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A citron yellow Rest Vest

Thank you all for your comments and sympathy regarding the death of my father and my tribute vest. I’ve been sewing a LOT over the past few weeks while he’d been dying, but for obvious reasons I hadn’t felt like writing blog posts or taking photos, so I’ve got a bunch of garments to show you, completely out of order and with some photos taken recently and some from weeks ago (just don’t look at the length of my hair too closely!).

The first I wanted to show you is the Rest Vest from MadeIt patterns – a new-to-me pattern company that is also based in London! This is the pattern I used for my tribute vest, but this version today is the one I made first.

I saw the back view of this vest (British English for “tank top”, Americans!) in my Instagram feed and basically clicked buy then and there. It was still under its launch discount, too, which was just a bonus, but I love that the top wraps around at the back to create that upper back interest and the back wraps around at the body to shift the side seams forward. It feels like a design I’d draft myself, which is high praise indeed!

Meet our athlete model – Jenni from London Bike Kitchen!

One of my favourite parts about the entire pattern development process is working with our athlete models. I decided early on in the life of FehrTrade Patterns that a) I didn’t want it to just be me modelling our patterns all the time, and b) I didn’t want to use traditional models, as I’d seen way too many covers of Runners World with the same waif blonde doing that awful “fake running” pose! I know so many incredibly inspiring women and men in the fitness world that it’s only right to share them all with you, too.

A double gauze day dress

A while back I’d heard of a fabric called “double gauze” that was supposedly perfect for hot weather, but at the time it was really only available imported from Japanese shops and really expensive at that! Fast forward a few years and it’s now much more readily available locally, so when I was in Brighton last August I bought some of their muted teal double gauze fabric (also available in a bunch of other colours), keen to try it out. Double gauze is two layers of cotton gauze/muslin fabric joined together with stitches in a grid pattern which creates a sort of seeersucker or quilted texture. It also means the two layers may not be 100% on grain to each other, and it really likes to shrink in the wash so be sure to pre-wash it.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it though until I saw the perfect day dress in the May 2019 edition of KnipMode magazine (#11, though #12 is a longer version with longer sleeves). The pattern is available to buy online, too, though be aware the instructions are in Dutch.

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! 😂

A doggy sweatshirt

And now for something completely different… I appear to have made a sweatshirt for a dog!

Stay with me here – my friend Pip and her partner adopted a rescue dog a few weeks ago. Rufus is a very playful one-year old American bulldog who absolutely loves his walks and getting nice and muddy. He has a very thin coat, however, so Pip was concerned that he might be getting a bit cold when the weather dipped into the single digits. So I offered to sew him up a quick coat from offcuts in my stash and we could see whether he’d tolerate wearing it before making him anything nicer.

A Golden Velvet Moneta Dress

I started as new office job back in May (I’m a product manager in the music/tech space when I’m not designing sewing patterns or writing books!) and since this company is significantly bigger than all the previous offices I’ve worked for in the past, I’ve spent the last few months getting excited about the prospect of the first big office Christmas party of my life. And of course, with that comes What To Wear.

Burda magazine September 2017

I’ll be honest with you – I wasn’t expecting to review this issue. I’ve subscribed to Burda for years now (and bought sporadically before that), but I’ve been increasingly been disgusted by their wasting an entire issue on dirndl dresses every September, which are a waste of my money, tbh. So when I got a notice that my subscription was ending with July’s issue, I thought “a-ha! I’ll outsmart you this year, Burda! I’ll buy August on the newsstand, skip your awful Dirndlpalooza issue, then re-subscribe with October!”

So I bought August (which was the best issue of the issue so far IMHO!), and then I tip-toed to the newsstand on my lunch hour last week to look through September… and no dirndls! Hurrah! A regular issue for September for the first time in at least five years! (Seriously though, if you want to sew your own dirndl, more power to you, there are loads on Burda’s site to help you with that.) I’ll still probably buy October from my newsstand just in case, but I think we might’ve escaped with much more usable patterns this year, hurrah!

A pale blue Seamwork Eugene henley

The final Christmas present I made this year was a long-sleeved top for James, using the Seamwork Eugene Henley top pattern and some pale blue cotton lycra jersey he’d picked out last time we were at Ditto Fabrics in Brighton. I’d inadvertently picked up a remnant of their cotton lycra jersey previously and James raved about the fabric so much that I finally just brought a scrap of it in to their Brighton store for Gill to fondle and ID for me! Luckily for him, it’s something they always have in stock in a bunch of different colours…