Search Results for: hot chocolate

I'm currently excited about…

My turquoise and silver motif dress is nearly done (check out the fantastic lace hem tape I found in my stash to pretty-fy my hem, too!), but it doesn’t stop me thinking ahead…

  • Lekala 4020 – My brain needs a quick knit top, and I looooove the cowl neck and shoulder yokes on this. I’ve created echoing sleeve bands on the back to decrease the “coffin back” look (the only reason I haven’t made their “S dress” yet is that I’m contemplating how to jazz up the back on it. Any ideas?). I’ve got some small lengths of silver silk jersey left in my stash that I think will find a good home in this top.

    Even better is that they’ve got every pattern available in a free size 44 pdf this month if you want to try them free before you do the custom-size thing!

  • A foam cup bra – OMG I am amazingly excited to learn there’s a pattern out now for making the type of bras I buy in RTW with the moulded, foam cups! It’s the Pin Up Girls “Amanda” bra pattern. I’ve made bras before, but I’ve never been happy with the fit, and I think that half my problem is that I’m trying to sew the kind of bras I never actually buy…

    I had an email chat with the lovely Kellie, owner of The Sewing Chest shop (the best UK source of elastic and boning and lingerie fabrics, hands down!), and I’m now totally excited about sewing bras again. She’s advised me to put some of her foam cups onto the non-cup parts of the KwikSew 3300 bra I’ve made before, and see how that goes. She’s also advised me to use a different underwire size, too. Fingers crossed for bra success!

Some lovely sewing gifts

In amongst my usual pattern magazine subscriptions, my postie has been quite busy delivering some additional goodies to FehrTrade Towers over the past few weeks! First, I won a sewing (almost) page-a-day calendar from Julia at Marmalade Kiss, whose blog I’ve been following for ages and ages! She’s incredible at corsetry, underwear and drafting (and has her own corsetry supply shop, too) and was one of the contributors in the calendar so I’m looking forward to bumping into hers as I work my way through the year!

Not long after that, the lovely and extremely chic Yoshimi posted a giveaway for a really cool rotary ruler, and this was not two days after I’d just painstakingly measured the armscye and the sleeve curve on my winter coat pattern so I was really hoping I’d win as this would make it SO much easier to match curves! And then I was gobsmacked to win this, too! It’s like a pizza cutter but with a ruler along both sides of the wheel so you can measure as you roll! I’ve never seen anything like it before, but it’s such a cool idea.

In America…

Having an international relationship (even when the expat half is as firmly ensconced as I am) makes weddings a bit tricky. We’re lucky that we didn’t have to take immigration laws into account, but even so, we needed to have wedding celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic to include as many people as possible. So a few days after the wedding, we flew over to Pennsylvania, spent a few days at my parents’ house in Perry County, then had our celebration dinner in Lancaster, taking the train down to Philly to catch up with my Man of Honour, then the Acela train up to NYC for a week of a proper honeymoon before flying back home to London.

So to start, I decided that I wanted to give my Granny a nice memento of her gown, since she had given it all to me, and I ended up with some medium-sized scraps of the really nice silk satin after finishing my gown. So before I left I made up four sachets filled with lavender buds I’d grown on deck, and during the flight I embroidered a silk square for each of these with the initials of her four grandchildren and their spouses, plus the year they were married. It just worked out nicely that my cousin Charlie was the last of us to wed, having their wedding two weeks after ours!

I then finished up the sachet construction at my parents’ house and presented these to Granny before the Lancaster reception dinner.

There was also a nice surprise of a massive box of vintage haberdashery she’d found in a charity shop. I only picked a few things out of it, but I just couldn’t resist some of this glorious packaging!

Then my mom insisted on driving me out to this Amish fabric shop she knows in Perry County – it was only a little ways past my old high school, but I was just blown away by the prices!! I went NUTS in the zippers – tons of really long invisible zips for 75 cents or a dollar (when I’d pay at least £3-4 each for these in London), buttons for as low as 2 cents each (when’s the last time you saw anything for 2 cents??), tons of ricrac and trims, embroidery floss for 30 cents, and (of course!!) they had the bobbins for my hand crank vintage Singer. For 15 cents each!

Our DIY wedding – Cupcakes

Mmm, cake, the sweetest decision to make for any wedding, yet one that’s all-too-easy to get horribly wrong (Unfortunately one wedding I attended years ago had a beautiful cake that was mouldy inside when cut into!!)

Luckily, we had Sarah at Maison Cupcake, a friend of a friend and an amaaaazing food blogger and baker, on our side. Honestly, she’s already in my RSS feed reader and I want to eat her whole site on a regular basis!! Like James’s Auntie Anne (who did our flowers), Sarah’s also a “keen amateur” and not usually a baker for hire. With the quality and detail in the cakes she made for us, though I’m sure she could make a living from this if she wanted to!

We mostly wanted cupcakes, both for ease of serving and the ability to taste more flavours, but we also opted to have a small cake for us to cut. All we stipulated is that we didn’t want a fruitcake (as is traditional for UK wedding cakes) and that we didn’t want to use a cake topper or have writing on it or anything. Sarah suggested something like this chocolate and booze-soaked cherry cake and we nearly bit her arm off! She topped it all with a delicious fondant icing, and yes, she made all those tiny flowers herself!!

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!

Ruffled pink girlie dress

I hadn’t planned on making this dress, but I suddenly remembered it was our neighbour Matilda’s fourth birthday today so I went over and took some measurements yesterday, and chose dress #6 from the Fall (Herfst) 2008 Knippie idee magazine:

Remember back at Christmas I made this as a top for my niece? You might also remember Matilda from the knit balaclavas I made her at Christmas…

This time I made the smallest in the size range, 98, after measuring Matilda (who’s turning 4), whereas I’d made the biggest size, 128, for my niece who was barely 6 then.

Here’s the dress, front and back, laid out flat:

Patterns from a suitcase

My mom arrived on Friday morning, bearing a ridiculous amount of American cookies, candies, chocolates, cakes, and kitty treats, but also a few patterns that were on my wish list!

Vogue 1109 is a Sandra Betzina pattern for a knit top/tunic with really interesting seam lines. It kinda feels expected for all sewers to love SB without question, but to be honest, I don’t find her “all that” and this is the first pattern of hers I’ve even remotely liked (though not in either of those fabric choices, ugh) so I wanted to give it a try.

Simplicity 2647 is a knit dress with varying lengths and bodice treatments, but I really liked the short version with the wrapped side even though it’s quite similar to a Vogue pattern I already have.

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!

Birthday sewing surprises

You may remember that last Fall I helped a friend test a bunch of budget sewing machines for a major newspaper, and one of the machines was a tiny, red John Lewis Mini sewing machine. John Lewis is a chain of high quality department stores in the UK (and the only one which still maintains a haberdashery and fabric department) and this is one of their own branded machines, though it’s actually a Janome under the hood. If you had any doubts – when you order these off the John Lewis website, it comes shipped directly from Janome UK!

Anyway I didn’t have much need for a tiny, portable machine back in October, but happily James’s parents thought I might like to do a bit of sewing in hospital and gave me this for my birthday!

As I knew before, it’s definitely got its limitations, but as a second, portable machine, it should do nicely for me. It is really tiny, and very lightweight – the instruction manual for it is printed on bigger paper than the machine itself, and even I can lift it with one arm! It doesn’t have any accessories, or a light, for that matter, but it sews well, and through denim, too, being a sturdy mechanical Janome.

Problem solving

Problem: exposed kitty litter tray

In our attempt to make the transition over to the other side of our boat (from the self-contained flat to the main part), we set up a new litter tray for Bosco in a pipe void under the bathroom sink. But shortly after we installed it, Bosco was having a scratch, James looked over, and they made awkward eye contact. Bosco meowed in protest! Clearly something was needed to protect his precious modesty!

So I sewed up a little curtain for his litter area using Michael Miller‘s “Bad kitties” fabric that I had leftover from our throw pillows, adding a nice little border in chocolate brown at the bottom. It’s all cotton and all washable, so it’s no big deal if it gets dirty.

And hurrah! No more litter in sight and I have a happy cat.

Problem: cold feet at night