Tag: shopping

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Inspiration

Incoming Ditto stash fillers

After sewing through my two Ditto fabrics I received at Christmas in record time, I’ve gone and ended up with five new fabrics from them! A few Saturdays ago we drove down to Brighton (via Lewes) with friends so I had to stop in at their shop in the North Laines, and then last weekend Pip gave me two more fabrics for my Christmas pressie! Yay!

Here they are:

From L to R above:

  • Mauve bamboo lycra jersey (2m at £9.99/m) – this coordinates nicely with my dark green stretch lace from Paris so I’m thinking I might use these for that Patrones pleated turtleneck…

  • Dark grape lace (1m as a gift) – I’m feeling this is crying out to be a luxe skirt, but I need to find a good, beefy knit to underline it or it’d be very chilly indeed!

  • Deep purple ex-Prada wool/poly sweater knit (2m at £8.99/m) – I’m thinking I’ll use this to make the cowl tunic from the Winter MyImage magazine after seeing GlobalMom’s version on PR.

  • Grey ex-Versace wool/viscose rib knit (2m at £8.99/m) – James picked this out for some winter pyjama bottoms so he has some to wear that aren’t covered in Christmas Homer Simpson (poor man!)

  • Cherry red bamboo lycra jersey (2m as a gift) – so many options for this, so the jury is still out.

Inspiration

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!

In Progress

Bridal bodice – buttons, lining and shopping!

Ok after that little lingerie diversion (and a day spent being filmed for BBC1!), we’re back on the wedding gown!

First up was a quick fitting of the shell with all the boning pieces inserted and the waist stay hooked. And I can breathe a sigh of relief, because it’s looking good. A tiny bit of horizontal pulls around the zipper (which can be fixed by laying off the ice cream a bit) and a bit of boning show-through at the centre front (which I’m going to hold off worrying about for now, but I may just shorten that boning piece so it stops below the bust).

So I can push on ahead, safe in the knowledge that there’s no major fitting issues…

First up – I sewed on all 13 original covered buttons along the right side’s zipper, matching up with the original satin loops I placed along the overlap during the zipper insertion step.

On the surface, these look like ordinary covered buttons, but look at the underside!

I’ve never seen buttons like this before in my life! Instead of a shank with a hole, there’s a mound of stuffed fabric to sew through! What a strange vintage detail! I’ve learned so much from taking the original gown apart…

In Progress

Bridal planning update

Apologies but this is a bit of a “brain dump” post as I’m understandably a bit frazzled right now, with the BurdaStyle book deadline looming on top of wedding planning and everything else I seem to list every time I post (ahh, just thinking about it is starting to stress me out, sorry!).

So I haven’t done much tangible work on my gown since I last updated because I’ve been focusing on getting the BS book dress done since it has a more immediate deadline, but I’ve been doing lots of mental sewing on the gown. Which, you’ll remember, is half the battle for me. So I took an evening out to read (really read and digest!) through “Bridal Couture” by Susan Khalje and the OOP Palmer/Pletsch “Bridal Gowns—How to Make the Wedding Dress of Your Dreams” book (the former being way way more useful than the latter IMHO). I placed copious amounts of Post-It notes sticking out the edges at places I want to refer back to later.

I’m also really glad I ended up taking that PR online Underlining class a few months ago now!! Though I just looked to see if I could link to the Underlining class somehow, and I noticed Susan Khalje herself is teaching a “Wedding Gowns 101” class starting Aug 15. If it were a few months earlier, I’d have jumped all over it, but you need time to devote to the classes most evenings and I’ll need all the time I can get to work on my gown!

After reading through the two books I had everything mostly straight in my head about this dress, but the boning placement still puzzled me because my pattern doesn’t have any obvious vertical seaming to place the boning along, and all three examples in Bridal Couture had some sort of princess seaming. Luckily for me, it was easily solved on the PR messageboard and by this Susan Khalje article, so I’ve got a full gameplan in my head now for the dress!

Inspiration

Well-travelled silks

Yay! My friend Shasha was in Malaysia recently and she went to the massive Gulati’s fabric store and brought me back some silks!

I must’ve coached her well because she bought 2m each of this gorgeous turquoise silk satin which coordinates perfectly with the blue floral silk jacquard. You can tell she’s got such the eye for colour because these two just look like they’re born to be sewn together, and she said she thought the blues would go well with my colouring. You can see bigger photos of each on their on in my fabric stash gallery.

Inspiration

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!

Inspiration

Au revoir!

We’re off to Paris today for a weekend of food and fabric shopping excess! Unlike Susannah, we’re driving down (and staying with friends), so I can’t really do any sewing to do en route, but I fully plan on hitting up Isabelle’s Montmatre fabric shops and doing some keen couture window shopping while I’m there, too. But because we’ve got the car, I don’t have any baggage limit on the amount of fabric (and macarons) I can buy, either. BWAHAHA!

Now seems a natural point to put my summer sewing on hold, and start sewing my wedding gown in earnest when I get back (more on that next week) in addition to my “OMG crazy busy secret project”, that’s going to keep me really on my toes in July (as soon as it’s announced, I can tell you what it is, honest).

So how have I done on my Summer Sewing Shortlist? Actually, not too badly! I was never expecting to make everything in one month, but I did manage to make…

Inspiration, Magazine

KnipMode sale alert

I recently (after years of saying I would!) finally sorted out a subscription to KnipMode magazine, but since they said it won’t start until the August issue, I took a whirl round my favourite online KnipMode source, Naaipatronen.nl to get the June and July issues, plus one for a friend. I’ve used them for years to get my KnipMode issues and they’ve always given me great service.

Imagine my surprise when yesterday they sent me a partial refund, because they just started a 3 for 2 sale on all their magazines (they also stock Ottobre, Knippie, Burda, and Burda Easy)! How nice is that, the sale wasn’t even running yet when I ordered! The sale’s not mentioned on the English version of the site, but it’s a news story on the Dutch side, and runs until Tuesday (22 June).

Inspiration

Comfort stashing

I’ve had a bit of a bad day today, so instead of stuffing my face, I went and did a bit of online comfort fabric shopping.


(Full fabric stash viewable here, with new stuff at the bottom)

I’m definitely most excited about the mustard + navy combo right now. I saw two different people on the street wearing mustard tops and navy bottoms within the space of about 15 minutes yesterday, and both times I did a double-take at how great it looked (one was a casually-dressed Shoreditch man and the other was a smart City lady). So I’m definitely making a top out of the goldenrod cotton rib knit and pairing it with a pair of slim-cut stretch navy twill trousers (Patrones 290 has some amazing slim trouser patterns in it but more on that in a bit!).

I like to think I was quite sensible with my choices, buying things that a) I can’t easily buy here, like the quality stretch wovens, b) I’ve got mental plans for already, and c) will work for Fall and Winter, which is when I’ll be seeing what I’ve just bought. And I’ve kinda noticed that I don’t wear loud prints anywhere near as much as the solids in my wardrobe, so I’m trying to keep those to a minimum (both prints in this order are for gifts!).

Inspiration

Pre-birthday miscellania

Birthday dress!

My LMB draped birthday dress is finished, so thank you to everyone who commented on my muslin! I’ll be having the photoshoot tomorrow so you can see it on my big day itself on Thursday (no, not THAT big day, that’s in September!). I’m really happy with the way the final dress turned out, and the silk jersey is just so gorgeous to wear…

Labels!

My new labels also arrived this week (albeit with an eBay shipping mishap).

For some reason Cash’s aren’t offering the silver/black I had before, so I went with GB Nametapes for this lot. I’m not 100% convinced on the font I chose for “Fehr Trade”, but I love that I could get the URL printed smaller this time around. Considering that the last lot of 120-some lasted me just over two years, I have a feeling I’ll get used to this design soon enough.

BurdaStyle!

Looking beyond my birthday plans, I am super excited that BurdaStyle are coming to London next week, so I (of course!) need something new to wear to their mixer!