This was supposed to be a dress. Remember that Fabric Swap I went to a while ago, and came back with four fab fabrics? (Nope, I didn’t think you would, it was a long time ago!) One of them was a lovely navy sweater knit. The label on it said it was 140cm wide and 180cm long. I thought that I could just about squeeze a knit dress from it. However, as I found out when I started to look at how to cut it, it turned out to be only 120cm wide, which made it much too narrow to cut the front and back side by side, so it was definitely not big enough to make a dress. So I revised my plans, and went for ..read more

I made the Minty Ponte Top a while ago, at a sewing workshop. Workshops are great, I love them, but they are usually quite tightly timed. That meant I just followed the instructions, and didn’t have the time to really think through the optimal cutting layout to maximise the use of my fabric. So I was left with essentially the side bits that are left over from cutting on a centred fold. Buoyed by my experience with the eye-watering scrappy stripy skirt, I was determined to patch some of those bits together and make something useful out of them. My first thought was to make a matchy matchy skirt ..read more

Mend March is out of the way, so I’m on to the next Challenge month! I’ve been doing Me Made May, hosted by the wonderful Zoe of So Zo What do you know? and Check Your Thread, for 10 years (with varying degrees of success), and this will be my eleventh year. Eeep! It gets harder each year to find a new way to make the challenge meaningful. But I think I’ve got it sussed for May 2024. My wearing habits are very lazy. I wear dresses because that’s just a single decision to make in the morning. Separates require deciding on one garment, then deciding on a second garment to go with it. Too much ..read more

I went into Mend March knowing I was unlikely to meet all the daily prompts. I’ve tried enough of these monthly challenges to know I’m not very good at them! But I did a lot of mending and fixing up, and I posted 20 times, and as the late great Meatloaf once said, Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad. I mended more than I posted. I fixed a few holey tights. I’ve renovated several pairs of knickers and two bras, bringing them back to comfortable wearability. But it wasn’t all undies – I fixed a hole in a dress (that was right on my bum). Holey dress fix, Batman! Sorry – as soon as the word Holey was the ..read more

My latest Instagram crush is Kate Sekules, @visiblemend on Instagram. She is a champion of mending and fixing, and one of her mending methods is Punk Smocking. I’ve stolen some images from Kate’s Instagram, to demonstrate. Happy to take down, Kate, if you don’t approve. It’s a great way to change the shape of a garment in a gloriously decorative way. So one of my Mend March projects was to use punk smocking as a way to bring the stretched out neckline of this very old T-shirt dress back into shape. Since I’m still on the #LastSewistStanding No Buy challenge (I’ve done over a month, go me!), I ..read more

No sooner do I take on one challenge (Last Sewist Standing – update: I’m still standing, despite being ambushed by all the beautiful fabric shops of Goldhawk Road last weekend), than I go crashing headlong into another… This month is Mend March, a challenge set up and hosted by Kate Sekules, aka @VisibleMend on instagram. It celebrates all the beauty and usefulness of mending your clothes. This may be the last Mend March, Kate warns us, because of Instagram being so rubbish about hashtags at the moment. Maybe the algorithm will be tweaked, who knows? I really hope it won’t be the last. So why ..read more

I don’t normally do sewing challenges, apart from Me Made May. Sewing challenges usually involve making clothes I don’t particularly want to make, to a deadline. I don’t want to make clothes to order. I like the freedom to make what I want, when I want. I don’t feel the need to make things than I won’t realistically wear. But this challenge is a lot more within my own sewing ethos. As any reader of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of Zoe Edwards of So, Zo, What Do You Know and her podcast Check Your Thread. She was my introduction to the #LastSewistStanding challenge, hosted by Lise Bauer, a ..read more

Before 2024 has time to get its feet fully settled under the table, I’d better get my New Year Review done… 2023 has been a very productive year, and I’m attributing that to making my sewing more sociable. I found the Virtual Sewing Room and #SurreySews in the Summer, I did two SewCations, I did sewing socials online and face to face. It’s made me a lot more active in my sewing, and also more accountable. I’m not very good at self-motivation, but signing up for a social sewing session means I can carve out a set time for making, and I can plan for it and get projects moving. It helped that I f ..read more

The Virtual Sewing Room had a Sewalong Session on Saturday, using the Helen’s Closet Costa Tote Bag pattern. I hadn’t originally intended to do it, but I’m a martyr to FOMO. I wasn’t sure what fabric to use. I’ve cut my stash down a fair bit, but I pulled out a deep teal coloured sateen, left over from a dress I made a long time ago. The remnants were too pretty to get rid of, and I’d always thought I could combine them to make something else. Then when I was rummaging around to see what other bits I’d got, I pulled out this dress that I also made a long time ago and which I no longer wear and ..read more

I really liked the first Bianca dress I made, and I wanted to make another one, slightly different but based on the same slash & spread idea. The first dress had gathers diagonally from the shoulder to the opposite side of the torso, but I felt those torso gathers were a bit underwhelming, so I decided to leave them out completely, and do pleats (not gathers) to the shoulder instead. The pattern was my basic self-drafted Repro knit dress pattern. I knew from the previous dress that I needed to make the neck opening narrower, so I did that. Then I marked out my slash lines, from shoulder to ..read more