Quickie : Shirring

Up until last week, I didn't know I could shirr with my machine. I don't know I'll be using this technique a lot, but I am quite happy to have learned a new trick... which I quickly passed on to the lovely young lady who comes everyday to learn. 

I may have created a monster because all day, yesterday, she painstakinly, very slowly made rows and rows of shirring to make a dress like this one, which is really a 2 hour project if you are not a beginner.

There is no pattern to this dress, it's a square. Measure your bust, double the measure, in my case I took the entire 150cm width (where I realised the cheap fabric I bought had been printed on a slant) made a baby hem on top and used this excellent very simple shirring video. I made a side seam, a 4cm hem and I was ready to hit the beach in style. Just so you know, I took off 25cm in length after seeing this picture!

Just imagine this knee-lenght

She was shinning with glee when she finished, I found it extremely moving as I made a Ratatouille-like flashback to being 16 and felt her joy and pride. She has some of the qualities it takes to make a seamstress : extreme patience, some stubbornness, some pickiness and a steady hand. I wish her a gazillion little perfect stitches and hundreds of well-worn handmade garments.

Belted : Vogue 9133

What a difference a belt makes!

Remember this one? I finally got around to take the scraps and make a belt for it. I knew it would make a difference but I didn't expect the dress would become more comfortable to wear!

I am such a procrastinator, it took me a year to make what I made in a half hour before lunch on the counter top! Now I like it so much, I am going to make little belt loops!

In other news, I've been making slow progress on the Burda 7517 dress. I am showing the lovely young ladies next door how to follow a pattern but, I can't really say I am teaching them how to sew as it would be a misnomer, there is very little sewing being done here, lots of unpicking and recutting very shifty material and starching and said dress NOT looking like the envelope and general headaches caused by working with a pattern with no dots and marks. I don't know that they'll learn anything from this experience except patience. I should have made a cotton skirt!

Is there a tutorial for marking a Burda pattern properly? I could use one if I am to use their patterns again. You girls and boys get such lovely results out of them and all I have so far is a raging headache!

Queued : Chloe Vogue 2074

I have had this pattern forever, and I'd pretty much given up on ever making it, due to a complete failure on finding the right fabric and general lack of a social life where one would wear such a pretty dress until yesterday, when I saw this polyester voile in the bargain bin at the local Myrtille.

I didn't know how much I needed, so I took whatever was left of it, about double the yardage, but who cared? It was €1,50 a meter! Don't hold your breath, I will not make it right away, but it'll be ready for the Christmas-New-Year party season, when, no doubt I'll be overdressed once again.

Winner(s)

It's about time!

Pattern Junkie and I laughed out loud when we read Marylin's comment. So the bronzer and teeth whitening nightmare is being sent her way.

She is not the only one who won something. Last week, BurdaStyle had a twitter Selvege giveway and I won!

I am sure I will love it as I have checked their site many times for inspiration and all I have seen is some kind of beautiful. Check it out!

  

Sewing For two : The Pertegaz Hybrid

Rocking in LA, Giles Peterson spinning tunes.

You know you've been sewing a long time when you start to refashion stuff you've made.

These skirts were made for the trip to Japan that my sister and I never made. Ten years went by, lots of wear, wash, a tear and the tight, stretch cotton, 4 pannel generic Butterick patterned skirts started showing underwear lines due to new fat deposits on the waist, gravity, flab and assorted age related occurences. They could no longer be worn as they were.

I don't mind the age, but I do mind ill fitting clothes on me. Other people can do whatever they want, I won't judge, it's way too time consuming! As a consequence of trying to fit so many garments, you end up caring very much about curving outward bulging stuff for yourself. 

Enter inspiring Pertegaz' Vogue Couturier 2567. Can you see me coming? Yep! I "Pertegazed" the skirts.

And got to look at this amazing pattern piece. Not scratch my head puzzling, but certainly interesting construction-wise. 

I lowered the waist, made a new waistband for comfort and drew this piece, which drapes the a-line a lot better than if I had used a straight on the grain strip of fabric as I intended, made the zipper invisible and got two really fun summery skirts.

Lets see how many more years we get out of these!

Refashion Master

I am refashioning at the moment and I just very quickly wanted to point you to my refashion master : Marisa from New Dress A Day.

This crazy woman, meaning extremely enthusiastic of course, says she needed a creative challenge and decided it would be a great idea to whip up 365 items of clothing, for $365 dollars in 365 days. So armed with her scissors and her machine, she turns the like of that into this every single day!  

Or that, 

Into this : 

Check out her blog, it's turbo charged with inspiration daily. 

Overdressed

I just purchased Burda 7517 (hot results here). It's another attempt at sewing Burda, which I invariably find difficult to sew. But hey! this one has pictures inside with their criptic un-spell-checked French instructions! So I am going to give it a try once again. 

This of course is part of my ongoing attempt to make stuff I wear everyday. But in reality, I want to sew this, from Chanel's Haute Couture collection.

Now where would I wear this I ask you? For, hear my lamentations here, nobody dresses for anything anymore, so I am always overdressed. Even at a recent funeral where I thought it appropriate to wear black when it turned out, nobody else was or, at a recent baptism where I was to become godmother to a wonderful little girl, in the green satin suit that you can see here in action, where people wore jeans. 

Oscar Wilde said: "You can never be overdressed or overeducated." I have lived by that, but really, wouldn't my sewing life be more fun if I was to make this Dior number in pink terrycloth to go to the beach instead?

The Week Of Plenty : Take 2

Sychronicity!

The day I wrote my second post, my sister said she'd picked up a Mondrian themed knitting magazine from 1977. St-Laurent was soooo ahead of it's time, that it took 11 years to trickle down to the mainstream.

I am not going to make this, knitting sweaters for Brittany weather is usless, it's never really cold, cardigans are warm enough and it rains a lot so I have been thinking about raincoats and a nice red wool coat for everyday wear this winter.

This one, from Armelle's vintage patterns collection, is a raincoat contender. I picked it up because I like the way the welt pockets are included into the princess seams. There is only one slight problem with  it. It's got no instructions! They probably were in the magazine that the pattern was mail ordered from. So I am looking for the March 1967 issue of Modes & Travaux no.795. Or if any of you knows how to do this, because I don't think I can make my own instructions for that pocket.

A quick look inside brought a big surprise, the pattern was stamped! A handmade pattern! 

The Week Of Plenty

What an amazing week!

My friend Armelle let me look into her treasure box of French vintage patterns and I almost fainted. This one is dated 1936 and is for a "combinaison", a slip if you will. I love that all the instructions are on the enveloppe. It's brand new, uncut and I wanted to wear gloves while holding it.

Though not quite the same period, I think it would be a great undergarment for Cathy's new dress!

For myself, I borrowed this one, from Modes & Travaux. I love the collar and I'll be making a muslin with my new €1,50/m off white cotton fabric I bought at IKEA yesterday. I think the combination of princess seams - darts will be tricky to fit properly.

Now look what have you here? A film on the pattern. It's so quaint.

In other news, the His & His pyjama pants shipped yesterday. That was the funniest bit of sewing I've ever made, the first time sewing for my brother and can't wait to go to the pyjama party!

The cute C&W vest I made with leftover fabric from the Kenzo for my neighboor's poney club party was a great success. 

You have until Friday to post a funny line here, the great Pattern Junkie will be the judge. 

And, last but not least, this Savage Chickens sticky note made me laugh and wish it was that easy!