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Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode January 2011

My January KnipMode actually arrived a few weeks ago while I was ill, and boy is it a good one. Trouserpalooza!! OMG! Seriously, I think I counted 18 pairs of trousers in here, and 90% of them I’d wear in a heartbeat… There’s tapered leg, wide leg, jeans, leggings, treggings, wide waistband, no waistband, knits, wovens, and stretch! You name it, they’ve got a pattern for it here – they really have got the full trouser rainbow covered here!

How fresh and modern are these cargoes? I love the styling, but the tapered leg really updates these here beyond the stereotypical 90s grunge ex-Army fatigues.

I love these trousers with the foldover front! Seriously, these are on my list of my next tracing batch – I love that these are cutting edge but (crucially) without a drop crotch! They’ve even got big illustrations to do the foldover bit, too.

In Progress

Pre-Christmas prep

Are you ready for some random sewing goodness? Let the randomosity begin!

  • When I was at the bookstore on Brick Lane buying James’s birthday card, I couldn’t resist this reusable wrapping paper (okay, it’s just fabric to me and you!) with London streetsigns. I love that it’s a London fabric without being OMG UNION JACKS THE QUEEN TOWER BRIDGE! I figure I could use it as a lining like I did with that Japanese tea towel and my bolero jacket a few years back…

  • We were supposed to meet up with Pip and her boyfriend two weeks ago to celebrate Christmas, but we had to reschedule due to my swine flu, so I’m only just now able to sew up her present – a Nairobi bag made up in gorgeously soft red wine leather, bought in NYC from Global Leathers (I find it interesting that Americans would call this colour “burgundy”, whereas in the UK it’d be “claret”). I’m about halfway done and already I can tell she’s going to love it!

Inspiration, Magazine

MyImage Magazine

Woohoo! There’s a new sewing pattern magazine on the block! Do you remember a few years ago when I reviewed the Dutch magazine FIMI? Well appparently FIMI went bust, and a few of the ex-employees got together and started MyImage, taking their 25 years of experience with them to try and make a better pattern magazine. So not only are they an independent company started up by female entrepreneurs, but they’ve learned from the mistakes of an earlier company and started their own!

With a story like that, well, I just had to try their first issue!

This Winter 2010/2011 issue contains 16 patterns in child, teen, and ladies’s sizes, but subsequent issues of MyImage will contain only teen and ladies’s sizes, with an additional YoungImage magazine containing the child and teen sized patterns (I don’t know whether the teen patterns will be duplicated or different in each edition though!). If you’d like to take a look at the patterns in this issue, here’s a link to the tech drawings (pdf).

I’ve scanned in the size chart here so you can tell how these compare to other pattern companies:

The cover! (or most of it, since the magazine is actually a bit wider than my scanner!)

Inspiration, Magazine

The Best Pattern Magazines of 2010 – Nominations

I always look forward to Pattern Review’s Best Patterns of the year, but this year the nominations don’t have a single pattern magazine included. This is really disappointing as I do 99% of my sewing from them, and I feel the shortlist really doesn’t reflect my own personal sewing in the slightest. (And don’t even get me started about the inclusion of some patterns that were just Big 4’s stumbling, mediocre versions of great patterns previously printed in pattern mags!)

So I thought it might be fun to have our own nominations for the Best Pattern Magazines of 2010!

I think it’ll be easier to vote for whole issues rather than specific patterns inside, and also give people a better idea of which back issues to hunt for. If there’s enough nominations, I’ll set up a proper vote in a bit so we can see what’s crowned the winner when I do my own personal roundup of the year on New Year’s Day.

Inspiration, Magazine

The Motherload of KnipMode – Part Two

You can read my roundup of Part One of the haul of older KnipModes from Hilde here, but now it’s time for the exciting conclusion to my newly-acquired stash of KnipModes from 2005 through 2007.

KnipMode May 2006

Wow Knip have gone full-on wedding crazy here! The bridal feature takes up a good third of the magazine! Ok so the wedding gown is not really to my taste, but I still think it’s a shame that the pattern is a special-offer to post away for and isn’t included…

…but the patterns for the rest of the bridal party are!! Everyone from the baby to mother of the bride to wow! those are the first maternity patterns I’ve ever seen in Knip! I wonder why they stopped printing them, especially since Burda and Patrones seem to publish maternity patterns with some regularity.

I really liked the khaki and white colour scheme of this feature, especially with this model’s colouring, but my favourite pattern of the lot was these nice pleated trousers:

Inspiration, Magazine

The Motherload of KnipMode – Part One

About 8 months ago, I got an awesome email from FehrTrade reader Hilde asking if I’d like her mom’s stash of KnipMode magazines from 2005-2007 as she wasn’t really using them much any more and they both thought I’d give them a good home.

Would I??? Omg.

So therein started the logistical planning to transport a rather heavy stack of magazines from The Netherlands over to London… Around this time we thought we’d be driving navigation equipment over to northern Holland in preparation for a neighbour’s North Sea crossing, so we’d make a detour to Hilde’s, but logistics didn’t work out and we weren’t needed for the neighbour’s barge anyway. And then, in a fantastic twist, a few weeks ago Hilde told me her sister lives in London and brought the stash over in her suitcase for me! So I only had to make a 10 minute walk from my office to her sister’s flat (seriously, what luck that she lives so close!) to pick up the magazines and thank her profusely for lugging them in her suitcase.

And for the past fortnight or so I’ve been absolutely pouring over them, picking out my Must Sews, investigating tiny design details, and noticing what changes Knip have made in the past 5 years.

There were too many for me to scan in one session, so here’s my picks from the early half of the stash, with Part Two to follow next week!

KnipMode 11-2005

OMG Lingerie!! I have already got the most perfect fabrics in my stash to make the camisole with the bra cups – the olive green stretch lace I bought in Paris coordinates perfectly with a teeshirt I got free with a magazine but was comically tiny (what percentage of the UK female population has a bust smaller than 27 inches? Seriously.). I think there might be enough to do the cami with a bit of the teeshirt’s sleeves left for a thong gusset. And you know how much I liked the KnipMode lingerie pattern I already had…

In Progress

Bridal bodice – a slight (but fixable) setback

Apologies for the photo-less post, but with four weeks to go to the wedding, the planning has gone from busy-but-manageable to STRESSAPALOOZA! And as a result, I haven’t had a chance to take the photos of my beautiful lining prickstitching off the camera yet.

But before I forget, I wanted to describe a slight setback I ran into in preparing to attach the skirt to the bodice. To start the process I removed the central skirt panel that contained the blue dye stain (from the tissue paper it was stored in for 60 years), and sewed the two gored sections together, which makes a really unexpectedly beautiful central detail. But as I was lining up the centre front, centre back, and side seams on the skirt and bodice to make the skirt pleats, I kept having excess fabric on one side of the front skirt.

Scratching my head, I measured the front of the skirt, and the CF is indeed central. So then I measured the seam line of my bodice, and ERRRRRRRR! the right side is 27cm to the CF point and the left is 24cm. So that’s why I was having excess skirt fabric on the left but having it match almost exactly on the right.

Inspiration

KnipMode September 2010

Still no August Burda or La Mia Boutique in my postbox (though I just found out my 6 month resubscription to Burda, made in a moment of weakness, won’t start until September now, argh.*), but KnipMode’s September issue arrived already, just like clockwork!

The first, colour-blocking feature has a bunch of great patterns in it, though I’m not quite sure about the styilng…

Case in point: fantastic coat! But purple Uggs? Really?

This knit dress appears no less than six times in this issue, but I thought you could see the lines best in this version. Though I think if I make this, I’d add a gathered waistband to the back, too, to make it all even.

Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode Summer 2010 Roundup

I’m taken a brief moment to poke my head up from under my enormous pile of BurdaStyle Book sewing, wedding gown dismantling and bodice muslining, running, gardening, wedding planning, and some seriously busy office day-jobbing to bring you an overview of the summer KnipMode magazines… I’ll show off what I’m actually sewing if and when I can, I promise!

June 2010

This dress and skirt are ok, nothing to really grab me, but they’re nice enough basics. I mostly just liked that the model has wrinkles!

Woop! Another origami dress!

Inspiration, Magazine

How to subscribe to KnipMode magazine

An international subscription, that is! All of you lucky Dutch readers can just subscribe online to one of their many cut-price deals with great freebies (a nice Toyota sewing machine with a year’s subscription, nice!).

I’ve been buying individual copies of the Dutch pattern magazine KnipMode for several years now, and I finally got the funds together to get a subscription for myself, just as the euro/pound exchange rate was at its lowest for ages. I started the process at the very end of May, and look what arrived in my postbox on Saturday (3 July)… the August issue! Yayyy!

There have been quite a few people asking how they can subscribe (I think after getting a taste of the magazine during Naaipatronen‘s 3-for-2 sale! Seriously, way to go, guys, we totally cleared out their back issues!), so I thought I’d sum up the process here for anyone outside the Netherlands that would like to subscribe. Please note that the prices vary with time and postal rates, so always get your own quote!

Subscribing to KnipMode outside The Netherlands

As far as I know, there are no resellers or international distributors for KnipMode (or Knippie, their bi-monthly childrens pattern magazine), so you have to subscribe directly with the publishers.

Email ServiceTeam@sanoma-uitgevers.nl and say you’d like to subscribe to KnipMode with [your country] delivery. They’ll email you back (it may take a few days, they can be a bit slow to respond to emails) with a list of conditions: