Mirroring Suzy Bee Sews - Life So Strange It Should Be Fiction

I didn't order the Burda Classics magazine from GLP--never got around to it--but while in Porto, Portugal I saw it--in French--in the window of a tiny newsstand on a little side street.  Apparently, Burda is not pronounced anything like "Burda" in Portuguese, because it took a bit of gesturing and explaining to indicate which magazine I wanted to buy (the window copy was the only one), but eventually it was mine, all mine! I was happy to see a simple 3/4 circle skirt in the magazine.  I am just too lazy to draft my own pattern, and I had been wanting one as a bike-friendly alternative to an A line.  I thought I'd start with a silk chiffon version--it goes with a bunch of tops already in my closet and would work year round. Well, who knew a freaking two piece skirt could be so much trouble?  I cannot even begin to describe how much fail went into this. Fail #1:  Cutting.  This is totally, completely my fault.  The chiffon was not wide enough ...

After a long stretch of unappealing, Burda finally started getting interesting again late last year.   Burda 09-2013-105  was one of the patterns that went on my list as soon as the magazine arrived.  It has a pencil skirt silhouette, but the front wrap/split means that it's fairly bikeable.  Perfect! I shortened the skirt three inches before cutting and still had a generous hem allowance for a skirt longer than I usually wear.  This would have been mid-calf had I not shortened it.  Because the shapes of the front openings is the major part of the design here, for my short legs the skirt needed to be at full knee length so the graceful arcs would have their full space to be graceful.  When I pinned it at a shorter length it lost a bit of its sophistication. I love wool crepe for office clothes.  The only downside is that it wrinkles almost as much as linen.  To attempt to keep the wrinkling slightly under control, I underlined it with silk o...

I had a fairly small piece of this Fabric Mart yellow wool crepe (purchased in October 2010 for $9.99/yd) leftover from a dress that I made last winter (and haven't blogged about because I want to change the skirt from dirndl gathers to darts but haven't).  I couldn't make my usual A line skirt  so I looked for an interesting pencil skirt pattern.  The curved darts on Burda 07-2010-120  and I decided to give it a shot. The dirty little secret nobody talks about with wool is that it wrinkles as much as linen, maybe more.  Or maybe this doesn't happen to anyone else? To try to keep the wrinkling under control (I sound like I'm talking about my face, ha!), I decided to underline the skirt in silk organza.  For the back, I treated the organza and wool as one at the darts, sewing them together.  However, for the front darts I wanted to take maximum advantage of wool's moldability with steam.  Getting those darts flat was going to be crucial to making ...

My work was closed due to Hurricane Sandy so I had some unexpected sewing time.  A bonus, unplanned item seemed the way to go.  I sort of fondled my stash for a bit and ran across this crazy fluorescent neon safety orange sateen.  I purchased it from Fabric Mart a couple years ago for $1/yd to be the trim for my Butterick 5315 piped shirtdress  but I ended up using tie silk for that project instead.  I was wavering whether to put it into the giveaway pile or make it into a Halloween skirt.  Halloween won.  I love Halloween, but there is just nowhere for a grown adult to dress up in a costume and go someplace non-horrible.  It makes me sad that I've had to give it up.  This lets me celebrate a little. I went digging through my skirt patterns and found Simplicity 2413 .  I made the pleated skirt last year in silk organza , and had made a mental note at the time to try the paper bag skirt.  A bright orange skirt shaped like a pumpkin--...

Thank you all for the lovely comments on my photos from Portugal!  It really is a wonderful place to visit.  I highly recommend it. Since making my biking/travel wardrobe for The Netherlands , I've pretty much been set on travel clothes.  For that trip, I made 6 tops out of solid-colored wicking fabric and added 3 print skirts to my already broad repertoire.  Throw in a dress or two and you've got two weeks worth of outfits that you might not even get sick of.  However, for Portugal the weather was likely to be a little cooler than my sleeveless tops and summer skirts would work for, and plus I always need an excuse to do some sewing! I made four new items and in writing about them I realized that all of them are TNTs, or at least based on a TNT.  Am I getting boring?  I hope not.  I think it's that with 275 pattern reviews (plus all the patterns sewn before I discovered PR and those I haven't gotten around to reviewing), I've got a lot of bases c...