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

It takes me a long time to warm up to a trendy trend, like the high-low hem.  At first I hate it.  Then I am skeptical.  Then I see some cute examples .  Then I am ready. This process can take years.  After seeing several cute iterations of this pattern on PR, I decided I could take the plunge with the high-low trend (I may be willing to do the trend, but I am not willing to butcher the English language by calling it "hi-lo") using Vogue 8870 , sized XS-XXL.  I even went bold with double trending by using this ombre silk, one of the gorgeous pieces BadMomGoodMom  picked up for me for a song. After I had the dress almost done I saw this Lela Rose for Fall 2013.  It looks like my trends should last through at least next season! I did my usual adjustments, including a broad back.  I should have been more aggressive with the broad back.  I didn't want the hassle of bringing the adjustment into the raglan sleeve, so I just did it on the b...

The Facts Fabric: Cotton sateen from Spotlight Notions: None Pantone Challenge colors: Emerald, Mykonos Blue and Turbulence Pattern: Colette Macaron dress with a full circle skirt Year: 2009 Time to complete: Way too long, about 18hours First worn: Today Wear again? When the weather warms up! Total Cost: $20 I became interested in sewing through sewing blogs and read a lot before I actually dusted off my sewing machine. One of my favourite blogs was the Sew Weekly and it inspired me to sew something every week, regardless of how it turned out. I'm a big believer that the best way to get better at something is to do lots of it!   Having said that, this dress gave me the fits! This is the third bodice that's been sewn onto the skirt, the first was a NewLook 6048 (like my copy cat dress ). The neckline stretched out and looked awful though and the waistband looked all crooked. So that was unpicked and chucked aside. Next version was the bodice from the Tiramisu dress,...

I am in need of a couple of little light early morning layers to wear to work. In my stash I had Kwik Sew 3693 which seemed to be exactly what I was after. End result is not one, but two new little jackety garments ready  for work this week... First one is made using a boucle type summery knit fabric, I just loved the colours in it (but they are not very photo compliant!) - Since this was the first time I tried this pattern, I basically followed it 'as-is.' But after pinning it together, I did ease in the side seams to take out that boxy look. Love the boxyness on the shoulders, but I do like a few curves to show as well... And it was just sooooo easy to put together, only 3 pieces as the facing and neck are just extensions of the front. So easy, that I quickly pulled another one together... This is View A, made in the recommended French Terry fabric. It turned out fantastic. The only change I made to the construction was to turn the facing to the outside, and use my coverstitc...

I've been meaning to get back to Simplicity 2369 (which they have issued as a seemingly identical pattern in the Amazing Fit line as 1653 ) for a while--it is just so flattering, and also fabric-economical compared to a full wrap dress. I had made it with the longer flutter-esque sleeve, as well as self-drafted long sleeve, but I wanted to try the cap sleeve version. The sleeve is drafted as a two piece, with a front and back sleeve and a seam all the way down the shoulder.  I combined these into one, lining up the seam line at the hem and using a dart at the shoulder where the seamlines diverged. After the dress was made, the sleeve was much floppier than I expected.  It's shown on the line drawing as a cap and I feel like on other people it looks snug, but mine wings out a bit.  I took some width out at the hem for next time, as you can see in the tucks at left. I shortened the crossover a smidge, shown at right.  On the previous versions I found the crossover wen...

On Saturday, Nikki  acted once again as our fearless leader and organized a DC area sewing meetup!  I love these events.  It's great to be able to bring projects you're working on and get opinions, to chat about sewing, and to find new homes for fabric and patterns that need to get out of stash. We had an awesome turnout, and took over the whole front section of the restaurant (it was empty so they didn't mind). The front section was convenient because there is a long bench with a ledge behind it that we used for spreading out our swapping goodies.  And there were some goodies!  One woman's excess stash is definitely another woman's treasure. I once again failed miserably in reducing my stash by bringing swap fabrics to the meetup.  But come on, how could I resist any of these? I wore a new dress (you can see a sneak peek in the second photo) and had a great photo shoot.  More to come on that... All photos of the meetup are here .

... it's nearly Spring Down Under, which means time to get ready for long sunny days, and  restock the basic casual shirts for the two males in my household!  First off is another Vogue 8759 for my son. His request was for it to be trendy, no pocket, have a personal look, and be easy to wear. Fabric is from Spotlight, a light Japanese Lawn that is just perfect for a one-season shirt. For this shirt I used a navy lawn for the inside back yoke, inside neck, collar under, as well as the front plackets. The sleeves, collar and back yoke are all put together with the wrong side of the fabric outermost - apparently an 'in-season' trend in the shops! I did bring the front yoke section forward again, by about 5cm so that the yoke seam wasn't sitting right on the shoulder - this is just a personal preference of mine. So another winner for the son in the household! Next up is KwikSew 3422 for the Hubby! Not as fitted in the body, but still a good shape to it anyway. I used View B...

Why do I never think to post this in advance? There will be a brunch meetup on Saturday, August 17 for local sewing enthusiasts.  The location is Vapiano in Chinatown, right outside the Gallery Place metro (and easy walking distance from Metro Center).  It's at 623-625 H Street NW. Bring any fabric or patterns that you'd like to swap, or just bring yourself to hang out and chat about our latest projects. Hope to see you there!

I have been hoarding this fabric range for a few months now, its one of my favourites for when I want to go all Gollum by stroking my stash and calling it my pretties....... I finally caved and decided to make my daughter a quilt. I let her pick the design and the contrasting fabric and binding. The main are from the Geekly Chic range and I bought them from lilybellafabric.com . The contrast is from Lincraft's quilting cotton, in Lilac and binding is from the stash.   It turned out to be a reasonable size quilt, 175cmx220cm. It fits really well on her king-single bed with a decent overhang. I like doing half square triangles, they go together really quickly and you get to see a nice big piece of the fabric. The only downfall of hst is if you are using a directional print which is why I decided to do them facing side to side rather than up and down, makes it a little less obvious that half are facing the opposite direction. I pieced her name in the back, using the Refrige...

The piece de resistance of my stashbusting during the stash contest was finally making something out of this fabric I bought in Malaysia in 2009.  I was there for work, and one of our excursions was to the local department store (our hosts, understandably, wanted to show off their modern marvels). They had packaged sarong lengths for about $6, so I bought 3 of them.  This was the last one left (one of them was made into a shopping bag, the other into Simplicity 2177 ).  This print was meant to be shown to advantage when folded as a wrap skirt in the traditional manner, so it was a double border print with a decorative panel at one end.  In all, I had 75 inches of fabric. My first plan was to make a simple darted sundress using Burda 08-2009-128 .  I planned to use the decorative diamond-shape section as the bodice.  Well, with the double borders and relatively narrow fabric, I couldn't fit the whole bodice in the diamond-shape section.  Dangit!  I...