sewing plan: autumn 2022

Hi! It's been kind of a rough month. We've been incredibly busy, my health crashed again because of course it did, and I also got the worst haircut of my entire life so I really didn't want to take any photos. (It's been fixed now.) We're off on holiday in two days so I won't have the time to try and back into the groove until October. I'd wanted to have this plan properly thought out, all fabrics acquired and photographed, but I haven't got round to it and if I don't post it now I will probably end up not doing it at all, so here, have some half-formed ideas! 

This is another super-short plan, and it's actually even shorter than it looks since I'm only planning to do one of my two challenges, but hopefully that will enable me to get everything done in the time I have. In addition to this stuff I want to make a couple of basic tops - we went back to North Wales for a bit earlier this month and I was able to raid the Abakhan remnant bins again - but I don't think it's worth making them an item on the plan when I won't have a single useful word to say about them beyond "they exist now". 

Here's the abridged project list: 

Challenges

I had decided originally to set myself two challenges for autumn, but given how September has gone so far I think it's not too likely I'll manage both. I'm going to put them both here anyway, with the expectation that I'll do one out of two. If both happen, that's a nice bonus. 

A corset

I started this literally a year ago and it stalled, first because of my mental health and then because I was changing size too rapidly, but things seem to be sufficiently stable now that I could get on with it. I have a semi-completed mock-up that I'm going to continue with, though I'm expecting to need to do a second one given size changes. 

A pair of jeans

I mentioned this as a possibility in my summer plan, and I do think I'd like to try it. I'm still thinking of the Charm Patterns Marilyn jeans - I'm just not a jeans-and-a-T-shirt kind of woman and if I'm going to have jeans they need to be a bit more... something. So vintage style jeans might be the way to go. Mostly this will be a skill and confidence building exercise rather than a means to an end of owning a pair of jeans. I'm quite certain I can make a pair of jeans but because it's something I've never done it's been filed under "Scary Thing" in my brain. I'm sure it doesn't belong there, so I'm going to make some jeans. 

Easy wardrobe fillers

The rest of the plan is intentionally fairly straightforward. I don't want to have to think too hard about these projects, I don't want to have to learn any other new skills, and I want to be able to use these projects as palate cleansers for the more difficult stuff, or as a way to get my motivation back if (when?) the more complicated things prove too frustrating. Two of them are things I need, and the other is joyful nonsense that I'm very much looking forward to. 

A trans-seasonal jumpsuit

I love wearing jumpsuits, and I have more than half a dozen I love, but they're all either strictly for summer or evening wear. I would love to have one or two that would work for cooler weather. Honestly I'm still chasing the high of the blue M7626 in this post - I loved it so much but I never got it to fit me properly. I also ran into problems with the more wearable olive version, ie. the layers of corduroy made everything super bulky and there wasn't really enough room in the crotch area for me to sit down comfortably in it. Nevertheless, option one is still to just try that exact same thing again. Option two is a Deer&Doe Sirocco in something a little more casual than black velvet. I may do both. 

A pair of trousers

I'm at the point now where very few of my old faithful pairs of trousers fit, and as we go into autumn (and I get more interested in trying to pair separates together) I'm going to need to start replacing them. Having already given myself one difficult trouser project, I don't want to reinvent the wheel here. I want something pretty simple, wide leg but not too wide leg, hits my natural waist, has decent pockets. What I do not have right now is a go-to pattern for this, so this is probably my most complicated "easy" project because it will involve me trying some stuff out. I'm going to see if I can size down my block before I go buying any new patterns or anything. 

The Murder Dress

I'm going to do it. Raspberry leopard print velvet off-the-shoulder wiggle dress. I am not going to make it floor length (though I'm not promising I won't make a floor length one the next time I see some exciting-looking velvet), I may or may not make the skirt a little more fitted, and in order to actually wear it I will probably have to find some sort of performance opportunity. It is going to be one of the least wearable things I've ever made, but I have concluded that anything else would be kind of a disappointment next to the vision of the Murder Dress. 

That's as much as I'm prepared to commit to for now. We're away for a week so I won't be posting next Monday, but I hope to be in a better place for photography when we come back so that I can get on with posting the rest of my summer projects!