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I made the Sylvie top from Forget-Me-Not patterns!
NB. I am a part of the Forget-Me-Not patterns Insider program, which means I get access to all their patterns in exchange for some social media posts showing off my makes. Forget-Me-Not haven’t asked to write this review though, and I get nothing for this. I just want to share the details of this lovely pattern!
What fabric and size did I choose?
I made a straight size 34, no mods at all.
This is a cotton jersey fabric from Selfmade.com. I picked it up on holiday in Oslo last year. I spent like an hour in the store touching all the fabrics and the haberdashery and generally being very excited. It’s suuuuch a lovely fabric.
I originally wrote this blog post as a guest feature for Dovetailed London, as I’m one of their brand ambassadors. I received the fabric in exchange for the blog post.
It’s my first Dovetailed London Ambassador make! To sew this dress, I used the Megan pattern from the book Love at First Stitch by Tilly and the Buttons.
I chose this dress pattern because it has clean, simple style lines, which let the fabric be the star of the show. It also has a lot of straight seams which makes pattern matching much easier! The pattern also recommends fabrics with a little bit of structure to their drape, and even suggests quilting cotton - so I knew it would work nicely in wax print, which has a little bit of sturdiness to it.
Inspiration finally struck for this meter of gold foil fabric! I made a top from it a few years ago, but this leftover length has been sitting in my stash just waiting for me to do something with it. So I sewed up this Bibi skirt from the Tilly and the Buttons book Stretch!.
The skirt is so simple, folks. It’s two pattern pieces (a skirt panel and a waist band). The construction is straight forward, and fitting is easy as you can just baste the panel seams before you sew them up properly. A super quick make. Which is really what I needed - a quick win to break up the ongoing saga of my self-drafted bodice block.
After many, many (many) iterations of trying to retrofit a bodice block from an existing pattern, I’ve decided to step up my game and do the damn thing properly. So I’m drafting one myself.
I bought myself a copy of Winifred Aldrich’s famous book Metric Pattern Cutting. This is a classic - and it isn’t cheap. It’s very much a text book, that teaches you the formulas for drafting patterns. It explains how to draft basic blocks, and then it shows you a whole bunch of different modifications you can make to those blocks - all mathematically. And I love it. I’ve fallen in love with the book. The technical angle works wonderfully for my brain. I’m a software engineer by trade, so I’m very much a precise/logical thinker. This makes so much more sense than guesswork.
I tried out a great technique to speed up sewing.
Recently, I had to make a dress on a deadline. By which I mean, I left it til the last minute to make it! I had so little time that it barely seemed possible to finish the dress. But rather than give up, I used the pressure to try out a technique that would make my sewing more efficient: task batching. And it worked so well!
Batching your sewing tasks is such a time saver - and it doesn’t even involve cutting any corners. (Insert joke about trimming seam allowances here.) You’re not skipping any of the important steps - you’re just rearranging them.
I’d planned to make this Shelby dress for a 90s themed birthday party I was going to. I bought the fabric and the pattern well in advance - but thanks to some other sewing deadlines I had, I ended up with only two days to make it! Spoiler: I managed it in time.
This time pressure gave me the impetus to try out a technique I’ve been meaning to do for a long time - task batching. I mean. It’s not exactly revolutionary. I do the same thing in the kitchen when I’m cooking.
I’ve got a blog post coming up on how to batch tasks, so look out for that!
It’s time to admit that we’re entering Autumn sewing season. Thankfully, I’ve got sewing plans that I never got around to last Autumn, which I’m still excited to get into this year. Assuming I get around to them this time.
First of all, I need to interrupt this broadcast to give a huge thank you to TipStitched for the How I Create Digital Sketches video, which explains how to make images like the one above. Game changer.
Let’s dig into it!
First up, I’d like to make myself another pair of Ginger Jeans. This will be my second pair of Gingers. I took a jeans making workshop at Bobbins and Bolts a couple of years ago and made a pair in indigo denim, but I needed a lot of handholding at the time and so far I’ve been too nervous to attempt them again by myself.
I tend to prefer sewing clothes, but every now and then I’ll make something for the house. This week I made a cushion cover, and also made the cushion itself out of upcycled materials.
I have some old cushions from Habitat that are well over 10 years old and completely flattened and stained. They came round the world and back when we did our stint in Singapore. The last time I unzipped them to wash the covers, I discovered that the fabric of the cushions had completely disintegrated - and I mean completely. There was just dust left. Which is… kind of freaky?