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

This jumper is very much a product of Instagram Sewjo. I got the fabric at a #SurreySews fabric swap, a couple of weekends back. And it was made largely at a @VirtualSewingRoom Sewing day. Firstly, the fabric. This is a Sweater knit, cottony, quite loose and a tiny bit see-through. There were a couple of pieces of this fabric available at the Swap, but I had a really clear idea of what this was going to become, and I knew I’d only need this one piece. The Fabric Swap was great. Enough people attended for there to be a good choice of fabrics, several long tables-worth, plus there were patterns ..read more

I don’t blame you for not remembering Part 1 of the Rosy Ruby Dress. This project has been on the Naughty Step for over 2 1/2 years. I’ll be honest, it very nearly went onto the Repurposing The Fabric As Something Else Completely Step. But I got a last minute chance to do another Sewcation, in September, with CL, the Thrifty Stitcher, and Amanda of The Sewcial Studio, and about half an hour before I left home, I changed from my original plan (working on the Alex shirt) and pulled out this project instead. I figured these two ladies could probably help me work out what the problems were with th ..read more