Tag Archives: Daily Outfit

Inside Out

24/04/2014 1:03 am \ 24 Comments \

Meggipeg alerted me to the fact that today, 24th April, is Fashion Revolution Day; thank you Megan! and it was lovely to finally hang out together, in person  🙂
So I am wearing my dress and my cardigan inside out for the day.
A year ago today the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing 1133 people and injuring over 2500 more.  Fashion Revolution is suggesting that out of respect and acknowledgement we wear our clothes inside out to display the hidden inner workings; the labels, seams, hems and bindings that seamsters labour over.  If you bought your clothes readymade there are more things you can do; outlined here.
Generally I stay away from political and social conscience opinions here on my blog, although in person I can be quite the bore on a subject once I get going!  Don’t get me started!  However the issue of ethical manufacture of consumable goods, particularly clothing; is dear to my heart and one of the primary reasons why four years ago I started down this rather bizarre path of eschewing ready-to-wear clothing entirely and of making with my own two hands just about every item of my clothing that I possibly could.  I don’t know if it was a sensible or reasonable decision; but it felt like a good idea at the time and years later it still does, so I’m going along with it, still.  I can make my own, so I do.  It was my own decision and I know not one that another person would or could make.
Wearing your clothes inside out for a day may not seem like much at all in the scheme of things, but may make more people aware of the questionable ethics of “fast” fashion.  A day of tweeting to brands may make a difference, and I hope so.  People may treat it like an amusing distraction in an otherwise uneventful working week, but any action that makes people think twice is a good thing.  For me, I do think about the ethics of clothing manufacture a lot but the reality is that the greatest hardship I will undergo today is going without the use of my pockets.  Also, maybe someone will point out that my clothes are inside out, but probably not.  People are quite polite around here  🙂

Details:
Dress; dress M with minor modifications, from the Stylish Dress Book by Yoshiko Tsukiori, red cotton, details here
Cardigan; knitted by me, Jo Sharp fitted cardigan in Soho Summer dk cotton, colour Calico, details here
Scarf; a strip of cotton jersey
Shoes; Bronx, from Zomp shoes

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Patched pockets

20/03/2014 8:20 am \ 42 Comments \

Just to provide further proof of my predilection for unusual clothing … please allow me to present my new skirt.
This skirt is the love-child of four old pairs of jeans.   They were a bit battered but in favourite colours, and had fabric in some areas still in pretty good knick.  Charcoal denim (Cassie’s), olive green corduroy, olive green moleskin and chocolate moleskin (Craig’s).  The chocolate moleskins had previously been nibbled away at to produce the Brown parliament.

The skirt pattern is another offspring of Vogue 8363; yes, the very same as my previous big baggy pockets skirt.  Quite different, yes?!  That’s the beauty of a well-drafted good basic pattern like this one, you aren’t limited to the plain unadorned versions, which obviously have their place in any well-rounded wardrobe too! but my point is that you are only limited by your imagination  🙂
I thoroughly enjoyed making this.  For a start it’s re-using old unwanted textiles, always an activity dear to my heart.  I am in the fortunate position that when my family is tossing out cruddy old clothes they tend to lob them my way first.
And I love puzzles, and making this skirt was a fun puzzle.  This was a joyful and totally engrossing project where I happily zoomed along, cutting out on the laundry floor, up and down, rushing to the sewing machine, the iron; slicing and piecing away without any thought to time passing.  Bliss…

I used the pattern variation that allowed for front slanted pockets, and made whole skirt front and whole skirt back pattern pieces from newspaper, re-drawing the side seams on both front and back to be just slightly more flared and A-line than the pencil lines of the pattern although not quite as pronounced as for my big baggy pockets skirt.  

I unpicked and re-used the waistband from the charcoal jeans and made use of its resident buttonhole although I sewed on a new flat button that won’t dig into the small of my back when I’m sitting back in a chair.  I also re-used the waistband of the chocolate jeans to finish the lower hem, putting its button and buttonhole at the front.  It wasn’t long enough to do the full hemline of the skirt, so I made a filler piece and a few extra belt loops and repositioned all the belt loops to distribute them evenly and hide the joining seams.   I also saved the fly front off the olive green moleskins and re-used it for the skirt closure at the centre back, although retrospectively I’m not in love with this.  It’s quite a bulky fly with a heavy duty jeans zip, but I guess the look of it is in keeping with the whole cobbled together, rough-and-ready look of the skirt.

I cut the patches so as to keep lots of pockets from the various jeans.  The skirt actually has eight pockets in total!… in addition to the two regular slanted front hip pockets that I sewed as part of the pattern; there are two patch pockets, three welt pockets and one curved side pocket in it.  I only did this for fun, for the aesthetics of them, but they are all still functional.

It’s just a bit of silliness really, but I like off-beat random patchwork-y stuff like this  🙂
Inspiration?  Well, I’ve pinned like a tonne of this sort of thing…  this Isabel Marant dress, this mystery jacket, and also Yoshimi’s jeans from a few years ago.  Also, while I was busy laying down patches and switching around different shapes and sizes, this cottage kept popping into my head.   Now a cottage probably seems like an off-the-wall (ha!) inspiration for a skirt, but let me explain; superficially, the re-cycled nature of the materials is an obvious commonality between the cottage and my skirt, as well as artistically, in the random and irregular grid of their design.  And in purpose, pockets in clothing have a correlation to windows in architecture.   Pockets and windows are a visual feature of a thing, but also a functional component of that thing; specifically as an opening to/in their respective objects but not the entry point to that object.  
So in that vein; can one consider a pocketless garment to be like a window-less building; and are zips and button-bands akin to the doors/gates of a building?  
Discuss in one thousand words or less and submit by the end of class.  
(only joking)
Sometimes I think it would be lots of fun to have a group to discuss and dissect clothing and fashion theory; like a book club, only far more frivolous.
(sigh) A pipe dream…
This skirt is another swap item.

Details:
Top; top “a” from shape shape by Natsuno Hiraiwa, white cotton, details here
Skirt; Vogue 8363 modified, made from 4 old pairs of jeans, my review of this pattern here

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Green pleats, please!

17/03/2014 1:57 pm \ 19 Comments \
Hello!  🙂
So
what’s new here?  Just a colour,
really.  My Issey Miyake pleated top (vogue 1142) used
to be a cheerful daffodil yellow, and now it is a murky-lurky, swampy, toxic-waste shade of
green.  Definitely far more me  😉  Hoorah for dye!
Cassie was doing a wardrobe reno: an apricot cardi
plus some black dye equals a new chocolate cardigan! and asked if I wanted the
used black dye-bath for anything before she chucked it out.  I barely gave it ten seconds of thought, just
grabbed this top.  It’s not that I can’t
bear to waste a teeny bit of dye that might still have some oomph in it.. oh well,
yes, maybe there’s that too.  But I
really liked the top and wanted to get it into circulation more.  Yellow is one of “my colours”, but the
brightness was just not working with many bottoms… and furthermore since
I’ve planned a very subdued autumn/winter wardrobe for myself then the bright yellow
top would just continue to not work.  And
on a psychological note, not that I’m overthinking this or anything!  but I think maybe brights are just too daring
for my personality?  I’m a bit of a mouse and perhaps bright yellow should just
be limited to infrequent miniscule doses in my life.
Ha! I reckon I’ve officially just overthought the
whole thing, which is hilarious considering that I didn’t think at all before
plunging the top into that dye-bath!  Lol!

 

Anyway, now the main thing is that now it’s going to
go quite well with the ivories, browns and greens of my swap.
Details:
Top; Vogue 1142, yellow silk over-dyed in a weak, already-used bath of iDye in Black, original details and my review of this pattern here
Skirt; my own design modifications to Vogue8363, cream curtaining fabric, details here and my review of this pattern here

below; before…
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some tops

16/03/2014 5:03 am \ 27 Comments \

I’ve made a couple of new tops lately  🙂

I’ve made this design once before  so I knew I’d like this new one too. It is a modified version of the
loose draped top from drape drape, by Hisako Sato.  Modified in that A; I removing a
wedge of the width in the neckline drape both front and back, so I could fit both pattern pieces
onto my small-ish piece of fabric, and B; this time I made it as a double layered top, since my fabric is so thin it’s thisclose to sheer.  This was a rayon/linen remnant bought from the
Morrison’s fabric sale, a grey-ish ivory/bone colour with a very subtle, paler, knitted-in stripe which barely shows up at all in the pictures!
It’s a basic; but I think it will be quite good with all three of the busy, feature-laden skirts I have made for my autumn/winter swap.  The thing I’m most pleased with is that I got all the seams of the top enclosed inside the two layers; and only had to hand-stitch one short bit of the hemline closed after turning it all through, right
side out.
I’d made Cassie’s Christmas dress the same way only a few months ago, but I still had to stop and
think step by step, how to do the double-layering! so I took pictures and am writing a little how-to on my method so I don’t forget for next time.  Appearing here soon  🙂

 lingerie straps; essential in this design

The next top above: I’m very meh about this one.   It’s amazingly boring and unprepossessing  given that making it has been a freakin’ saga and a half.  This is version two; I first made it as a very big and very loose tunic-y style top.  Valuable time and energy and a piece of fabric was dedicated to making a rather hideous top.  So I fixed it.  And re-made it into a marginally less hideous top.  Yay!
this is the least revolting “before” picture … 

I think it’s that the fabric, a knit remnant from Potter’s Textiles was just not suited to an oversized silhouette, being both heavy and weirdly clingy at the same time.  The combination as a whole was instantly frumpifying, like a hospital gown; or looking like you had to borrow your man’s ratty Tshirt from his gym bag in the car because you’ve ruined your dress, or something.  The exact opposite of chic.   

In anticipation that some kind people might express approval of the “before” version, please know that these are the very least offensive pictures, and let me point out that any vestiges of appeal are probably due to the fact that my hand is in a pocket/on my waist, giving it an appearance of shape that it did not have.  Other photos where it’s hanging straight and loose had the hospital gown/grotty man’s gym Tshirt vibe.  
So I cut out of it my much more fitted, regular tried-and-true custom fit Tshirt.  It’s still pretty blah but least I don’t unequivocally hate it now.
I’m thinking it will be ok for warmth or whatever during winter.  Heck, another layer’s another layer.  We’ll see how it goes!



Details:
Ivory top; the loose drape top, from the Japanese pattern book drape drape by Hisako Sato, ivory rayon/linen
Chocolate top; ultimately, my custom fit Tshirt pattern, chocolate jersey knit
Shorts; Burda 7723, charcoal stretch gabardine, details here and my review of this pattern here

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Big baggy pockets…

24/02/2014 3:11 pm \ 40 Comments \

… with bonus skirt.
It is an unusual skirt, admittedly.  That’s OK.  One description could focus on the fact that it is softly creamy in shade, ever-so-slightly crinkly in texture, interestingly layered in construction, and easily breezily comfortably summery as a whole.  Another could point out that it is made of flippin’ curtaining off-cuts for crying out loud, and features ginormous flappy saddlebag things.  Well let’s not over-romanticise, hmmm?  But I like it, nonetheless.  And I don’t mind curtaining fabric; in fact, one of my most useful and reliable favourites is another curtaining skirt..
I started out with Vogue 8363, a plain, waist-banded pencil skirt with simple variations; and altered it to make it a bit more A-line, cutting the side edges like so; both front and back.  And then added my little added designer-y flight of fancy in the form of those big wrap-around bags.

They are basically sacks; like envelopes or pillowslips, that are sewn within long long extensions of the narrow waistband.  These cross over at the centre back, wrap around my hips and tie loosely at the front.  The skirt closure is the regular kind, by invisible zip in the centre back seam.  
I was inspired by this skirt.  Does anyone else have a go at actually doing something with their pins?  I have pinned LOTS of things, but have only followed through on nutting out making a few.  I have big BIG plans for making tonnes of things from my random unbridled pinnings; but the same ol’ story; so much inspiration, so little time.  And there’s only so many clothes that one can in all good conscience add to one’s wardrobe.  Striking a balance is key, my friends, striking a balance.  However I do feel pretty good about this particular skirt since it’s pretty much a freebie; made from the off-cuts of Cassie’s curtains.  I’d found the absolutely perfect thick calico curtains on super special in Spotlight.  Correction; the fabric was perfect but the top had been made as pencil pleat curtains, which I loathe and detest with a fiery passion.  So I bought them too long and cut off the tops, keeping the hemline intact, and re-sewed the top edge with my preferred triple pleat curtain tape, so they match nearly all the other curtains I’ve made for our house.  And was rewarded with a few pieces of leftover fabric… which I have now put to good use  😉  Double, no… triple win!

Details:
Skirt; a modification of Vogue 8363, thick calico curtaining fabric, my review of this pattern here
Top; the loose drape top slightly modified, from drape drape by Hisako Sato, white crinkly cotton jersey, all details here
Sandals; Franco Burrone, from Marie Claire boutique

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Issey Miyake tucked dress

15/02/2014 5:03 pm \ 48 Comments \

I’ve made a new dress.  Part of that swap-eroonie…. which does seem like a vague dream from the distant past now; but actually upon which progress has happily been made.    *gasp*  *self back-pat*.
My new dress is from an old Vogue Issey Miyake pattern, Vogue 2438, hailing from maybe the late 90’s? I think? I don’t know for sure.  If someone does then please feel free to enlighten me!  (Later edit; 2001)  I bought it through ebay.  The dress is basically a giant, almost shapeless sack of a dress that achieves shaping with a few darts and two big strategically placed folds held in place with snap tape.  You are supposed to arrange the snaps to make the folds more or less pronounced, as desired.  Pretty cool concept, huh?   This is in the same vein to another Issey Miyake dress I have, of black jersey, and is perfectly representational of my desire to make things that look kinda ordinary on first sight but on closer inspection turn out to be just a touch weird and slightly “off”.  Those of us into clothes often see the link between our fashion choices to our personalities; and I think that description pretty much sums up me in a nutshell too  😉

 it’s asymmetrical so the side views are a bit different
there are also darts down each side from the underarm to the hip

This dress is supposed to be made in stretchy fabric too, but scandalously, it is not.  It is a thickish woven cotton, deep chocolate brown with a cream pin-stripe, bought from the Fabric Store in Melbourne about three years ago.  I was so in love with my vision of this particular dress, in this particular fabric that I was just like; oh, recommended fabrics, pfft.   I know I know, such a rebel, tut tut.  The recommended fabric is generally like a primary tenet of dress-making; that thou shalt ignore at thy peril and risk of permanent exclusion from the hallowed halls of sewing Utopia.
O woopsie.  *blush*
Well ok, I didn’t just gratuitously leap in and go for it helter skelter; I did measure to check feasibility.  I sized up, and also altered the snap tape placement to accommodate my shape; in a little bit in at the waist and out a little bit at the hips.  And it all worked out.  In fact it is pretty much exackertackerly just how I wanted it to be, so I’m happy!
the back tuck is on quite a slanted curve

Details:
Dress; Vogue 2438, chocolate/cream stripe cotton
Shoes; Perrini, had for so long I’ve forgotten where I bought them now.

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Alabama Chanin; a tank top

06/02/2014 1:01 pm \ 68 Comments \

Fortunately I have managed to finish the matching embroidered tank top to go with my skirt.  Hurrah! for plane trips and the resulting enforced hand-sewing time!  I’m so happy with the full ensemble; I like how it looks like a full dress, and that if I choose I can break it up into the separate components.  The pattern is the fitted top from the  Alabama Studio Sewing + Style book (Natalie Chanin), and is made from the same fabrics as the skirt; a thickish, cafe au lait cotton jersey substratum (KnitWit) with a dark olive, lightweight jersey overlay (Potters Textiles), the latter stencilled with the Anna’s Garden stencil from the same book as outlined here, and top-stitched with Gutermanns topstitching thread.  

I took a slight swayback wedge out of the tank pattern…. looking at the picture below I could possibly have gone further with that, oh well, next time.  Otherwise it has the same width shoulder straps and the same low rise of the back neckline as the original pattern.  The stitching throughout is in exactly the same style as the skirt; with all seams stitched and flat-felled by hand, and the neckline and armhole binding sewn on using herringbone stitch.

My Mum wanted to know if the jersey fabric loses its stretch though being embroidered; it does lose a little, but not all of its stretch.  The fabric also shrinks ever so slightly through the process of quilting the two layers together. Not drastically, but if your muslin is skintight then I reckon this is definitely something to bear in mind.

OH BTW! a little tip I forgot to mention before… when the pattern pieces have been cut out and stencilled, stay-stitched and are awaiting embellishment; the very first thing I did was to tack a scrap of paper to each piece as above, marking the centre front or centre back of each piece, as applicable.  The pattern pieces for both tank and skirt, are actually all so similar to each other that I think this is an essential precaution!
Well, was it was worth all the hours of hand-work?  But of course.  I’m not going say otherwise now, am I?  😉

Actually, seriously, I totally love my AC pieces and it was no biggie to make the tank top; each pattern piece is quite small and manageable and the embroidery can be knocked off in a couple movies or a short plane trip quite easily.  A little tank top is not really the sewing marathon that the midi skirt is.  I’m even feeling optimistic about taking on another Alabama Chanin project…! (gasp!) um, well… in a while.  Maybe, hehe.  Well, I should really, I bought a whole lot of beads while Mum, Cassie and I were in Melbourne, in a zealous fit of enthusiasm, so hmmm.  (blush)

Details:
Top; the fitted top from the Alabama Studio Sewing + Style book,  hand-embroidered and -stitched cotton jersey knit in two solid colours
Skirt; the midi skirt, same as above, all sewing details here
Sandals; Zomp, from Zomp shoes

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Hayward, in Noro Ayatori

25/01/2014 2:49 pm \ 24 Comments \
Hello!  In further knitting news I have also just finished a comfy new jumper recently.   The pattern is the Hayward, by Julie Hoover, and the yarn is Noro Ayatori; a wool/silk mix, in colour 19; a beautiful variegated collection of raspberry pink, grass green, warm pinky/ivory, mint green and hot chilli pink.  The yarn was a birthday gift to me from the lovely Yoshimi; thank you so much Yoshimi!  

When I was trying to decide what pattern would be worthy of this eye-catching yarn, I remembered an elegant Hayward Yoshimi had knitted for herself and I have to admit I seriously wanted to copy  🙂  I enjoyed wearing my new jumper for the first time on our recent day out in Tokyo together.
And actually Yoshimi also wore her own Hayward that day too!

 

I think this is a very chic style; I like the loose and wide boxiness, the wide unstructured boatneck and the curling up lower edge and neckline.  It’s soooo supremely comfortable!
I knitted mine pretty much to the pattern, the only change I made was to the neckline: I kept all the top stitches live without casting off, and once I had sewn the front back and sleeve pieces together; knitted in the round around the neckline using all live stitches, for 4 rows before casting off loosely.  I did this mostly because I’m lazy and loathe picking up stitches, but really it makes more sense to do it this way since, well c’mon it is so much easier and as well makes for a much smoother seamless look at the neckline.  My jumper is size 48″ (34-36″ bust) and I found it necessary to have eight balls of the Ayatori to complete the jumper with stripe matching at the sides and to have the sleeves identical to each other.
I had already started knitting this last year so unfortunately I cannot include it in my SWAP wardrobe; but it’s going to go very well with all my planned olives and ivories  🙂

Details:
Jumper; the Hayward in Noro Ayatori yarn,col 19, the pattern is available here
Beige high-necked Tshirt (under); Metalicus
Jeans; Burda 7863,white cotton denim, details here and my review of this pattern here
Ski gloves; had for years, can’t remember where they’re from
Snow boots; I bought these from Big KMart in the US, 13 yrs ago!  while we were living there  😀  We come across snow so rarely I expect these will last me forever!
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