This is turning into quite the magazine review week! Between getting my next sewing pattern ready for release (it’s with my testers now!) and working on the boat renovations every single weekend, I’ve had precious little time to devote to sewing recently, and when I do, I end of sewing easy TNT garments instead of spending time photoshooting or blogging about them! But I have been keeping a list so I can eventually blog about them, and the advantage there is that I might be able to wear a few as sets for the photos!
Burda magazine October 2018
Dutch sewing pattern magazine roundup
A few weeks ago J and I took a long weekend away in Amsterdam, but the majority of these patterns actually came from a different trip he’d made for work a few weeks earlier. It turns out that the newsagent inside Rotterdam station is a haven of sewing pattern magazines, who knew?? So rather than do a post on each of these, I thought I’d pull out my highlights, and take the chance again to explain how accessible the pattern sheets and instructions are for non-Dutch speakers…
Activewear Sewing Myths
After years of sewing my own activewear, producing 13 patterns, teaching multiple classes, and even writing my “Sew […]
The Sewing Weekender Number 3
No sooner were we back home from Iceland than I was on my way up to Cambridge for my third Sewing Weekender! The first year I was lucky enough to buy a ticket, then last year I gave my “Sewing for Movement” talk as a speaker, but this year I was determined to attend again and set my alarm in order to buy my ticket as soon as they went on sale.
No joke, these tickets were hotter than Glastonbury – we crashed The Fold Line’s site and tickets sold out in like ten minutes despite having doubled capacity this year to 100 places!
Running and Knitting in Iceland
The perils of running a one-woman business alongside an office job and attempting to also have a bit of a social life is that, at times, I have to make some tough decisions regarding my time. So since I’ve been away the past two weekends (prime-time for me to work on FehrTrade), I’ve not had any time to blog since I prioritised my Friday/lunchtimes/evenings to working on the new pattern in development, albeit slowly. But I definitely want to capture the last two weekends away before they fade into memory!
For those of you who have been following my loom knitting journey over the last 18ish months, I’ve actually made something other than socks!
Burda magazine September 2018
I’ve been away the past two weekends (in Iceland and at the Sewing Weekender, respectively) so I’ve not had much of a chance before now to sit down and really sink my teeth into the latest Burda edition. I know much of the USA is in a heat wave at the moment but in England it’s cooled off considerably so an issue full of Fall fashions is very welcome!
Listen to me on two new podcasts!
For the record – I freaking love listening to podcasts. I listen while I sew, walk around London, and before I go to sleep some nights. I mean, my last job was even at a podcast company!
So I was super excited when two new UK sewing podcasts launched recently and even MORE excited when I was asked to join them for a chat! And then out of sheer coincidence, both episodes ended up going live this week so you all have got no excuse for not hearing my funny trans-Atlantic accent all weekend long! 😂
Burda magazine August 2018
I can’t believe it’s the August issue already! Granted, I feel like I’ve lost five months of this year to being ill, but still, sitting here in London in a neverending heatwave, I’m not sure I’m ready to look at Fall fashions yet… and it looks like Burda feels the same, because while August issues are traditionally the start of the Fall fashions, this year it feels like a mishmash of Summer and pre-Fall. There’s not much I personally actually want to make in this issue, but there’s tons of great stuff nonetheless!
A doubly-recycled denim coffee sack jacket
This blog post title is quite a mouthful but the “fabric” I used has such a great origin story that I didn’t want it to get lost in view of the final jacket. It all started last summer, when I found out that a local coffee roasters here in London had partnered up with a Guatemalan company to reuse waste cotton fibres leftover from the denim industry. They mix the waste denim in with a small amount of virgin, undyed cotton, and produce fabric on giant looms which they turn into coffee sacks. These are then filled with local beans and shipped all over the world, and after the coffee beans are off-loaded, you can buy the recycled denim sacks to reuse however you’d like.
There’s a lot more about the super-interesting process over on Square Mile Coffee’s blog, but as soon as I heard about it, I instantly bought two sacks with the idea that I’d make myself a pair of jeans with it. But when they arrived, I realised that, while the original fibres were denim, the recycled sacks were more like a cotton bouclé, and far too loosely woven to be used in place of denim.
So I pre-washed the sacks, dutifully unpicked all the seams, and thought about making a jacket while the seasons rolled around to something more befitting an unlined jacket (since I knew I didn’t want to cover up the cool coffee sack printing!). A couple of candidate jacket patterns caught my attention, but then I saw New Look 6532 as a free covermount pattern on Sew Magazine and thought it was pretty much exactly what I had been imagining for my coffee sacks.
Burda magazine July 2018
I’ve had this issue for a few weeks now but I’ve finally started to feel better and now I want to do! all! the! things! and haven’t quite found the time to sit down and post about it. But I’ve been on a staycation from my office job this week, so you finally get to enjoy my picks from one of the best July issues I can remember (not that it’s saying that much – July issues are usually my least favourites of any given year!).