I’ve been saving my pennies for ages, and last week my copy of the Cochenille Garment Designer software arrived. I haven’t said too much about it yet because I’m still on the steep part of the learning curve. This means that anything I might have wanted to say was probably unprintable anyway. The first pattern [...]
Tag Archive 'patterns'
Quarter Past Ten Scarf
Posted in knitting on Sep 6th, 2011
I liked the Ten O’Clock scarf, but wanted something a bit wider. So I added an extra column of feather-and-fan up the middle. Then I decided that I didn’t want the edges to curl so much, so I’ve added a couple of garter stitches and a yarn over at each side. Knitted from a single 200g [...]
This is Vogue 8434, a pattern I added to my stash recently – partly because I was thinking about shirts for the summer, and partly because Vogue were having a sale. In my giant fabric mountain I have nine metres of linen – three metres each of black, white and purple. I also have three [...]
Remember me saying that I fancied making a Regency dress for the summer? Well, I went and grabbed myself a copy of Simplicity 4055, read a number of reviews online, and started sewing. Normally in a Simplicity pattern I’d cut a size 18, but I’d read that this pattern came up large, and I knew [...]
Regency Summer
Posted in Uncategorized on May 27th, 2011
Today I would like to both praise and curse my friend Rhona, for being an extremely bad influence. At the beginning of July I’m going to London for a three-day weekend with friends. Being London, and being July, I expect it to be excruciatingly hot and stuffy. (It’ll probably rain now.) In order to try and stay [...]
Despite my determination that I would no longer be sewing for anybody but myself, my friend Joolz managed to convince me that she really needed a new velvet skirt. It’s about three years since I last made one of these, and I didn’t really need very much convincing to make another. These simple elasticated skirts [...]
Young Designer – Mary Quant
Posted in inspiration, sewing, shopping on Jul 29th, 2010
During the 1960s, the big pattern companies enlisted the help of the hottest young designers to bring the latest fashions to their catalogues. This is Butterick 5912, designed by Mary Quant, whose patterns were licensed by Butterick well into the 1970s. I have a sneaking suspicion that this design is about as old as me. [...]
This is Burda 7808. (Information now only available in German, since the English site has merged with Burda Style and all the patterns are gone. *sigh*) I bought the pattern yesterday because the weather’s gone mad, and I’m going to need some kind of loose summer dress so that I don’t inadvertently boil inside my own [...]
This week’s been a pretty hot one, as far as weather goes in the UK. I’m sure most people are thrilled to bits (in fact I can hear them all outside, laughing and enjoying their barbecues in their gardens), but unfortunately for me, I’m really not very good at hot. I get sunstroke very easily, [...]
Andrea Katz Objects
Posted in inspiration, sewing on Apr 4th, 2010
This afternoon I went and had a little look at the Vogue Patterns website, to see whether they had any patterns I could modify for a dress idea I was thinking about. Before I’d even got that far I discovered that the new season’s patterns have been released, and this is one of them. It’s [...]