FO: Sewing friends and fabric shopping in NYC

Anyone who follows me on IG may have noticed that my family and I went on a pretty epic holiday this summer, travelling up the east coast of America from Orlando to Richmond VA, Washington DC, New York, Boston and ending in Maine.  This the story of how a recent make came to be....

When flying from Orlando to Washington DC to get to Richmond, my suitcase some how didn't get onto our plane. I was extremely upset by this, not least because I had most of my favourite me made items of clothing in it as well as my tamoxifen medication.  Cue lots of phone calls made by lovely Husband and I finally get my slightly battered suitcase delivered to the house we were staying at 2 days later.  In the meantime, our friends had taken me to Target in order to get a couple of changes of clothes. One of the things I tried on was a chambray shirtdress:

I didn't get it because, as ever with rtw it didn't fit quite right, but I really liked the idea of the style of dress.

Spin forwards a couple of weeks and we are in New York where we met up with Jennifer Weise of Workroom Social. She and I had met a couple years ago at NYLon14and got on quite well, so I got in touch to see if she would like to meet up for a coffee or something. The 'or something' turned out to be a brief visit to the Workroom Social Studio,

a lovely tour of Brooklyn and lunch at Brooklyn Farmacy and Soda Fountain ending up at Brooklyn Bridge so that we could walk back in to Manhattan. On our tour Jennifer took us to Brooklyn General Store

which had a great selection of knitting, sewing and crafting supplies.  Much of the fabric there was not what I was looking for, but they did have a good selection of denims, unfortunately not one light enough for a shirtdress. We had a wonderful time with Jennifer, who very generously gave us her whole afternoon to show us around an area of New York that we knew nothing about and probably wouldn't have gone to if we hadn't met up with her.

A few days later, our last full day in New York coincided with MPB Day organised by Peter Lappin of the Male Pattern Boldness blog.

It was reaaalllly hot and humid.

Everyone met at the  FIT museum to see an exhibition called Uniformity.
The exhibition was small but extremely interesting reflecting on how uniforms and fashion influence each other.

My family accompanied me for this bit, then went and did their own thing for the rest of the day (which mainly involved spending time in air conditioned refreshment places and drooling over KitchenAid accessories in Macy's!).

The rest us of had lunch at a nearby Panera where there was lots of sewing chat and a pattern swap.  I picked up a Vogue pattern. After lunch we split into 2 groups one lead by Peter and the other group, led by Tomasa, was going to Mood fabrics amongst others.

I really really wanted to go to Mood so I stuck with this group. I think we went to Pacific Trim and another trimming shop then we got to Mood.  I did my usual dither around feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choice, then gave myself a talking to and looked for specific fabric including some chambray for a shirt dress. They had three chambray's of the right weight for a dress, but only one in the right colour, so that was easy.  It felt a bit stiff, but I was assured that it would soften up with washing, and it has a bit.  I also bought some white Swiss dot cotton for a summer shirt and some white burn out jersey.

Mood

 I had a great time being shepherded around the Garment District by these ladies

Anne, Mary, Kyle, Tomasa and Rhode

 At the end of the day we all met up again in Bryant Park, where we all showed off our purchases

Me and Peter

The haul

The fabric had to wait a couple of weeks until we got home, before it met with my washing machine, then I had to decide which pattern to use...

The dress itself will be in my next post.

FO: Sunki tunic dress

This is a repeat make for Youngest, which I made at around the beginning of the year.  I intially made her a version in a very stiff denim that turned out to only just fit and was very short.

For this one I used the largest tween size in the pattern and I think lengthened it a bit.  The fabric is a lovely soft chambray that I picked up at Karen of DidYouMakeThat's 'Made Up Meet Up' last September. As soon as I saw it I thought it would be a good fabric for a tunic.

It went together well, although the pocket instructions made me stop and think for a while, even though I have done them before and they are very similar to the Portfolio tunic. I still really like the overlapping detail at the shoulder:

Despite the fact that she has worn this a lot more than she ever wore the first one, I only have a couple of pictures of her wearing it - as you can see, she was super keen to have her photo taken!

FO: Skirts for Eldest

Happy New Year to everyone. I am probably not going to do a review of last year as the latter half was not much fun. I have lots of catching up still to do with blogging my makes, so here are a couple of skirts for Eldest.

Skirt one was started (as in she cut it out) by Eldest two summers ago, I think, in a heavy denim from my Mother-in-law. It was finished by me towards the end of the summer 2014. We used Burda 9562 view A, which does not seem to be available anymore.

top stitching and pleats

It was very short so I added at least 5 cm to the length before we cut it out and it is still a bit short! We used age 15 to ensure it would fit her as she is quite curvy, however her shape is still changing plus she prefers to wear things on her waist rather than below, so I ended up putting elastic in the back of the yoke at the waist.

This pattern is designed to sit just below the natural waist, but with Eldest prefering to wear it on her waist, it makes it shorter than planned when worn!


Skirt two was inspired by this skirt in the window of J Crew:

 and this skirt in Johnnie B, the Boden teen section:

Photo from Boden.co.uk

I could see that it was a pretty simple design and that I could 'knock something up' pretty quickly.  I bought some chambray from a local shop. I think it was 4.95 or maybe £7 (I can't quite remember) a metre and nice quality. I loosely used this chart for sizing and this tutorial for making skirt - which I think has probably made the skirt too poofy for Eldest. I thought for a future skirt it may be better to have a plain front to the skirt with any gathering just in the back.  I intially hemmed the skirt to be 22" at the back and 21" in the front (her curvy bottom lifts skirts slightly and makes the hem uneven). This was not a flattering length, so I shortened  it by 2" all round.

I also put a welt pocket on the front.  It is not brilliant but it looks ok and fits her phone. I only did one as I made it up as I went long really, and didn't fancy trying to do a second one and getting the placement wonky!

She seems pretty happy with them both and has worn them, but I only have pictures of her curled up in a chair in the 2nd skirt and you can't actually see much of the skirt!

I have just realised that this ties in with my previous post of using RTW for inspiration!