Even though I sewed these at the end of November, they’re my final makes of the year. Despite having a week of feeling “kinda okay” (able to take 15min walks outside) around the end of November, I’ve felt truly appalling for the rest of December and am yet again spending 23hrs a day stuck in bed with post-Covid fatigue. It’s now over 100 days since I got Covid and I still can’t sit up or stand for very long, let along have a normal life.
But now that it’s crunch time at the end of the year, I want to share these before I forget the details, even though I’m not able to share anything more than flat photos of both…
These both started with a photo of a maxi dress that was doing the rounds earlier this year (or last year? It all runs together) with big blue and purple flowers on a black background, with black cats peeking out of the shadows. I really wanted to recreate the fabric on my own, but didn’t quite get to do it. And then I saw a similar print on Creative Market so I purchased it instead, and changed the colours to suit my vision.
I knew I wanted three garments with this print: a shirt for James, running shorts for my mom, and leggings for me. I decided to make my life easier and just get Contrado to print James’s teeshirt (as it worked out cheaper in their Black Friday sale than getting the fabric printed, let alone factoring in my sewing time!). But for the latter two I got 2m of Active Eco Lycra printed at Maake (formerly known as Fashion Formula).
For my mom, I used our Duathlon Shorts pattern, using her personalised pattern I tweaked when she was over in May. It’s great that I have a TNT pattern for her and I can just surprise her with running shorts without her having to be over here for fittings!
I added some heat set vinyl motifs to the inner back rather than a label that might irritate her…
I bought enough yardage to make leggings for me, too, and it made sense to cut those out at the same time to make the most economical use of the fabric. I used our Tenacity Leggings pattern with the hidden back pocket option, and 2cm elastic inside the wide waistband (as is my preference).
I even had some great turquoise (nearly matching!) stretch mesh in my lingerie stash for the pocket, so it’s nicely coordinating!
The nice thing about the Tenacity Leggings is that there’s no side seam to break up a big print! I actually want to get this design printed up again but I think I’d reduce the scale a little bit. I bought a small business license for the print design so I may see about getting it printed onto the FunkiFabrics Spider base that I love so much, but that has a 10m minimum so I’d have to find a few others wanting to go in with me…
ALSO! Just a reminder that our Tenth Birthday sale is still on for a few more days – 20% off all patterns using the code 10FREAKINGYEARS at shop.fehrtrade.com
Truth be told, I might actually extend the sale, because I didn’t get to properly celebrate or promote it anywhere near as much as I wanted to. I had so many plans for promoting the big 10th birthday and celebrating Christmas! At least when I’m finally feeling better I’ll have new leggings…