Category Archives: Uncategorized

An un-stylish blogger writes about Vogue 8333

08/04/2011 1:27 pm \ 17 Comments \

I didn’t intend to take a photo of today’s outfit, as it was one that I threw together with no intention of looking stylish or put-together.  Purely randomly chosen things.  And I ended up being perversely happy with it.  You know a day where you have a contrary, grumpy, don’t-give-a-toss attitude to how you look… and end up feeling sassily funky and pleased with your unglamorous, even weird ensemble.  All these items I threw on today are individually items I have felt ambivalent with lately.  I didn’t care what I looked like as I was contemplating a day at home, office-ing, and a little bit of muslin-ing.  Yes, people, I am getting along with my muslin of Vogue 8333 and it is proving a doozy.  Not in a good way.  I’ve read before about the dangers of OD-ing on your pattern during the muslin stage, and I am in near danger of doing just this… I have nearly finished my muslin, on which I am trying out all the couture techniques explained within that are new to me, and then I will take a short break before starting on my “real” jacket.  A short break during which I will do some quick-fix fun stuff, instant gratification stuff.  Vogue 8333 is emphatically NOT an instant gratification project.

Details:
Shirt; Burda 8497, white cotton, details here
Skirt; Vogue 7303, green velveteen, details here
Tights; my own design, details here
Cardigan; Metalicus
Thongs; Mountain Designs

Thank you so much Donna, for giving me this award!

Now, I’m to write 7 things, supposedly about myself, but instead for something different I’m going to write about 7 of the couture techniques I’ve learnt doing the muslin for Vogue 8333, which I expect will be a lot more interesting.

1. Bridles.  You could be forgiven for thinking Vogue have inadvertently branched out into horse-riding advice, but no, this is still within the realms of dress-making.  The bridles are a pieces of tape hand-stitched onto the roll line of the lapels in couture jacket construction; to both stabilise the fold and also help create a soft fold.  Giddy-up!

2. Pad-stitching.  Is where you do long lines of running stitches laid out in a grid, or a cross-hatching arrangement.  The result is fabric that is a bit stiffer, like it’s been quilted.  Well, padded.  Thus the name,  Methinks. When one does this to thick wool fabric with some body one can hide the pad-stitches within the fabric somewhat, making them almost invisible.  When one is trialling pad-stitching on a calico muslin like I did, it looks…. kind of ridiculous.  I don’t care.  I will wear my silly looking pad-stitched muslin with pride whence it is done, you’ll see.

3. Taming, (the seam allowances).  If you think that sounds a wee bit kinky, well, in the immortal words of… somebody, the best is yet to come.  Taming the seam allowances within a corner involves folding the two edges of the corner down firmly and closely to each other, pressing into submission and hand-stitching down.  One does not, I repeat, NOT trim triangles away from the corners to remove bulk.  Oh yes, I tell you, we are throwing old ideas out the window in wild abandon with this project, die-hard corner trimmers….  NOT SO FAST with those scissors!

4. Spanking the corner;  ooh, yes, I kid you not, fellow seamstresses.  And you thought sewing was for squares, dried up earnest individuals with no excitement in their lives… well, little did we know about all that “spanking” going on in those couture workrooms!  The Vogue 8333 instructions recommended something called a “clapper”, not owning one of these intriguing sounding tools I used a wooden spatula instead.

5. Fell-stitching.  Well.  Having not done fell-stitching before I googled it and found a little tutorial.  And discovered that I had been fell-stitching, like, only all my life, believing myself to be slip-stitching.  Who knew?  A subtle little distinction…

6. Hand-finished buttonholes.  Hold your horses, before one steamrolls ahead and starts hand-stitching one’s buttonholes, the instructions specify to first wax, and then press the thread.  Yes, press the thread.  Another first.  Has anyone else out there, and I mean anyone, ever ever pressed their thread before?  Hmmm?  Been using un-pressed thread for your buttonholes?  Faaail…

7. Not necessarily a couture technique, but the instructions recommended that once the collar is turned out, and if you are not ready to sew it to the neckline, in order to keep the roll-line nicely folded and in order pin it to a tailor’s ham and set aside.  I couldn’t resist giving it a little face…

Now to give the award to 7 other stylish bloggers, (and please, there is no obligation whatsoever to do this… if you hate blogger awards then feel free to ignore this and don’t hate me)
Darci, of Darcidoodle-do
Liza Jane, of lizajanesews
Steph, of 3 Hours Past the Edge of the World
Magda, of magdamagda design studio
Patty, of the snug bug
Bernice; of Raindrops and Bellyflops
Denise, of dame design studio

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Deep Scarlet socks

07/04/2011 6:53 am \ 7 Comments \

A pair of sockies hasn’t been seen here on the blog for a while, although actually I finished these right at the beginning of March, and then got mired down in the me-made March maelstrom and sort of forgot about them… I know, how could one forget abut twenty hours of knitting, hmmm?  Definitely signs of old age creeping in…
These are knitted using some more of the Morris sock yarn Sam bought for me in Melbourne when he was there on his volleyball tour.  I only have about three balls of this type of yarn left.
The weather is cooling off slightly, yay!  enough that my feet were OK with being encased in socks for a photoshoot.  Hehe, our weather girl announced cheerily last night that as we’re expecting a high of only 24C (75F) we should all dress warmly for today, which made us laugh.  Of course this is not really a cold day at all, but compared to the summer we’ve just had it does feel a bit on the freezing side, hilariously.  Given that only two days ago we had 35C (95F).  And joy, last night it rained, the first rain we’ve had in 67 days.  I was pretty excited to put on a cardigan this morning.  Oh, cardigans, how much I love thee, and have missed thee… and I thoroughly enjoyed walking the dog in the rain this morning.  Truly, no kidding.  Just a little bit of rain has brought a freshness to the air, an environmental sigh of relief if you will.  You can almost hear the gardens cheering.  Even Sienna got excited and sprung along with an extra zing in her step.

Details:
Socks; knitted in Morris Empire Superwash Merino 4ply in Deep Scarlet (col 412) with Beluga (col 430) heels and toes, based on the pattern for Ladies Sockettes in Patons Knitting Book C11, a circa 1960’s publication

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Billowy black shirt, with skulls

06/04/2011 5:04 am \ 32 Comments \

I’ve made a new shirt.
But I can’t do any reviews, because this shirt is based on not one pattern, not even two patterns, but three patterns.  A conglomeration of patterns.  The united states of patterns.  You’ve heard of a meeting of the minds?  This is a meeting of the patterns.  A little bit, hopefully the best, taken out of each and the production of a mongrel, but better, (stronger, faster) shirt…
 I knew in my head exactly what I wanted; I wanted a billowy pirate-y type shirt, inspired by the cute little skull buttons I bought in Japan.  The buttons are miniature silver skulls, but each is wearing a tiny little silver crown, so the shirt had to be not just piratical, but kind of majestic at the same time to make it worthy of these completely wonderful buttons.  Don’t you just love these buttons?  You cannot get buttons like this here… I need to go to Japan more often.
The fabric is a thin self-patterned black cotton/synthetic mix that was one of my Christmas presents, bought by me, for my son to give to me for Christmas (hey, we’re practical when it comes to gift giving around here…)
I’m wearing it hanging out over my skirt here, to show it in its full length with the gently curved hemline on show, but most probably I will wear it tucked in a lot of the time too…
I put the technical details of making the shirt below, if anyone is interested.
Oh, the shoes.  These are my highest heels, at 4 1/2″.  They put me at over 6′.  I adore these shoes, and decided I am going to wear them more often, just because.  Of course I didn’t wear them to walk the dog.  But I wore them to do my other daily and office activities.  They are a lot more comfortable than they appear.

Details:
Shirt; Burdastyle 10-2010-102, collar from Burda 8218, sleeves from Burdastyle 05-2010-101, made of black self-patterned cotton mix with skull buttons bought in Japan
Skirt; Vogue 7303, olive corduroy, to see this skirt styled in 6 different way go here
Shoes; Kron by Kron Kron, bought online

The shirt; so it’s probably pretty complicated so you can skip this technical stuff unless you really want to reproduce this for yourself…  like a lot of seamstresses I like to take a little bit from here and a little bit from there, and manipulate the patterns I have to get the look I want..
I saw this lovely graceful classic shirt pattern 102 in Burdastyle magazine 10/2010 (right, top) and liked its loosely elegant body with no body darts or shaping. But I wanted a shawl collar rather than the classic one in the pattern, thus the hunting down and finally locating Burda 8218, the only shawl collared shirt pattern available here in Perth, or so it seemed… and for the sleeves, I wanted something gathered and billowy, but three quarter length, so used the lower part of the bell-shaped gathered sleeve from the dress pattern 101 from Burdastyle 05/2010 (right, lower).  To cut the sleeve cap to fit into the armscye of the shirt pattern, I laid down the sleeve pieces from the shirt pattern 102, to get the sleeve cap part of the sleeve right.  It is a two piece sleeve, but I just laid them together with the stitching lines abutting.  The other sleeve from the dress pattern 101 I laid down on top with the underarm points matching those of the shirt sleeve pattern, and just used this to cut out the arm part of the sleeve with the bellshaped hemline (see below), and I also used the sleeve cuff from the same dress pattern 101.  Except when I had finished the shirt, the sleeves didn’t sit exactly how I envisioned, they sagged a bit low and I really wanted for them to look really billowy and like they were pushed up to the elbow permanently.  So I added an in-sleeve tab on the sleeve seam which pulls the sleeves up to gather just that little more fully and gracefully at just below elbow length and sit up right where I want them.  I only had five of the skull buttons so I had to use different buttons here, these are purply-grey natural shell buttons.
The shawl collar, well, obviously I used the collar pattern pieces from Burda 8218, and cut the shirt front facings, front neckline edge and back neckline edge to match those of this pattern, otherwise the collar wouldn’t have fitted… This only took a little bit of adjustment and it was not difficult at all to match the collar from one shirt pattern to the different body of the other shirt pattern.
Et voila.

(the sleeve at left; the two shirt sleeve pieces underneath were laid together along the stitching line to get the sleeve cap, at left, and the lower edge of the sleeve piece was cut off at the curved hemline of the piece on top)
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An early project…

05/04/2011 4:41 am \ 8 Comments \

Once I mentioned here one of the earliest things I made that I still have, a pincushion.  And I thought maybe it deserved a post of its own as it is so funny to me to look at it now!
I made this when I was about seven, a gift for my grandmother.  Each wonky stitch is lovingly and painstakingly hand done by me; two fabric squares joined together with overstitches of different shades and thicknesses of green thread.  The word “PINS” is done in double running stitch, alternating the dashes in pink and green thread.
It is stuffed with a rather scant amount of something that has gone a bit lumpy, probably cotton wool or something like, knowing me and my “make-do” crafting ethic.
When my grandmother passed away I inherited her sewing basket along with everything in it, and I rediscovered this little thing that she had obviously kept and used for the twenty or so years that she had had it.  Granny used it for needles not pins, so I do too now.  The fact that she lovingly preserved and treasured it has imbued it with an extra specially important significance to me. 
What’s the earliest thing you remember making, and do you still have it?

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Fool’s Gold

03/04/2011 10:47 am \ 17 Comments \

Last night we went to an April Fool’s party, dress code: well of course, something to do with “fool”!
So I remembered this skirt that I made about three years ago… guess what I went dressed as?  Oh, yeah, the answer is up there in the title, hehe.
Ironically I originally made the skirt for another dress-up party at the same friends’ house; the theme that time being “glitterati”  I’m so glad I kept it!
It hasn’t been seen here on the blog before.  Obviously I don’t wear it much, hehe.  Not much call for this sort of thing in my everyday life.  
Funny story, the last time I wore it, for the glitterati party, I had to nip out halfway to pick up our daughter from a school event, and it just happened to also be the day of the annual Perth Christmas Pageant, streets lined with people all watching the pageant, hundreds of people, nay thousands of people, or that’s what it felt like.  Naturally Murphy’s law had it that our daughter had to be picked up from the very middle of town, requiring me to park a little further away than I would have ideally liked, and walk the rest of the way to where she was waiting… you get the picture.  There’s me, looking at best like an act, a performer straight from the pageant; at worst a streetwalker who has lost her way and wandered in amongst decent law-abiding families sitting with their small children… embarrassed!  I felt like I was running the gauntlet and yes, I got some very funny looks, and a few wolf whistles, the last not something that happens to me very often any more I can assure you…
The skirt is made using my old favourite, Vogue 7303, out of that cheap stuff that has thin plastic shiny foil circles glued all over it.  Surprisingly easy to sew; those foil thingies are just like thin cellophane and the needle punches through very easily.  I inserted an invisible zip in the left side seam, and hand-sewed the coffee coloured lining all around the inside edges.  The skirt has a big slit up the right hand side, going up to just above knee level, partly so I can actually walk in it, partly just to add another element of something fun and party-ish otherwise it is a pretty ordinary shape.
I wore it with my gold chain belt, worn as a necklace here.
(btw, this is not photoshopped or anything.  The golden glow in my photo is courtesy of the light of the setting sun)

Details:
Skirt; based on the basic shape of Vogue 7303, synthetic gold glittery stuff
Camisole; Country Road
Cardigan; Picnic
Sandals; Sachi, some little shop in Melbourne
Necklace; my own design, tutorial here
Bag; Glomesh, found secondhand
Sunnies; RayBan
Nail varnish; undercoat of One Voice OPI, top coat of Golden Peach, Nailfinity

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Me-Made March, a summary

01/04/2011 3:54 pm \ 10 Comments \

I thought I would summarise some of my thoughts on the Me-Made March challenge…
well, it was a challenge.  I made things more complicated for myself (ha, what’s new) by starting with vague thoughts not to repeat any garments, and then ended up following through on that.  So, once I had worn something for the month, I kind of shoved it over to the right hand side of my wardrobe, and tried to make new outfits out of things that hadn’t been worn yet that month… I think this worked sometimes better than other times.  On some occasions I had a complete outfit worked out in my head and then spontaneously grabbed completely different things instead.  Nearly every morning however I approached my wardrobe having no idea what I should wear that day…

I identified holes in my wardrobe, namely I don’t have a lot of me-made tops.  Funnily, I identified the same problem after Self-Stitched September and tried to rectify it, so don’t know what happened with that.  I guess a lot of my tops I couldn’t wear because of the heat.
Three of my dresses (pictured below) have migrated over to Cassie’s wardrobe.  I’m fine with that.  That is life.  I know they are there if I need them, although I’ve kind of mentally said goodbye to them and am already planning replacements.  And really she looks so much better in them than I do!  That’s the reality of having a teenage daughter…

Part of the difficulties lay in the weather; and here are some statistics to bore you with; and I’m not having a whinge but just stating the facts here
1.  Perth has officially just had the hottest March on record, yes, a record high month since they even started keeping records in the 1880’s.  This added quite a degree of difficulty to my clothing options, jeans and even a lot of my dresses, shirts and long-sleeved tops were out of the picture!  Well, only a difficulty because of the self-imposed no-repeat thing… 
2. We had a completely dry March; this has happened only six times before in our recorded history.  In fact, we haven’t had even one raindrop for 60 days, and there is still no rain expected in the foreseeable future!  Well, actually to be honest that didn’t affect Me-Made March at all, just thought I’d mention it just because… well, just because.
Soooo, that’s it.  It was fun, and that’s the main thing right?

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The dress that wanted to be a skirt

31/03/2011 4:12 am \ 19 Comments \

This skirt was originally a dress.  I posted about my dissatisfaction with it here, and Terri brilliantly commented that she thought this dress wanted to be a skirt.  Well, that revelation was like a bucket of cold water over my head.  Oh, I mean that in a good way, actually in this weather, a bucket of cold water over the head could be a very welcome thing.  I mean it was like I woke up and looked at the dress with new eyes and saw that yes, it did indeed want to be a skirt.  Thank you , Terri!
Was able to fashion some facing out of the old bodice, luckily.  I cut off the top of the invisible zip and held the top ends of the same over a candle flame to melt the top couple of plastic spiky zip bits into a biggish round blob, so the zip pull won’t come flying off the top when I pull the zip up.  Yikes, has anyone else ever ever done this??  I have, once, years ago by accident, and learnt my lesson, never ever take that risk again.  Re-attaching the zip pull back onto an invisible zip is NOT FUN!   
Aaaand bob’s your uncle.  New (very) high-waisted skirt.  I think I like this style, especially worn with my husband’s white linen shirt tucked in, and all oversized at the top, setting off the slimline-ness of the skirt.  It is Craig’s shirt, but I am allowed to wear it this month, since I made it.  But poor Craig.  Perhaps I should make myself my own oversized crisp white linen shirt, so I don’t need to go hijacking his all the time…

Details:
Shirt; Burda 7767 with minor modifications, white linen, details here
Skirt; Burda 8071, the skirt part only, faced at the top; embroidered silk

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Brighty tighty

30/03/2011 5:26 am \ 19 Comments \

Me-Made March, Day 30
I’m not 100% feeling this outfit.  Both the top and the skirt are getting old and have been kicking around in my wardrobe for a few years… both were part of my earlier plan to inject some colour into my life when I first started this blog.  I’m not sure how that’s panned out for me.  I feel a little conspicuous whenever I wear bright colours, so maybe they are not for me after all.  And combining two really bright vigorous colours like in this outfit is really pushing my comfort barrier…!
Actually, I’d forgotten how much I liked this skirt with its sharp kick pleats.  They lend such an old-fashioned ladylike air to an skirt, no?  Maybe I should bring it back into regular rotation.
And although I’ve enjoyed this month-long me-made challenge …. just one day to go!  (squeee!)  My camera will be glad of a break!

Details:
Top; Butterick 4985, orange polkadot print cotton, refashioned from a costume skirt here
Skirt Vogue 1023 shortened, some turquoise synthetic stuff, details here
Sandals; la soffitadi Gilde, from Zomp shoes
Nail varnish; Santorini Sunset

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