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Inspiration, Magazine

MyImage Magazine

Woohoo! There’s a new sewing pattern magazine on the block! Do you remember a few years ago when I reviewed the Dutch magazine FIMI? Well appparently FIMI went bust, and a few of the ex-employees got together and started MyImage, taking their 25 years of experience with them to try and make a better pattern magazine. So not only are they an independent company started up by female entrepreneurs, but they’ve learned from the mistakes of an earlier company and started their own!

With a story like that, well, I just had to try their first issue!

This Winter 2010/2011 issue contains 16 patterns in child, teen, and ladies’s sizes, but subsequent issues of MyImage will contain only teen and ladies’s sizes, with an additional YoungImage magazine containing the child and teen sized patterns (I don’t know whether the teen patterns will be duplicated or different in each edition though!). If you’d like to take a look at the patterns in this issue, here’s a link to the tech drawings (pdf).

I’ve scanned in the size chart here so you can tell how these compare to other pattern companies:

The cover! (or most of it, since the magazine is actually a bit wider than my scanner!)

Inspiration, Magazine

The Best Pattern Magazines of 2010 – Nominations

I always look forward to Pattern Review’s Best Patterns of the year, but this year the nominations don’t have a single pattern magazine included. This is really disappointing as I do 99% of my sewing from them, and I feel the shortlist really doesn’t reflect my own personal sewing in the slightest. (And don’t even get me started about the inclusion of some patterns that were just Big 4’s stumbling, mediocre versions of great patterns previously printed in pattern mags!)

So I thought it might be fun to have our own nominations for the Best Pattern Magazines of 2010!

I think it’ll be easier to vote for whole issues rather than specific patterns inside, and also give people a better idea of which back issues to hunt for. If there’s enough nominations, I’ll set up a proper vote in a bit so we can see what’s crowned the winner when I do my own personal roundup of the year on New Year’s Day.

Inspiration, Magazine

The Motherload of KnipMode – Part Two

You can read my roundup of Part One of the haul of older KnipModes from Hilde here, but now it’s time for the exciting conclusion to my newly-acquired stash of KnipModes from 2005 through 2007.

KnipMode May 2006

Wow Knip have gone full-on wedding crazy here! The bridal feature takes up a good third of the magazine! Ok so the wedding gown is not really to my taste, but I still think it’s a shame that the pattern is a special-offer to post away for and isn’t included…

…but the patterns for the rest of the bridal party are!! Everyone from the baby to mother of the bride to wow! those are the first maternity patterns I’ve ever seen in Knip! I wonder why they stopped printing them, especially since Burda and Patrones seem to publish maternity patterns with some regularity.

I really liked the khaki and white colour scheme of this feature, especially with this model’s colouring, but my favourite pattern of the lot was these nice pleated trousers:

Inspiration, Magazine

La Mia Boutique November 2010

With KnipMode pulling out all the stops for their fantastic new December issue, would La Mia Boutique rise to the challenge and present an issue full of wonderful, glitzy holiday wear?

Err, sadly, no. But let’s have a look anyway…

This minidress has some interesting pleating going on at the centre front, but it’s a detail I’ve seen countless times in RTW, and one that Burda published patterns for at least two years ago. But it’s still a nice, very wearable look, and hems can always be lengthened.

This knit cowl dress with shoulder yokes would look great in a luxe, drapey fabric like silk jersey…

Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode December 2010

If you thought November was a great issue, wait til you see what KnipMode have in store for us this month! In my opinion, this is one of their best issues in months, and it’s resulted in me sewing a dress from it before the month has even started! That’s a new record, even for me!

So let’s take a look inside…

Right from the first page, I knew this would be a good issue, as I turned the page and gasped with joy when I saw this asymmetrical cocktail dress for stretch wovens. I absolutely love the three curved bands that come up and over the hip and are released into full pleats at the skirt. These bands also carry on around the back at the waist level, so you don’t get a plain “coffin back”, either.

You’ve already seen this one since I sewed this over the weekend, but I love love love this shawl collar dress!! The skirt pieces meet in the centre front then come up and around the neck and back down again to form the collar. This is so nice in person, too, just you wait til I can get a photoshoot up!

Inspiration, Magazine

The Motherload of KnipMode – Part One

About 8 months ago, I got an awesome email from FehrTrade reader Hilde asking if I’d like her mom’s stash of KnipMode magazines from 2005-2007 as she wasn’t really using them much any more and they both thought I’d give them a good home.

Would I??? Omg.

So therein started the logistical planning to transport a rather heavy stack of magazines from The Netherlands over to London… Around this time we thought we’d be driving navigation equipment over to northern Holland in preparation for a neighbour’s North Sea crossing, so we’d make a detour to Hilde’s, but logistics didn’t work out and we weren’t needed for the neighbour’s barge anyway. And then, in a fantastic twist, a few weeks ago Hilde told me her sister lives in London and brought the stash over in her suitcase for me! So I only had to make a 10 minute walk from my office to her sister’s flat (seriously, what luck that she lives so close!) to pick up the magazines and thank her profusely for lugging them in her suitcase.

And for the past fortnight or so I’ve been absolutely pouring over them, picking out my Must Sews, investigating tiny design details, and noticing what changes Knip have made in the past 5 years.

There were too many for me to scan in one session, so here’s my picks from the early half of the stash, with Part Two to follow next week!

KnipMode 11-2005

OMG Lingerie!! I have already got the most perfect fabrics in my stash to make the camisole with the bra cups – the olive green stretch lace I bought in Paris coordinates perfectly with a teeshirt I got free with a magazine but was comically tiny (what percentage of the UK female population has a bust smaller than 27 inches? Seriously.). I think there might be enough to do the cami with a bit of the teeshirt’s sleeves left for a thong gusset. And you know how much I liked the KnipMode lingerie pattern I already had…

Inspiration, Magazine

La Mia Boutique Oct 2010

This is going to be old news to fellow subscribers since this issue arrived while I was on honeymoon a few weeks ago, but I hope it’s helpful for those of you who use these posts to determine whether to buy the issues on eBay or not!

This issue of La Mia Boutique was really focused on jackets and light coats, so the cover image was pretty representative!

I think this coat was my favourite of the whole issue – I absolutely love that collar! I think the button placement is really “off” on this, though (that bottom set just looks far too low down), but I never pay attention to button markings on patterns anyway, so that’d be trivial to change.

I don’t normally go for tunic length OR billowy shapes, but I really like that this is made in a linen-y fabric, and the back technical drawing absolutely intrigues me. This is where I really wish I could speak Italian to figure out what’s being done on that back yoke. Without a back view photo, it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s there – contrast fabric? Lace? Pleating? Embroidery?

Inspiration, Magazine

La Mia Boutique Sept 2010

I’m still away on my honeymoon for a few more days, but in the meantime please enjoy my pre-prepared rundown of the latest La Mia Boutique magazine!

I love this casual, raglan sleeved minidress:

There are quite a few nice trench coats in this issue, but single-breasted ones like these are quite difficult to find:

While this reminds me of a knit tunic Burda did a few years ago, I like that this A line dress is for silks and lightweight crepes, and doesn’t require any zippers.

Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode October 2010

Hot on the heels of the a-freaking-mazing Burda September issue (in which I have no less than eleven Must Sews!) comes the KnipMode October edition. It’s a bit unfair on Knip to have to follow an act like that, so I’m naturally less enthusiastic about these styles that are just good rather than incredible. Maybe I’ve been buying Knips for too long, but I’m seeing a lot of repeats in this issue that appeared a few months or years ago…

But anyway, on to my highlights!

The cover feature is all about three garments in leather – a leather blazer, an A-line dress, and this skirt. I rather like the skirt but I think the gathers would be really difficult to achieve nicely since you can’t do two lines of gathering stitches (as the lower one would leave permanent holes). And this section gave me massive deja vu from the October 2009 issue where they also had a leather jacket, skirt, and A-line dress…

Next there was a section showing lots of winter knitwear that could either be sewn, or knitted (giving me massive deja vu yet again to the January 2010 issue where they also did the same thing!). Most were either long, baggy, or both, but I rather liked this batwing tunic which could look really nice in a thin, drapey sweater knit:

Inspiration, Magazine

Lavender confetti bags

We decided fairly early on that for our wedding confetti we were going to throw lavender buds instead of the traditional rice, birdseed, or tissue paper varieties (many of which are banned at venues these days anyway as they don’t break down readily enough). But I wasn’t quite sure how we’d portion these out to our guests until I saw this tutorial and free pdf label and got inspired to do something similar.

I ordered a ton of small glassine bags from this UK shop and we were planning on designing our own labels along the lines of the ones in the Mint Design link, but our laser printer decided to choose this point to run out of ink (after three years on the same cartridges, it’s still excellent value!) so we required a change of plans.

Stashed away in a drawer, I had a bag full of reproduction garden ephemera that my mom had bought be and thought I’d like, and I saw these old Amateur Gardening magazines, Woolworths flyers, bills of sale, and gardening catalogues as a perfect accompaniment to our vintage-inspired modern wedding. The reproductions vary in age from the 1910s to 1950s, and I just LOVE the way they look all mixed up!