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!)
Here’s a photo of the girl’s tunic and coat, plus two ladies’s knit tunics/dresses. When I first saw the tech drawings, I didn’t realise this coat was for little girls and I really wanted to make it! Ha! But now I think the cowl neck tunic is the highest on my To Sew list – GlobalMom on PR made this as a top and eliminated a bunch of the extraneous seams (they don’t actually provide any shaping), and I just love it even more.
This is a really nice, double-breasted coat. The only thing keeping me from choosing it for my own next week is that I personally don’t like cinching heavy coats with a belt, as it causes odd wrinkles and make the belt crunch up (or at least those belted styles of RTW always did).
This is another view of that knit dress with the button tabs on the collar, plus a very wearable asymmetric skirt and jacket.
I love this teen jacket! They’ve even got two different styles of it, too. It’s another instance of me wishing all these styles were in ladies’s sizes, but I know how rare teen patterns are, so I’m not about to begrudge them some good ones!
MyImage magazine is made in the Netherlands, but each issue is published in English, Dutch, German, and French. Though to be honest, the English is so strangely translated that I actually get a better understanding reading the Dutch terms (and I don’t speak Dutch – I just know a few Dutch sewing terms from sewing so much KnipMode)! It’s not that their English translation is wrong – it’s valid English, it’s just that the words they use are not the terms used in sewing, so it makes it more difficult to understand (like using “yarn” instead of “thread” – you know what they mean, but it’s still jarring!)
I’ve put my own English translations in red above. The magazine makers seem to really care about this sort of thing, though, so I can only imagine that their translations will get better with subsequent issues as sewers like myself offer suggestions for improvement!
But with all the furore over Burda’s more compact pattern sheets, I think a lot of sewers will heave a sigh of relief when they see these – these are very beginner-friendly!
My only main problem with MyImage is that I wish there were more ladies’s sized patterns, but it sounds like there will be in the future, so I can only keep an eye on their site for the next issue’s designs…
MyImage is available to buy direct from MyImage (via Paypal or European bank transfer) or from Naaipatronen.nl. (I’ve got no affiliation with either!)
TV alert!
Way back in August, Nigel Slater came round ours, had a poke on our wonderful floating gardens on our moorings, picked a bunch of fruit and veg growing on our boat (and our neighbours’ boats!) and made us a lovely lunch.
Well, our episode is finally airing this week, as the last of the season of “Simple Suppers”! So if you’re in the UK (or Ireland, or some parts of France and The Netherlands), please tune in to BBC1 on Wednesday 22 December at 20:30 to watch us (in Scotland it’s slightly earlier, 19:05 on BBC2)! We’ll be a 10 minute segment in the middle of the 30min show, so you can see our beautiful moorings and boat in the summertime sunshine. Which is a bit nicer than our deck looks right now, as you’ll see tomorrow in a snowy photoshoot!