Pretty Penny

Oh my it’s been a while pals! I have been busy away in the background making stuff but I’ve just been procrastinating longer and longer before sitting down to write an actual blog post! And well life happened! I got engaged last September, which incredibly exciting, we have a date and it’s full steam ahead. I honestly cannot wait to call my best pal my husband!

Enough of all the soppy and let’s talk sewing! I’ve been excited to sew up a Penny Dress for myself ever since I saw the design way back last year when we were prepping the designs for this year at work. It’s such a simple but really pretty dress and in a lovely cotton lawn, which this version is in, it’s perfect for all the lovely but slightly sweat inducing sunshine we have been having!

I made this up last week and I was so excited to have made the perfect sundress my wonderful photographer/fiancee took some pictures on an adventure to Syon Park yesterday. We had the perfect day filled with sunshine and plenty of cake! I would highly recommend it if you fancy a day out, the conservatory is awesome. We didn’t get to go into the house as it was closed for a wedding but we will just have to go back for a second visit!

Back to the dress! I did a slight FBA following this tutorial, I also lengthened the front slightly to accommodate my bust and stop it sitting just under my bra! It seems to have worked fine and I’m pretty pleased with the overall fit. I kept the skirt the original length, normally I would shorten it but the longer length is nice for the summer, less chance of flashing your pants in an unexpected gust of wind, I’m looking at you London Underground!

There is already another Penny on the go, in the most amazing flamingo fabric but it has taken a bit of a backseat as it is not the most breathable fabric so I doubt I’ll get much wear out of it anytime soon! There will be photos, I am determined to fill up my wardrobe while I have the time before wedding dress sewing takes over!

That’s all from me pals, hope you all have restful Sundays! I’m sat with some tea and enjoying some leftover cake from our afternoon tea yesterday.

Knit Together

 

Hello Pals,

Please come and join me for an evening of yarns and fun at Sew Over It on April 22nd. The UN Refugee Agency do amazing work safeguarding the rights and well-being of refugees. I wanted to organise an event that would bring people together, as now more than ever we need to come together as a community and celebrate our connection to each other.

We will be having a yarn and needle swap, so if you want to add to your stash without feeling guilty about it this is the place for you! I will also be on hand to teach anybody who wants to learn some basic knitting, just bring along some chunky yarn and 6mm-8mm needles along with you.

There will be an area for you to knit, drink and eat cake. To buy tickets just clink the link to the event page.

Cake will be provided by the super talented Sophie Cabot and we have some excellent raffle prizes donated by the wonderful team at We Are Knitters.

I look forward to seeing some of your faces there!

Hope you all have a wonderful Easter.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/knit-together-in-aid-of-unhcr-tickets-23935843753

The Blue Leopard Dress

Hi pals!

Hope the New Year is treating you well, even though the weather is a bit grim at the moment! It’s been a while and I’m excited to share this dress with you.

This was meant to be my New Year’s Eve dancing dress but alas having to work through Christmas and the holidays meant there wasn’t enough time to finish it. As a result I ended up rushing the fitting process and having a dress that I can’t quite move my arms in. Will that stop me from wearing it; probably not. It’s perfectly fine for cocktail drinking and some moderate dance moves!

This number is the Lolita dress from Make my Lemonade. I am in love with the site, it’s so great. There are video tutorials for all the patterns and though they are in French, which I am by no means fluent in, they are pretty visual so it’s easy to follow along with them and the same goes for the instruction booklet. I also found it really interesting to learn some new vocabulary because I’m a word nerd.

I spotted this fabric on the Textile Centre’s Ebay store and I knew straight away that this was perfect for this dress. The lining fabric was from their shop in Walthamstow, I went there with Elle the lovely Lauralovepugs on Instagram. I was lucky enough to get to hang out with her at the beginning of December and she was kinda enough to stop me from buying all the fabric in the shop!

I bloody love this dress and I’m determined to get the fit right, I’m thinking of maybe making one in some scuba fabric and I also need to do another toile of the bodice. I’ve already done an FBA but the armholes are too small and I think I need to take some from the centre front and hopefully we’ll be there. Lesson learnt on this one is that crazy self imposed deadlines are not worth rushing fitting!

You also may have noticed that we have a cat! She’s called Bibi and we re-homed her from a friend. It’s super having a feline companion again! Here’s picture of me pulling a funny face and Bibi practising her blue steel for the camera.

That’s all from me! Hope you all have a super week!

Sophia Sew a Long – Jersey Top

Well hello there lovely people!

I hope this Friday post finds you well, the lovely Gabby Young asked me to do a guest post over on her lovely blog! Hope you enjoy having a read of it and here’s a picture of the finished thing!

I’m spending the rest of the day sewing up my Sophia ensemble! I’m looking forward to sharing it soon. Big thanks to Gabby for organising the sew a long and for letting me post on her blog!

Have a super weekend folks!!

Some Seamwork Love

Well Hello there!

How’s your Monday treating you folks? I had a weekend off which is usual for me as I work quite a lot weekends. I mostly hung out with my boyfriend, ate lots of food and bought some house plants. It was a good time!

A couple of weeks ago I ran up an Astoria pattern from Colette’s  Seamwork magazine, I haven’t made as many patterns from there as I would like but this is my second Astoria. I really love this pattern, it’s great for high-waisted skirts and I’ve also layered my other one over dresses so it’s super dooper for the colder weather winging its way. It’s always exciting for me to find another garment to layer with in the winter months. During the cold weather I have been known to attempt to wear my entire wardrobe before leaving the house. Who likes being cold though am I right?

The fabric is some I had left over from a yet unblogged Lady Skater dress, there’s quite a lot of makes that haven’t been documented yet but it’s getting there! It’s a digital print scuba fabric that I picked up on a trip to Dublin way back in April. It was very satisfying to get it out of the pieces that were hanging around in my stash!

Has anyone else got Seamwork patterns in their queue? Next on my list are the Oslo cardigan and the Bristol skirt and I just may do some selfless sewing with something from the recent menswear issue.

This beauty was debuted at the launch of the sewing social network The Foldline, are you guys on there yet? Isn’t it exciting to have a place that’s all about the sewing! We had a great time, drank too much fizzy and met lots of lovely, lovely people!

And on that note I’m going to leave you with some jazz hands because well jazz hands.

Hope you all have a super sewing filled week!

The Betty-Ann

Well Hello there!

I’d like to tell you about the pattern love-child I made, it’s the By Hand London Anna bodice with the Sew Over It Betty skirt. I could of made my own circle skirt pattern to go with it but these two fitted together so nicely without any faffing, so Betty-Ann was made and I will have The Beach Boys Barbara Ann stuck in my head forever more!

I decided to try out some nicer seam finishes for this one by using Hong Kong seams on the inside of the bodice and I found an exciting tape for the waist-stay. I was using some super tropical rayon which was not my friend for the entire journey but we made friend’s by the end after quite a bit of swearing. It still hasn’t apologized for being so shifty but as it looks so pretty I’m going to go ahead and forgive it anyway!

Whilst doing the fitting, according to my measurements I should have needed a full bust adjustment, but then found I didn’t need one, do you ladies of the fuller bust always add this adjustment? I’m sure it’s something that I should be doing on most patterns as I have a bigger than standard cup size but a tiny back. This is probably something that I’ll figure out eventually  but at least I got some practise in and the sew-along on the By Hand London blog is super dooper.

I made this dress for a wedding I went to with my Boyfriend in Poland at the beginning of September, we had a super time, did a lot of dancing and a lot of eating which was not so comfortable in my fitted dress!

These pictures weren’t taken in Poland but at Hampton Court after a trip to The Handmade Fair, did any of you guys go? We had a good time and I particularly enjoyed the churros! I also bagged the Tilly and the Buttons Agnes pattern and the wool issue of Pom Pom magazine, which was mega excited after reading Sonja’s post the morning I went!

I am very pleased with the dress there is a bit of gaping at the front neckline but I’m ignoring it. It’ll be easy enough to get rid of on the next version I make. It’s such a super pattern, the Anna, I can see why it’s so popular. I can see a midi length version with a split in my future.

I’m going to leave you with some jumping pics which I seam incapable of pulling off without looking like a complete tool. Turns out I can’t jump and keep my mouth closed at the same time. Who knew?

Sneaky sewing and a day of surprises!

So folks I had the most exciting time doing some sneaky sewing for Sew Over it at the beginning of August. And man did I feel like such a sneak, I was bursting to show off after I’d finished the Joan dress but I managed to sit on my hands and here she is!

I love this dress, the fit isn’t quite right yet but I love it all the same. Sometimes you have to just let some fit issues go and come back with a fresh pair of eyes. I’m trying to encourage myself to to this more as I struggle with the fitting process. It often fluctuates between I can fix this, this is shit, I’m shit, someone pass me the wine please and oh feck it, it’ll do! So I suppose this is my very wearable toile but because I am so nit picky I still want to refine the fit!

I made adjustments to the length of the skirt as it was nearly at my ankles, oh the joys of being a short arse! And there may be slightly too much taken off the bodice length as it sits a bit high on the waist but never mind for now. I need to do a narrow shoulder adjustment, some other minor things and then it’ll be just perfect. I’m thinking about drafting a sailor collar for it and then it might possibly be the sailor dress of my dreams.

The keen eyed among may spot that my neck tie is on the wrong side, that’s because I can’t tell my left from my right. If I was ever the protagonist in a Shakespearean tragedy my fatal flaw would be be inability to make the correct left/right decisions. There was one time when the wrong turn was taken and I ended up almost on the dual carriageway walking back towards central London in completely the wrong direction. My friend’s have never let me live that one down! And then there’s stage right and stage left = MY MIND BLOWN! Anyway the moral of this tale is double check your lefts and rights but also the tie works both ways. Tah Dah!

I gave this beaut of a dress a test drive when my boyfriend took me out for a surprise afternoon tea for my birthday. It was so great, there was champagne, tea and ALL THE CAKE. He is the absolute best. We went on to have a cocktail at the Savoy afterwards, it was all very fancy and this is the best thing about this pattern, you can’t help but feel very fancy wearing it!

So cheers guys, thanks for reading and thank you to Sew Over It for giving me their pattern to test.

*Please note although I was given the pattern all the opinions shared are my own

Swish Swoo

I love a good circle skirt, it always makes me feel a bit fancy swishing around in one, so as you can imagine wearing this one is all kinds of amazing. I’m not sure if it’s the print or the drape of the jersey but this one feels like the swishiest (I’m going to pretend that’s an actual word) I’ve ever owned. Admittedly it is a bit tricky to navigate on a windy day but I had to wear a kilt to school and that particular garment knows how to catch a breeze, so I’ve grown accustomed to holding on for dear life. It certainly doesn’t make me love it any less and the heat we’ve had it was lovely to wear.

This lovely fabric was gifted to me by my boyfriend’s Mum when we’re visiting back in May. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to make out of it, was it going to be a dress or a top or goodness knows what. Then I remembered how much I loved the skirt on my Betty Dress so why not use the skirt pattern for an elasticated skirt made of win!

I’m not entirely sure I went about the elastic waistband in the right way, sort of fudged it a bit but it worked. I cut some elastic 10% smaller than my waist measurement and a piece of fabric that was double the width of the elastic plus seam allowance and attached it the same way you would a neck binding. Then I top stitched in a fairly large zig zag stitch, if I was doing it again I might try and figure out a way to support the waistband a bit more as there is quite a lot of weight to the skirt. I’m not 100% sure I need to this but time will tell as I wear it.

So there you have it! I whipped the whole thing together in a couple of hours and it felt like such a productive thing to do before my shift at work.  I’m going to leave you with the last picture of this glorious print and no I have no idea what I’m doing!

Have a super weekend lovelies!

A Coco for the weekend

For a while now I’ve dreamed of making a stripey Coco, probably ever since I made the first one waaaayyy over a year ago and now I finally have it!

I love how quickly this pattern comes together, it took me longer to match up the stripes than it did to make the dress which is always a win. Well maybe not the stripe matching ,that was almost a win but they match in the important places!

I decided to do a contrast binding to finish the neckline and it really helped me not stretch the neckline which I had an issue with last time I sewed this pattern. I have sewn with knit fabric a couple of times since then and that’s probably helped too.

I shortened the dress a bit as the stripes are so wide I felt it looked better with a bit of the length loped off . This time round I also added the sleeve cuffs and the patch pockets, I bloody love it!

This is a double whammy  of a me-made post as you’ve also got my Colour Affection scarf in there too! Although I love it now it took me over 6 months to knit it, I was mostly knitting it between calls at work but still it took an age. I’m very glad I persevered though as it has kept me warm and cosy though all this weird weather we’re having !

So there you have! Here’s to a lovely long weekend friends, which for once I’m not working for most of it. Hope you all have a super time filled with some sewing related fun!

Braided Cable Cowl

Well friends the sun is shining, I’m listening to Ray Charles and the balcony door is open so this is probably not the most weather appropriate post but what you gonna do? Drink more coffee and  write about the braided cowl I knitted for my friend’s birthday last month!

I spotted this lovely little number on the Purl Soho Instagram feed and I thought a present for a super friend would be a good excuse to get my knit on! I used completely different yarn and needles  from the pattern not just because I’m a knitting rebel but also because there was quite a narrow time limit involved so I had to take whatever the delights of the John Lewis haberdashery could offer. The results aren’t too shabby, I used Rowan’s Big Wool and 10 mm needles. It’s bigger than the original and I think a less chunky knit might make the cables slightly more defined but it still looks good.

It just so happens that I managed to guess my friends favorite colour which was most definitely a win. Speaking of wins, this was for the friend that convinced me to buy that most awesome flamingo fabric. She’s a keeper and most deserving of knitted gifting!

So there you have it! I would definitely recommend this pattern if you want some cable practice and an interesting, quick knit.

I’m working on my first knitted garment and it’s very nearly finished so hopefully I’ll be able to share it with you soon. It’s gonna make me look like and ice-cream and it’s going to be great!