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Gold silk Eclair dress (and bonus purple bow tie!)

Sorry for the delay – I finished the Colette Patterns “Eclair” dress last week but couldn’t quite squeeze in a photoshoot until we were actually at the wedding venue on Saturday (the very nice London Canal Museum in King’s Cross. Though all the tiny canal boats made me feel like the 50 Foot Woman in comparison!).

If you recall from the previous post describing the invisible zipper details, I’m making this newly released dress pattern in gold silk crepe, with aubergine silk crepe ties and gold silk habotai lining.

I was a beta-tester for this new pattern company, so mine was only a rough photocopied draft, but it was enough for me to see that this is a definite keeper! I’m really jealous now after seeing the finished storybook packaging that I almost want to buy it again, just to have a pattern as beautiful as the dress itself!

In Progress

Prepping for Patrones

Now that I’ve finished all my other spring projects (the Colette dress is coming, sorry for the delay!), I can now devote all my available energy toward making my spring coat, Patrones #261-17, as voted on by all of lovely you!

Also sewing along with me are Zoe (whom I borrowed and traced the pattern from originally!) and Houkje, who’s also tracing and joining in a bit later on, creating our own London-Patrones micro-Sewalong!

First off, Zoe says:
I took a quick photo this morning of the fabric I’m using for the coat.

The wool on the left is a remnant from the cloth house and not enough
for the whole coat. The velvet on the right is for the hood, button
tabs and possibly the collar if I don’t have enough of the wool for
that. I bought some great brass toggles on Walthamstow market (couldn’t
find them a 6am without waking the family up), but forgot about the tabs
on the sleeves so I need to get back soon to get some more. I’m looking
for a two tone lining in beige and turquoise to match the stripes in the
wool, but no joy so far. Need to find time to get over to Shepherd’s
bush I think.

Whereas for my coat, I’ll be using that great, soft teal basketweave wool, bulk fusing it with lightweight interfacing, before cutting, then overlocking all the cut edges to prevent fraying and unravelling.

I’ve got 4 yards of the wool, but only ordered 3 metres of the Vilene H180 lightweight interfacing. Only I forget it was super narrow, so by the time I laid it side by side on the wool, I only had about 1.5m of the wool covered. So I’m waiting to see if I can lay out all the pattern pieces that wouldn’t normally be interfaced onto the bulk fused section, and the pieces like the collar, facings and button tabs onto a section that I’ll cover with heavier interfacing to avoid having to buy more. Confused? Don’t worry, this plan might fail anyway…

Inspiration

Thank You Part Two

Following on from the post “Thank you!” from a few months ago, I’ve now got three weeks to go before I go into hospital for my bone marrow transplant so I wanted to get my address up for any of you who’d like to send some boredom-relief packages.

Please read the earlier post for an idea of what I’m talking about here (it’s okay, I’ll wait. . . . . All done? Great!). In addition to all that, I will have my little red sewing machine and my Mac laptop (with low-bandwidth internet) in my little room with me, if that helps with ideas.

Ground rules

  1. Please wrap all boredom-buster(s) individually inside the postal envelope, enclosing your name and email address inside! (as I will gather them all together in one place to open one each day so they’ll get separated from their envelopes and I want to know who to thank!) Newspaper/magazine/recycled flyers are more than fine for wrapping!
  2. It is extremely important that you do not send anything if you or anyone in your home has even the slightest cough or sniffle. Please wash your hands for good measure anyway before wrapping, too (I will have zero immune system and what would cause a slight cold for you will result in a serious illness for me on top of everything else!)
  3. I am not allowed any flowers or fruit you cannot peel (though, admittedly that’s probably more pertinent for in-person guests…) because of the chance of fungal infections.
  4. If you’d like to send a card, please hold off – I’ll post up my hospital address as soon as I’m in so they’ll come straight to me (I don’t want the nurses to have to deal with any early arrivers, and I don’t want my co-workers to have to lug in a ton of post for me, either!)
  5. Please forgive me if I sound like a bossy, ungrateful cow. 🙁

Address for parcels only:

Article

Mustard yellow leather bag

This bag was long overdue, so I finally managed to squeeze in another HotPatterns Nairobi bag this weekend, made for about the 6th time now(?) I think!

It was originally a download-only freebie pattern, but it’s been long discontinued until a few weeks ago, when they started selling it again in paper form for a limited time! I highly, highly recommend getting this pattern if you don’t have it already!

I find it’s really difficult to photograph bag linings once they’re done, so I’ve taken some photos of the lining before assembly so you can clearly see my pockets!

Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode May 2009

Last Tuesday I had the extreme pleasure of meeting fellow sewer Sigrid as she was visiting London with her family and had a short break in their sightseeing to come and stop by the moorings! It’s so funny, within minutes it was like we’d known each other for years, even though we’d never met in real life before, only observing each other from our respective sewing blogs…

Besides the great opportunity to blather on about sewing with someone whose eyes don’t glaze over within 5 minutes, she also brought me some really nice gifts! Oh Sigrid, you can definitely come visit again, you didn’t have to bribe me!!

First up was a gorgeous silver and black Kantje Boord lingerie kit for my birthday!

Inspiration

Pillowcase Challenge giveaway!

Cast your mind back to May last year, when I posted about sending off some submitted projects for a book about reusing old pillowcases… You there yet? Great!

Because Craft Challenge: Dozens of Ways to Repurpose a Pillowcase has now been published! Or rather, it was a month or so ago, I’m a tad late…

I’ve got my copy here, which is full of really basic, easy sewing projects that are perfect for beginning sewers. The other cool things is that you don’t really have to use pillowcases for your starting points here – you could just as easily make things like the hat, stuffed toys, kimono (pictured above), remote control armchair caddy, cape, etc, from equivalent lengths of scrap fabric or fun quilting cottons. I sourced all my vintage pillowcases off eBay to make my samples for the book, too, so you don’t have to feel bad about cutting up your family heirlooms if you don’t want to, either.

So without further ado, here’s my winning submission, the “Flirty pyjama set”, featuring a camisole and French knickers made from one pair of pillowcases!


(Photo of the Flirty Pyjamas compliments of Lark Books!)

In Progress

The disappearing silk zipper

The Colette Patterns “Eclair” dress is not a quick, one-weekend project, but it’s well worth taking my time over and going through all the careful steps in the instructions to get a nice finish. I inserted the side, invisible zipper last night (more on that in a second), so now I only have to attach the lining to the zipper tape, stitch in the ditch along the waistband to join the shell and lining, and hem the two skirts! I’m doing well on time, too, since the wedding’s not until May 9th and I’ve got a bank holiday between now and then, too.

So here’s the invisible zipper on the side seam (yes, I am rather proud of matching the waist seam there!):

You can’t tell on the tech drawing, but this dress has inseam pockets, too, and the instructions have a very clever way of dealing with the pocket, side seam, and invisible zipper area that makes it all nice and neat!

Gallery

Pink flowered day dress

Thinking ahead towards summertime, I really like to wear casual day dresses around the moorings at weekends (and this year, during the week, too, I suppose). A few years ago my friend Jess bought me a really simple 70s day dress at a vintage shop, and I’ve worn that so much I realised I’d like a few more to fulfil the same function.

So for this day dress, I blended two similar dresses from the Feb 09 issue of KnipMode together into one! I took the top half of #15 (on the left) and the bottom of #18 (on the right) and joined them together at the waist seam to make a really comfortable, casual dress for lounging around the moorings.

The fabric is a really super soft cotton-lycra jersey from Totally Fabrics, but which has now, understandably, sold out (I looked a few days ago to see if I could buy more – it’s that good!). The neck and arm bands are just a bit of black lycra to give a bit of contrast to such a busy print.

Inspiration

Parklife!

Yesterday I had an all-day hospital visit, but instead of being the super dull day I was dreading, it actually turned into the most relaxed and chilled day I’ve had in months! Some women go to the spa, I go to Nuclear Medicine for a bit of radioactivity, ha.

Part of the day was that I had two hours free before having to report back in, so instead of wandering around Camberwell, I went into the big park next to the hospital. We’re having absolutely gorgeous weather in London right now, and everyone was out with their babies and dogs, having impromptu picnics and tennis matches, so I found myself an empty picnic table and brought out my embroidery. Here’s my view of my project, and of my view of the bandstand:

Gallery

KnipMode faux-wrap jeanskirt

I didn’t get much sewing done this weekend, but I did catch up on photoshoots for my finished garments from last week, at least. First up is an A-ine, faux-wrap jeanskirt from KnipMode March 09 issue, #12:

It features the very last of my super heavyweight Levis denim that also bore the Thames jeans and the recent KnipMode boyfriend jeans. And stylistically, it’s also got a similar idea, if not construction, to the KnipMode kilt-styled jeanskirt I made a few years ago.