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Inspiration, Magazine

La Mia Boutique July 2010

No, you didn’t miss it – the June issue never arrived and is presumed missing in the post by now (so Magazine Cafe extended my subscription by a month to compensate). But that’s okay because June didn’t look that great in the online preview, and July is a fantastic issue!

I utterly love this bolero – mostly for its sleeves! You can see more easily in the layout diagram, but there’s a strip of fabric down the centre of the sleeve, with gathering on either side. I’d so take these sleeves and try them out on a shirt or other style of jacket, too.

This is actually a dress that just looks like a skirt and top – it’d be great for short lengths of stash fabrics with a nice belt…

In Progress

Bridal Bodice Neckline – opinions needed!

I am very happy to report that my dress for the BurdaStyle book is completely, 100% finished, packed up in an airtight bag and ready to be FedExed this week. HOO–RAY!

I’m afraid that’s all you get to see until next year, to. Boo.

But it means I can now devote ALL of my sewing time to my wedding gown. So the first step is to attack the muslin. I’ve marked my waistline in green, and the possible boning positions in blue. Once I marked my waistline I realised exactly how short the bodice is so I’m elongating it all by an inch so the back and sides aren’t ending exactly at my waist. My waist is an inch higher than the standard measurements anyway so I think this alteration will help (note: I’m not short-waisted. My bust-hip measurement is standard, my waist is just shifted up a tad).

But I really, really need your help choosing the right neckline for this gown!!

In Progress

Bridal planning update

Apologies but this is a bit of a “brain dump” post as I’m understandably a bit frazzled right now, with the BurdaStyle book deadline looming on top of wedding planning and everything else I seem to list every time I post (ahh, just thinking about it is starting to stress me out, sorry!).

So I haven’t done much tangible work on my gown since I last updated because I’ve been focusing on getting the BS book dress done since it has a more immediate deadline, but I’ve been doing lots of mental sewing on the gown. Which, you’ll remember, is half the battle for me. So I took an evening out to read (really read and digest!) through “Bridal Couture” by Susan Khalje and the OOP Palmer/Pletsch “Bridal Gowns—How to Make the Wedding Dress of Your Dreams” book (the former being way way more useful than the latter IMHO). I placed copious amounts of Post-It notes sticking out the edges at places I want to refer back to later.

I’m also really glad I ended up taking that PR online Underlining class a few months ago now!! Though I just looked to see if I could link to the Underlining class somehow, and I noticed Susan Khalje herself is teaching a “Wedding Gowns 101” class starting Aug 15. If it were a few months earlier, I’d have jumped all over it, but you need time to devote to the classes most evenings and I’ll need all the time I can get to work on my gown!

After reading through the two books I had everything mostly straight in my head about this dress, but the boning placement still puzzled me because my pattern doesn’t have any obvious vertical seaming to place the boning along, and all three examples in Bridal Couture had some sort of princess seaming. Luckily for me, it was easily solved on the PR messageboard and by this Susan Khalje article, so I’ve got a full gameplan in my head now for the dress!

Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode Summer 2010 Roundup

I’m taken a brief moment to poke my head up from under my enormous pile of BurdaStyle Book sewing, wedding gown dismantling and bodice muslining, running, gardening, wedding planning, and some seriously busy office day-jobbing to bring you an overview of the summer KnipMode magazines… I’ll show off what I’m actually sewing if and when I can, I promise!

June 2010

This dress and skirt are ok, nothing to really grab me, but they’re nice enough basics. I mostly just liked that the model has wrinkles!

Woop! Another origami dress!

Inspiration

First rebirthday 10k race

Last Thursday was my one year anniversary of my bone marrow transplant, which others have taken to calling a “rebirthday”. James took me out for lunch and a very chill session at a super posh tea shop, followed by a surprise card and flowers when I got home! I’ve been planning a special celebration of my own for about six months now, when I got it into my head that I should run a 10k for my one year post-transplant.

The British 10K London Run was this morning, and even though I’ve been running around the river for the past 3-4 months to train for this, I had only managed 10km in my last three runs so I was feeling pretty nervous and hoping only to run the whole thing (no walking!) and to maybe finish in under an hour.

(More race photos here…)

Inspiration, Magazine

How to subscribe to KnipMode magazine

An international subscription, that is! All of you lucky Dutch readers can just subscribe online to one of their many cut-price deals with great freebies (a nice Toyota sewing machine with a year’s subscription, nice!).

I’ve been buying individual copies of the Dutch pattern magazine KnipMode for several years now, and I finally got the funds together to get a subscription for myself, just as the euro/pound exchange rate was at its lowest for ages. I started the process at the very end of May, and look what arrived in my postbox on Saturday (3 July)… the August issue! Yayyy!

There have been quite a few people asking how they can subscribe (I think after getting a taste of the magazine during Naaipatronen‘s 3-for-2 sale! Seriously, way to go, guys, we totally cleared out their back issues!), so I thought I’d sum up the process here for anyone outside the Netherlands that would like to subscribe. Please note that the prices vary with time and postal rates, so always get your own quote!

Subscribing to KnipMode outside The Netherlands

As far as I know, there are no resellers or international distributors for KnipMode (or Knippie, their bi-monthly childrens pattern magazine), so you have to subscribe directly with the publishers.

Email ServiceTeam@sanoma-uitgevers.nl and say you’d like to subscribe to KnipMode with [your country] delivery. They’ll email you back (it may take a few days, they can be a bit slow to respond to emails) with a list of conditions:

In Progress

Vintage wedding gown photos

So you’ve already seen a bunch of detailed photos of my Granny’s gown (from 1949) laid out flat, but I wanted some on a real person so you could really see the style lines and how it falls. And this way I can get some nice Before and After shots when I refashion it into my gown for September.

Big big big HUGE thanks to my neighbour Kate who not only fit into this tiny dress (respect!) but actually humoured me and let me take photos of her in it to post to the internet (Secretly, I think she had fun!). Kate’s also engaged and I was thrilled to learn that she’s not having wedding colours, either!

So let the vintage dress photos commence!

Inspiration

Well-travelled silks

Yay! My friend Shasha was in Malaysia recently and she went to the massive Gulati’s fabric store and brought me back some silks!

I must’ve coached her well because she bought 2m each of this gorgeous turquoise silk satin which coordinates perfectly with the blue floral silk jacquard. You can tell she’s got such the eye for colour because these two just look like they’re born to be sewn together, and she said she thought the blues would go well with my colouring. You can see bigger photos of each on their on in my fabric stash gallery.

In Progress

Bridal Bodice update

When you last heard about my wedding gown, it was two years ago(!!) and I was leaning towards turning my Granny’s gown from 1949 into something with a cowl neck, deep back, and sleek lines, using Vogue 2965 as my starting point.

But recently I’ve been looking more closely at the fabric I’ve got to work with in my grandmother’s gown, and my recent cowl sewing adventure has reminded me that cowl necks need pretty huge amounts of fabric, can’t easily be pieced together, and on top of that, the silk satin in her gown is more of the heavyweight duchesse variety than something very drapey that would cowl nicely. And while I love a low back, it does make things awkward for bras and any sort of shapewear, too.

So I had a bit of a wake up call and told one of my bridesmaids to keep reminding me that “This is just one dress. It is not all dresses.” (thanks, Stacy!). Yes, I like cowls. But I also like other things, too. And I do not need to put everything I like into one dress!

Inspiration

Paris fabric shopping

Ahhhhh, Paris! We had a simply wonderful time in the City of Lights this weekend, cramming an entire holiday into a few short hours. We’ve both already been to Paris a few times, so we didn’t feel the need to do the touristy stuff all over again. This left us with an entire weekend to devote to eating and shopping, and socialising with our friends Sat and Sarah (who I’d not met before this weekend, but I now feel like we’ve been friends for years!). As is my habit when I go away, I went fabric shopping so I can now share those shops with you…

As Isabelle says in her guide to Paris fabric shops, the bulk of the fabric and notions shops are in Montmatre, so if you’re pressed for time, head directly to the Abbesses metro and head east (which, conveniently passes right by a branch of my favourite-ever perfume shop, too!). There are a few other fabric shops in the same area that I didn’t pop into, plus a giant notions shop with more buttons than you could possibly imagine, so Montmartre really is your one-stop-shop for fabric, lining, interfacing, zippers, trim – the lot! Everything in Paris shuts down on Sundays, but happily, nearly all of the fabric shops are open on Saturdays which is convenient if you’re only in town for a weekend like us!