oh. my. gorgeousness! Are you ready for, what’s in my humble opinion, the best Burda issue of the year, or possibly even the past few years? Seriously, there are SO many patterns in here that I want to make immediately that I can hardly stand it! In my eyes, I’d have to go back to the Japanese-style feature in June 2014 to find as many designs I’m utterly crazy about! But don’t take my word for it – let’s show you some of my picks!
Burda magazine August 2017
The Great British Sewing Bee Live – come join me!
If you’ve not heard the news yet, the hit BBC tv show The Great British Sewing Bee is being reincarnated as a live event here in London in September! Having worked behind the scenes on the last two seasons of the show, I knew how much love and work went into every challenge and every episode of the show and I immediately got in touch with the organisers the second the live event was announced.
Patrones 56 magazine
It’s been a while since I had a Patrones magazine to share, but I kept an eye out for them while we were in Malaga last month. Eventually I found one on a newsstand in the centre of Malaga, but they certainly weren’t as easy to find there was they were in Argentina, which is more than a little odd considering it’s a Spanish magazine. It comes sealed so the pattern sheets don’t get separated or lost (as they’re not stapled in place like Burda), but it also means you can’t peek at the styles before you buy.
Anyway, if you’ve been following along with my reviews over the years, you might recall that they used to do knockoff patterns of seriously high fashion designers, then there was a fallout and they stopped being able to name any non-Spanish designers (so no more Gucci, Prada, Paul Smith, etc), and around the same time they also started to produce compilation magazines made up of a bunch of old patterns and photos lumped together. The only way you could tell the difference between the latest styles and the “latest” compilation was to look at the issue number, as the “new new” were in the 4-500s and the “not really new” had very low issue numbers.
The Cityscape dress
I was in need of a palate cleansing easy make after I returned from competing in Malaga and promptly came down with a cold (and made a wadder in the form of some deeply unflattering culottes that make me look 10 feet wide). Luckily, I had an invitation to attend the 25th birthday party of my local fabric store, Fabrics Galore, and while I sipped some bubbly I couldn’t help but do some shopping…
La Maison Victor – their first English-language magazine!!
If you’ve followed this site for any length of time then you’re probably already aware of La Maison Victor magazine, as I’ve been buying up issues whenever we’ve travelled to France over the past few years. It’s a Belgian pattern magazine, which started off as quarterly in the early days, expending to 6 issues a year and publishing in French, Dutch, German, and now… English, too!
This is super exciting because I love La Maison Victor‘s aesthetic – definitely more like a fashion magazine than a sewing magazine, and unlike some *cough* Burda *cough*, each of the patterns has incredibly well illustrated instructions, so they’re suitable for beginners, too.
Burda magazine July 2017
We may be in the peak of summer here in the Northern hemisphere, but in Burda’s world July is the last of the summer issues, normally full of floaty beach wear and rectangles-masquerading-as-clothing but there’s surprisingly a lot to like in this issue, too…
Fabric (and gold!) shopping in Malaga
Apologies for the radio silence over the past few weeks. If you follow me on social media, you’ll know I’ve had an absolutely intense 3 weeks of training culminating in my competing in the World Transplant Games in Malaga, Spain last week.
I’ve written a comprehensive race report over on my running site which gives a bit of insight into the amount in training and sheer effort that went into my performance at the Games, which (spoiler alert!), ended in my bringing home 6 golds and one bronze!
Print Club is here! Harkiran Kalsi’s “Role Models” for XYT Workout Top
It’s finally here! The long-awaited second Print Club fabric kit is finally available! We’ve followed on from the success of our first kit with Laurie King to team up with a second illustrator who designed some exclusive and limited edition fabric for our activewear patterns.
XYT Workout Top – now a layered pdf!
Happy Friday everyone! I’ve got some great news for all of you who’ve loved our XYT Workout Top pattern over the years – it’s now available as a layered pdf!
The XYT was our first ever pattern back in 2013 and when it came out, layered pdfs weren’t even a thing! Our most recent patterns have all been layered, but it’s a really tedious task to re-organise everything in the older pattern files in order to add this functionality. But we’ve got some big love coming XYT’s way next week (*cough* Print Club *cough*), so it was worth the extra TLC, especially since this pattern has English, French, and Dutch translations on the pattern pieces, too!
We made espadrilles!
Along with making my first pair of socks a few months ago, I got to tick off another First this weekend when my friend Sophie came over and we made shoes! These actually weren’t her first pair of shoes – last year she took an intensive shoe-making class where she got to use lasts and industrial shoe-specific sewing machines, but making espadrilles using home-friendly methods was new for us both.
I’ve been wanting to make shoes for a while, encouraged by other sewists like Jasika who make very professional-looking shoes that you’d actually want to wear! So when the opportunity arose to choose some Prym products (aka Dritz in the US) to try out, their espadrille-making supplies were high on my list, and they kindly provided the soles in my size (EU40) as well as in EU37 and EU45 for good measure. The other sizes, miraculously, correspond to Sophie’s shoe size and James’s, so they’ll all get put to good use!