UK sewing podcasts launched recently and even MORE excited when I was asked to join them for a chat! And then out of sheer coincidence, both episodes ended up going live this week so you all have got no excuse for not hearing my funny trans-Atlantic accent all weekend long! 😂

Inspiration

Behind the scenes on my “Serging Activewear” shoot

Thanks so much for all your enthusiasm on the launch of my Serging Activewear Craftsy class guys!! I wanted to talk a little today about what went into the making of this class because I know you all love hearing about this sort of thing, but also I found it fascinating to see how much work goes on in preparation, too!

As I mentioned earlier this week, I actually started working on the class prep back all the way back in December! The leadup isn’t usually quite this long, but we started the new year with a very intense few weeks of devising the script with my fantastic category editor, Elaine, over Skype. Basically, we had to work out what I was going to talk about, in what order, and what sort of samples I’d need to sew up ahead of time in addition to the ones I’d actually sew on camera.