Tag Archives: Tights/leggings

New (not) khaki leggings

02/09/2013 1:41 am \ 34 Comments \
Hello  🙂
I’m still renovating my wardrobe… and can I just say, beige leggings, hmmm.  (shudder) I’d taken a hearty dislike to mine over recent weeks.  But they still had some wear in them.  Wasteth not, wanteth not.  It was really just the colour that had become offensive to my eyes.   Corrective action was called for.  
To the dye pot!!! 
(spoken in the same tone as one says “to the bat cave!” of course!)
Before…
the transformative materials…
I used only a shake (that’s an official unit of measurement there) each of iDye in Brown and Chartreuse.  Probably a pinch at the most, plus heaps of salt.  Pinch, heaps;  some other highly technical terms.  Trust me, I’m an analytical chemist!

And now they are no longer hideous to my eyes, they have a new lease on life  🙂
my tutorial on dyeing

Details:
Leggings; self-drafted of beige cotton knit, dyed khaki, originally posted here
Tshirt; self-drafted, grey knit stuff, details here
Dress; the gathered hole dress from Pattern Magic by Tomoko Nakamichi, charcoal suiting, details here

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Bright roses, tops n tights

08/07/2013 5:58 am \ 39 Comments \

Y’ello  🙂
I’ve been making stoof.  Please bear with me while my photo-taking catches up…
Firstly, my new top of stretchy cotton sateen.  I must be dreaming of spring already, I think!
This is a stash-busting success story.  I fell deeply in love with this autumnal gold/orange/scarlet/khaki rose-print fabric from Tessuti’s in Melbourne last year, and threw down my credit card with blithe abandon.  So my colours!  Close-up, the print has that slightly scratchy spotty appearance of an old polaroid.  Love it.
Difficulties arose when I got home and had to come to terms with the fact that for some dumb reason I had bought only 70cm.  I have no excuse for this insanity. Yes, I was an idiot.  I’m blaming that state of mad fabric drunkenness brought on by places like Tessuti’s.  Note to self:  get at least a metre from now on.
So I made a simple little pull-on Tshirt top because fortunately you don’t need much metrage for this style.  This is the bodice from a dress pattern, Burda style magazine 08/2009, 128; elongated a bit.  I have made this pattern up twice before, firstly as a dress and then as a top just like this one, so I already know how much I love this flattering boat-neck style.  It has bust darts in the front and two long vertical darts in the back for shaping.  No zip or closure is needed because the neck opening is wide enough so that you can just pull it on over your head.

I could not make the sleeves as long as the pattern intended, as in my previous two versions.  This is the very longest I could get from out of my meagre piece.  I would really prefer them to be about 12cm longer, but meh.  I can cope.

Details:

Top; Burdastyle magazine 08/2009; 128 modified to be a top, stretchy cotton sateen, my review of this pattern here
Skirt; Burdastyle 10/2010, 136 (the Karl Lagerfeld skirt) lengthened, black suiting gabardine, details and my review of this pattern here
Shoes; Django and Juliette, from Zomp shoes
Some notes on the finishing details for this top:

The neckband is finished with facings.  I always always under-stitch facings on a garment that I wish to look sorta dressy, or just not-so casual.  Top-stitching always makes things look a bit more “casual” imo, and often you want an edge that smoothly and cleanly rolls under to the inside, with no top-stitching or anything visible on the edge.  Under-stitching (the red stitching in both photos below) always provides a nice clean and minimal look on the outside; and safeguards against facings popping up and out.

After under-stitching, the facings are stitched to the sleeve cap seam allowances just inside the previous sleeve cap stitching, and stitched-in-the-ditch down to the shoulder from the right side of the garment, to hold them firmly in place.  

But wait, there’s more…

While I am really enjoying wearing my crazier leggings and tights, I guess we all agree that plain black tights are kinda the most useful type to have, and a must for winter, right?  So I made a second pair identical in every way to my previous pair.  I am wearing these in the photo above too.
And I have made two little Tshirts too, one for me, and one for my husband, both self-drafted and custom-fit, using the very last of my 100% merino wool stash, bought from the Fabric Store in Melbourne last year.  Now we have matching his-and-hers thermal tops, haha.  Quelle romantic, non?

Random picture of the neckband, constructed using this method.  Appearing here for no better reason than for me to feel good about the increasingly better finish I am achieving nowadays.  The centre back is still a wee bit bobbly thanks to the extra thickness of fabric in the joining seam there, but it’s getting there.  Practise is benefiting the quest for perfection!
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Paprika tights; 6 different ways

05/07/2013 11:44 am \ 32 Comments \

Hmmm, a better name for these posts would be 6 different outfits, since there’s only one “way” you can wear most things, and particularly something like a pair of tights!  Oh well, I’ve been using this title for too long and it’s too late to change now  🙂
I made these tights only recently just before the start of winter, using my own custom-fit pattern.  They are um, quite bright, and I worried a little bit that they would be too bright for my mishmash of a wardrobe. I should not have, because there’s nothing like a spot of spicy crazy colour to pep up a drab winter-y colour scheme.  And I’ve been pretty happy at how easily these garish things have fitted in!
So here are some of the outfits they have cheered up over the past few weeks…

Below: at left; orange and ivory white seems like a very summery colour scheme, but it works beautifully in winter as well.  Worn with a burnt orange skirt, a long-sleeved white blouse, ivory cardigan, and caramel boots.  At right; near opposites on the colour wheel, orange is a natural pairing with blue.  Worn here with a blue cotton dress and a blue Pattern Magic cardigan.

paprika1a
Below; at left; worn with a light grey ensemble, a little grey skirt, white drape-y top adds a slice of fresh white, and with a light grey Pattern magic top.
at right; on a super frosty morning I needed gloves! and put together a light brown and charcoal ensemble.  Worn with a charcoal top, a darker charcoal skirt, brown knitted cardigan, beluga knitted gloves, knitted socks (not seen) and my charcoal and brown twisting cable knitted scarf.
paprika2a
At left; I used be completely allergic to the very idea of wearing brown and orange together, probably a symptom of growing up in the seventies.  I’ve got over that now plus these browns are very deep and rich in tone and the orange is strong and spicy.  Worn with my dark chocolate f-leather jacket, a black Tshirt (not seen), my sludge-y little skirt and chocolate boots.  At right; and this is the outfit I am wearing today  🙂 I am wearing a striped Tshirt (not seen), ivory skirt, a long-sleeved woolly Tshirt (reading as grey in this picture here but it is actually mossy green), hand-knit socks (not seen), a creamy, hand-knit Moebius scarf and biker boots.
paprika3a
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Black tights and striped Tshirt

29/05/2013 6:05 am \ 42 Comments \

So yesterday I mentioned I would need some black tights to see me through winter… well I made some, tout de suite.  Nothing like striking while the iron is hot! 
I used some lovely fine-knit black merino wool fabric, bought from the Fabric Store in Melbourne during our last visit, and my own self-drafted pattern.  Yah, nothing else to say about these really.  There’s no doubt I will wear them tonnes and tonnes.  I’m making a promise to myself that I will still wear my more colourful and interesting tights at least as frequently.

I also made a new striped Tshirt too; since my old navy and white striped Tshirt has been worn so much it’s had it and is now my PJ top.  I decided that a striped Tshirt, like the black tights, is another “need” for my wardrobe.  A must-have.  I know I know *cringe* must-have lists are a dime a dozen and sometimes appear to encompass everything under the sun: but I believe it takes time and trial and error to work out what really constitutes a must-have for an individual.  I think that these two pieces are both must-haves in the wardrobe, for me  🙂
I used my custom fit Tshirt pattern, (the pattern that used to be Burdastyle magazine 06/2011, 120, altered completely beyond recognition), and a white and grey striped cotton jersey from Fabulous Fabrics.   I stabilised the shoulder seams with Seams Great, many thanks to velosewer for this  :).  The raw edges of the sleeve and lower are overlocked, then folded under once and stitched with a twin needle, taking care to have the stitching inside and out appearing within the white stripe.  

For the neckband; instead of a vertical or bias striped band, this time I decided I wanted the clean look of a plain white band.  So carefully cut the strip and folded and basted it so the band is the exact width of the white stripe.  The thinner grey stripe appears just inside the fold.
I attached the neckband using this method, and topstitched the seam allowance down to the body of the garment afterwards.

min 9C, max 20C, sun, cloud and a smidge of rain today!

Details:
Tshirt; self-drafted, khaki and white striped cotton jersey
Skirt; Burda style magazine 10/2010, 136 modified, (the Karl Lagerfeld skirt) black suiting mix, details and my review of this pattern here
Tights; self-drafted, black merino wool knit: my tutorial for drafting your own custom fit tights pattern is here
Shoes; Django and Juliette, from Zomp shoes

in my family’s mmm13 today; Sam is wearing this hoodie, and Cassie is wearing these handknit socks.

Sam’s hoodie; self-drafted, blue/grey cotton jersey, details here
Cassie’s socks; handknit by me to a 60’s pattern, 2ply wool, details here

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Paprika legs

28/05/2013 6:38 am \ 31 Comments \

I have made some new tights! and now I have paprika legs.  You know, paprika, the hot n’ spicy stuff.
I like the idea of hot spicy legs  😉  you see, my initial impulse was to go with “oompa loompa” legs, but it seemed a little… er, silly?  Ridiculous?  Too close to the bone?!  I prefer the poetry of paprika!
Taking part in me-made May has once again taught me that I have plenty of me-made clothes.  So much that I really don’t need to be sewing fripperies for myself.  I am going to devote myself from now on to sewing two types of things: challenging sewing, for fun and self-fulfillment; and replacement or maintenance sewing, making essential things that I actually really need.
This is part of the latter.
The colourful RTW tights and leggings I was wearing last year and the year before have finally gotten hole-y enough to be embarrassing and are now retired to become pool-socks.  You know, when stockings get old you use them to put powdered pool chemicals in, tie off and then sit them in the swimming pool.  So the chemicals can dissolve slowly without getting hoovered up by the creepy crawly. 
I bought this rich burnt orange polyester knit last year, specifically for tights when the time came. 
I used my own self-drafted pattern, and the piece was big enough to squeak out two pairs.  So I made one pair from each of the “sides” so one pair is marginally darker and redder, and the other pair is lighter, a bit more “pumpkin” than red.  The differences are very slight.  The pair I am wearing here is the left-hand “redder” pair.  I figure I will wear these exclusively until they get a hole, and then I can start on the reserve pair.

Verdict: well, the colour is bright but I LOVE it, and think it will fit in beautifully with my autumnal colour scheme.  I think cheerful tights will always have a place pepping up the sombre drab neutrals, the blacks, charcoal and browns that are the backbone of my winter wardrobe.  So these will be useful.
Now, I just need a black pair, and I think I will be all set for a me-made, warm legged winter….  🙂

Details:
Tights; self-drafted using my own tutorial for making custom fit tights, rusty orange polyester knit
Top; half of a self-drafted twinset, leopard print knit, details here, and see this twinset styled in 6 different ways here
Dress; the gathered hole from Pattern Magic, charcoal fabric, details here
Shoes; Francesco Morichetti, from Zomp shoes

in my family’s me-made efforts today; Craig is wearing this shirt again, Cassie is wearing these hand-knit socks, and Sam is wearing this shirt…

Craig’s shirt; Burda 7767, striped cotton with yellow facings, details here
Cassie’s socks; knitted by me to a 60’s pattern, 2ply wool, details here
Sam’s shirt; Burda 7767 modified, navy and white check fabric, details here

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Spiral leggings

10/08/2012 2:26 am \ 43 Comments \

From my first flick-through
the book I always knew this project was a must-make… the spiral leggings on p
52 of Pattern Magic 3, by Tomoko Nakamichi.
The design is, like so many
in the Pattern Magic series, excessively cool.  A sorta a-ha design; seemingly simple and obvious when you see it laid out like this, but nonetheless innovative and edgy.
I know I’ve raved about the
Pattern Magic books ad nauseum over and over again before, but just allow me
just another small rave… every time I attempt something from Pattern Magic I feel
like I learn something new and profound about sewing and fabric
manipulation.  OK, OK, I know several of the designs
in the book are barely wearable, true; but they are without exception exciting
and forward-thinking.  The process is
about thinking outside of the box, getting out of the rut.   The designs are never
predictable, and never ho-hum,  I
love this sort of innovation in my sewing as well as in my wardrobe!
above 2 pictures from Pattern Magic 3
The fabric I used is a deep purple-grey, synthetic stretch knit from Fabulous Fabrics.   Actually, I bought this fabric specifically for this
project, it is exactly what I wanted.   I bought this fabric with my birthday gift voucher,
from a group of my friends; the other piece I bought with this voucher became
my red dress, and I still have some more of this grey stretch left too, to make
something else.  I have the best
friends! 
above; mine
I drew up the paper pattern
but there was lots of fiddly diddling.  I
needed legs both wider and a lot longer than the dimensions stipulated in the
book!  Well, that’s hardly
surprising, really 🙂  Also I mentioned my fabric was exactly what I wanted? well it was, but there was only
one small problemmo… the fabric stretched just one way, not two.  Or is that two-way, not four-way?? I
can never get that right.  But
you’re getting my drift here I hope….
My point is that the “girth”
of the leggings stretches around my legs in some but only some parts of the
spiral.  A minor technical complication…
I also made minor modifications
to the style of the leggings: as follows:
The pattern is for straight-ish
legs with very little tapering; and after the first try-on I decided that I wanted mine to be a lot
more tapered, to be skinnier around my calves and ankles.  It’s probably hard to
tell from the pics but I can assure you they are substantially skinnier than
the book version!
The other style adjustment
which is probably easier to distinguish between the two, is that my
leggings are form-fitting and “rumple-less” about my hips, while the ones pictured on the model in the book have the rumples going all the
way up the side of each hip, right up to the waistband.  Since I wanted to wear mine not as
pants, but as leggings underneath a dress or skirt, I wanted for the top part
to be tight and smooth and have no rumply bits that would bunch up to make my
hips look falsely lumpy and bumpy underneath a dress.  I prefer for my hips to look smooth and streamlined, not
lumpy and bumpy, thank you very much 
🙂   Just
a personal preference there, of course 
;D
Consequently I drafted and
sewed the top part of the leggings to fit my abdomen snugly.  I cut a tall waistband to be 3cm shorter than my natural waist measurement and attached the waistband to the top edge
using this method with no elastic, and they sit up quite securely and
comfortably and don’t feel like they are going to slip down.
I hemmed using the twin needle on my sewing machine, instead of the band suggested in the book.
All in all, because of my 1(2?) way stretch issue and desire for a skinny-leg modifications; I probably tried these on, pinned, took them off, did a bit of basting and tried them on again… at least a dozen times over; but y’know what? I’m perfectly satisfied.  Last year I devised and made
a pair of leggings I dubbed scrumpled leggings, and these ones are satisfyingly even more scrumply!
Details:
Leggings; from p 53 of Pattern
Magic 3 by Tomoko Nakamichi, made of grey synthetic stretch knit
Dress; body &soul, a
thing I’ve had for about twelve years.  I
probably should copy this one over again, I love it so.  One of those RTW things that I love so
much I probably never will part with it!
Shoes; Perrini, had these
for even longer than the dress, probably 20 years!
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Scrumpled leggings

19/08/2011 6:13 am \ 16 Comments \

Ta da!  Scrumpled leggings!  You like?  I do!
And I think they fit in very nicely with my current seasonal aim of dressing to suit the natural colours and textures of my environment…
I know this is not a new look.  In fact I had a vague sense of deja vu when I first popped on my new scrumpled leggings… and went off to check, sure enough, here are some Comme des Garcons leggings from 2005 that I can remember being quite interested in when I first spied them in a Vogue magazine.  Yup six years ago… back then I wasn’t into making my own leggings, thinking they would be way too hard.  Little did I realise then how easy leggings are to make!  Also this kind of raaather avant garde stuff never ever ever appeared in a store here so I never bought some for myself.  Perth is kinda sleepy, you see.  Fashion-wise we are slowly waking up, but Harajuku we are not…
Speaking of, when Cassie and I had our fun day out with Yoshimi and Novita in Tokyo, as we parted ways Yoshimi pointed us in the direction of the Mitsukoshi department store, where we had a fabulous eye-opening hour or so oohing and aahing over fashion the likes of which are almost unknown around here. Unknown that is apart from some very expensive European clothing in certain boutiques…  Anyhoo Cassie found a pair of scrumpled leggings like these, and we thought they were so fun and different we bought some.  You’re wondering why I didn’t buy any for myself? well the leggings situation in Tokyo is the same as the shoes situation, if you are taller than 5’6 or have larger than a size 38 shoe, then forget about it…
But scrumpled leggings had entered my radar once more…
And recently shams posted about a pair of leggings than she described as “pooled” because they ended up so long, and she liked them that way so left them long.  I liked them that way too.. and thus fully re-awakened my latent desire for a pair of scrumpled leggings…
Super easy.
I used my own pattern that I drafted to fit me, but cut the legs pieces to have about an extra 20cm length from the ankle down, and in a less tapered shape than I had drafted for a tight legging, probably by about 1-2cm wider at the ankle point.  Sorry, inexact measurements I know,the truth is I was kinda winging it…
After sewing up the inner leg seams (simply whizzed on the serger in a matter of seconds!) I cut two roughly 27cm lengths of 6mm elastic.  These were zig-zagged to the inside of the inner leg seam from just below my knee level down to 2cm from the bottom.  Then I just hemmed the lower edge as normal by folding up the lower leg edge by 1cm twice to sit over the elastic and zig-zagged the hem.

(Comme des Garcons leggings at right, image from Vogue Australia Sept 2005, photo by Willy Vanderperre)

Details:
Leggings; my own design, beige knit stuff, from my own tutorial of making your own custom fit leggings here
Top; Ezibuy
Dress; drafted from “Pattern Magic” by Tomoko Nakamichi, of charcoal wool mix, details here
Shoes; Francesco Morichetti, from Zomp shoes

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A leopard print daughter…

05/08/2011 2:10 am \ 23 Comments \

We bought enough of this gorgeous leopard print stretchy stuff in lovely caramels and warm golden brown shades to make this little Cat-girl set; Cassie made the Tshirt herself, drafting her own design based on a Tshirt she already has and that fits her well, and I made the leopard print leggings using my own pattern.
The side and armhole seams of the Tshirt are overlocked, and Cassie hand slip-stitched the lower and sleeve hems, and the neckline down in place.
Theoretically, the leggings were made to my pattern and so fit me too, but I’m doubtful I have the edge factor to pull these off! … they will be living permanently in Cassie’s collection.

Details:
Tshirt; made by Cassie to her own design, print stretch stuff
Leggings; made by me to my own design, leopard print stretch stuff, my tutorial on making your own custom fit leggings here
Denim skirt; Just Jeans
Boots; bought in Japan… tres cool, no?

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