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In Progress

The Winter Coat – construction

About a year ago I bought some gorgeous, ex-Burberry wool coating fabric from Ditto with plans to eventually make another winter coat. The muted turquoise wool has a patterned herringbone weave on one side but it’s also very thick and un-drapey but has the advantage of not fraying at all (almost like a boiled wool or Melton).

The fabric is so thick that I knew had to choose my pattern wisely, leaving out coats with lots of pleats or gathers that would’ve meant lots of bulk here.

As soon as I saw the Armani knockoff coat in the September Burda issue, I thought I’d found the match for my fabric, but as you recall, that pattern was just downright awful. So I started looking through my coat patterns again for something suitable, and Claire (Seemane) suggested I combine Patrones 285 #29 with some elements of the other coats in that issue, which is more or less what I ended up doing (though I need to change my tech drawing here to show the applied welt pockets I finally decided on rather than buttoned welts).

Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode January 2011

My January KnipMode actually arrived a few weeks ago while I was ill, and boy is it a good one. Trouserpalooza!! OMG! Seriously, I think I counted 18 pairs of trousers in here, and 90% of them I’d wear in a heartbeat… There’s tapered leg, wide leg, jeans, leggings, treggings, wide waistband, no waistband, knits, wovens, and stretch! You name it, they’ve got a pattern for it here – they really have got the full trouser rainbow covered here!

How fresh and modern are these cargoes? I love the styling, but the tapered leg really updates these here beyond the stereotypical 90s grunge ex-Army fatigues.

I love these trousers with the foldover front! Seriously, these are on my list of my next tracing batch – I love that these are cutting edge but (crucially) without a drop crotch! They’ve even got big illustrations to do the foldover bit, too.

Gallery

The Caramel turtleneck

“Oh”, I hear you think*, “another one of those Burda turtlenecks?!?!”

Endless others have already made this, and I admit I was hesitant to make it myself because:

  1. When a pattern gets made a LOT, it kinda makes me want to sew it less (maybe it’s shades of “I sew so I don’t wear the same thing as everyone else” coming through?)

  2. I love love loved the Burda September issue and it almost feels like a cop-out to make the super easy pattern from it first when there’s just so many great patterns in there

But in the end, I still really needed more long sleeved tops and I already had the fabric and the overlocker and coverstitch were still threaded in the right colours. So it’s fate.

So here is my version of the Burda Sept 2010 turtleneck, in caramel-coloured bamboo jersey…

In Progress

Pre-Christmas prep

Are you ready for some random sewing goodness? Let the randomosity begin!

  • When I was at the bookstore on Brick Lane buying James’s birthday card, I couldn’t resist this reusable wrapping paper (okay, it’s just fabric to me and you!) with London streetsigns. I love that it’s a London fabric without being OMG UNION JACKS THE QUEEN TOWER BRIDGE! I figure I could use it as a lining like I did with that Japanese tea towel and my bolero jacket a few years back…

  • We were supposed to meet up with Pip and her boyfriend two weeks ago to celebrate Christmas, but we had to reschedule due to my swine flu, so I’m only just now able to sew up her present – a Nairobi bag made up in gorgeously soft red wine leather, bought in NYC from Global Leathers (I find it interesting that Americans would call this colour “burgundy”, whereas in the UK it’d be “claret”). I’m about halfway done and already I can tell she’s going to love it!

Gallery

James's fantasy jacket

I’ve been calling this James’s “fantasy jacket” because he’s asked me to recreate a beloved unlined, simple, waterproof jacket that was stolen from a pub on the night he met me all those years ago.

He recalled it from memory while I attempted to create an accurate tech drawing, and then once that was agreed, I compared this against my vast pattern magazine archive (made much easier since I started tagging my At a Glance scans online, so I just had to shuffle through those issues tagged “menswear”!).

I decided that BWOF 10/08 #134 was a pretty good starting point for what James wanted, and I went from there. The muslin went well, so around Thanksgiving I started on the final jacket, made from a very cool laminated linen from Mood in NYC, with bias binding made from some dark red and black tie silk bought in Dublin three years ago.

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

And this little piggy stayed in bed all week long…

I have been laid low and barely able to get out of bed since Friday. After an entire weekend of cold/flu symptoms and a fever of 38.8 (102F), I dragged myself into hospital to make sure it wasn’t anything serious…

…only for my swabs for come back positive for H1N1, aka swine flu!

Oh joy. I’m barely able to stand long enough to make a cup of tea, or sit long enough to write some work emails, so needless to say, I’ve been unable to get any sewing done from laying in bed. This has put a severe damper on my Christmas gift sewing schedule. At least my latest Patrones order arrived (296, 297, and 298) for me to read through.

The doctors have said I need to stay off work for this week at the least, but I’m hoping maybe I’ll feel better this weekend. Until then, muse on the fact that I got this despite having the combined flu vaccine which is supposed to protect against H1N1. 🙁 And here I thought swine flu was so 2009…

Gallery

Rose and lace teeshirt

It’s absolutely freezing in London and I really need more long-sleeved knits, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to use this pattern from KnipMode Dec 2005 with a yard of rose jersey from Fabric.com and some of my gorgeous cream stretch lace that I bought in Paris. Et voila! A raglan-look lacey long sleeved teeshirt (Lace but without the Brrrrrr!).

This is a really basic long-sleeved teeshirt pattern, but with lines drawn in from the neckline to the side seams on the front and back. I left off the weird cuffs (in fact, I just reused the sleeve from my drape-front dress because I’m lazy like that and don’t see the point in tracing an identical sleeve again!), and decided to create my own neck binding which I serged on and then coverstitched down.