actual shirt attempt two: Sew Over It Hackney (plus Stitch School experience)

Hey, everyone, look what I did!

The glow up is real. I'm amazed at how much better this is than the first one. I enjoyed the process way more this time and I'm actually happy for him to wear it in public and claim it as my work. It's been a while since I've felt this strong a sense of accomplishment after making something. 

I would never have started on a second shirt so quickly if I hadn't got the no-minimum-period Stitch School membership, but I thought it might be helpful to make a second attempt while I had access to videos of the skills that aren't really in my repertoire yet (and I wasn't going to pay for a second month of access). If I'm honest, the slightly more in-depth written instructions were helpful to me but the videos weren't really. I'll go into a bit more detail on this further down.

I cut an XS in the shoulders and lower sleeve, and an S everywhere else. Patrick tends to wear his shirts very slim fitting and the finished chest measurement of the XS is about the measurement of his normal shirts, but the Hackney pattern isn't specifically slim fit and I was worried it might look weird. These sizes were largely guesswork but fortunately it's spot on. I think the XS would have been too small through the chest, but the S would have been too big in the shoulders. He says it actually fits better than most of his regular shirts because the shoulder seam sits in the right place rather than hanging slightly off the edge of his arm. So yay me!

This fabric was an Abakhan order and it's a really nice cotton lawn. It became clear to me very soon after starting this shirt that my biggest mistake last time was using the viscose. I was only thinking about print and breathability at the time, but I very quickly realised how much more I was enjoying sewing this version because the fabric wasn't being a git. Also, having the extra stability in the fabric means it looks way more like I was expecting a shirt to look. After a full day of sewing I hung up the cuffless, buttonless, unhemmed shirt and had a feeling I can only describe as pride. And then, of course, fear that I'd screw it up.

I'm still not completely sure about the placement of buttons and buttonholes. They do align properly this time (I put the shirt on him after making the buttonholes and poked a pen through each one for placement) but I think the horizontal placement is a tiny bit off. I'm probably hyper-aware of it because I think the rest of the shirt is so good and it won't be a thing most people will notice. BUT I KNOW.

Patrick is very happy with it. So happy with it, in fact, that he refused to take it off after we checked the fit for the final time and promptly spilt curry on it. So if you can see small yellow stains in these pictures, that's why. Running it through the wash didn't help and we're now on a stain remover mission. Sigh.

He's lucky he's cute. 

Here's a couple of detail shots:

I did also watch all the Stitch School videos that accompanied the pattern. Beyond a couple of handy tips I'm not sure I got much out of it. That's probably to be expected given my experience level, but after watching a video over my shoulder Patrick pointed out that they don't use anywhere near enough camera angles of the actual process. He worried I wouldn't be able to do the cuffs properly because the video hadn't really shown the actual cuff-making process (as opposed to Lisa talking about the cuff-making process). The written instructions explain everything in what I think is plenty of detail, but if you couldn't get what you're supposed to be doing from that I really can't imagine the video would have been much help.

(I also watched one of the fitting videos they did with Julie, one of their teachers who I've taken classes with in the past and is a genuinely awesome font of knowledge, and they... didn't make a properly fitting toile in advance? I assumed they'd show the fit of an unaltered bodice first, talk through some adjustments and then show the final version, but instead of making a final version together they got their subject to bring a bodice with an FBA and just recorded Julie telling her she'd done the FBA wrong and probably needed to start again. It was very strange.)

I also have to say that the platform itself isn't fantastic. It's not like Craftsy where the whole tutorial will play through if you let it; each individual step of the construction is its own separate unlisted Vimeo video and you have to click on each one to go through. It's also pretty slow and clunky; it feels like the server is overloaded at all times. It's very new and of course they won't yet know how popular it's going to be, so I hope that if it's profitable for them it can be optimised to be a bit smoother and more user-friendly. £15 for a dozen patterns was an excellent deal for me though, and I definitely plan to have a go at the vast majority of them.

I will share with you the couple of useful shirtmaking tips I got from the videos:

In order to get a neat triangle for topstitching the tower plackets, they advise using Pritt Stick to hold everything in place, so I went out and bought the first Pritt Stick I've owned in 25 years. It does the job and I will probably continue to do this in future. I am astounded at the leap in quality of my tower plackets and the construction makes a LOT more sense to me now.

The other useful thing I learned was to press 5mm of fabric to the right side of the sleeve cap before sewing it to make it easier to flat fell the seam, and it's a really good idea. Once the sleeve is sewn to the armhole the flat fell is basically just ready to go and all you have to do is pin it down. I do love a good flat fell but curved seams are a bit of a pain; this made it so much easier and I'm going to do it forever.

Nothing about this experience has made me want to make any shirts for myself, but I do think I'll continue to make them occasionally for Patrick, most likely using this pattern with double cuffs grafted on sometimes. Not just because he'd appreciate it, but also because it offers me opportunities I don't usually get in making things for myself. For example, it's nice to actually work with cotton. I don't tend to use it because I don't really wear it, but damn is it nice to sew. It just sits there and does what you tell it to do. It's nice to be able to do more precise sewing and produce something that looks the way this does. I'm also interested to start playing around with detailing a bit; Patrick has shirts that use a contrast fabric for the inner collar band or inner cuffs, different colour stitching on one or two buttonholes only, and various other subtle or hidden things that he's really into and would be a great way for me to use up scraps. I think between us we could come up with some really cool stuff.

(Approximate visual representation of me finishing an accomplished piece of sewing without having to deal with body issues once.)

I realise I've posted two men's shirts pretty close together and that's not what people generally come here for, but it's not going to be a regular feature (I will make maybe a couple of shirts per year, depending on how often I stumble across really Patricky fabric) and I was just so proud of how fast my skills improved. Next up will be something for me!

Sew Over It Hackney shirt

Fabric: Cotton lawn from Abakhan
Cost: £12
Pattern details: Classic shirt with collar and collar stand, tower plackets and cuffs, back yoke and box pleat, and chest pocket
Size: S with XS shoulders and forearms
Alterations: Chest pocket omitted
Would make again/would recommend: Yes/Yes

actual shirt attempt: Vogue 9220

I said when I started sewing, and for the three years following, that I would never make a shirt. I haven't worn a single item of clothing with buttons on it since I took my school uniform off for the last time and I don't intend to ever do so again (I fully recognise that this is really weird, but I've hated buttons since I was a small child and my vibe is not the button-up vibe anyway), so I didn't really ever expect to revisit the point.

Last year, however, Patrick made a couple of pouty comments about my resolve to never make him a shirt. He may have been kidding - he would certainly say now that he was - but I do feel a bit bad that I don't make much for him, and the kinds of shirts that he likes seem to have been completely out of production recently. At first I said I'd make him a shirt if he paid for me to do a shirtmaking class, but then nobody seemed to be running them. When I thought about it in a bit more detail, I realised that it wasn't actually that many new techniques - I've sewn collars before, I know how to flat-fell a seam - and it probably wasn't worth paying a couple of hundred quid to get someone to show me how to make sleeve plackets and then talk me down from my buttonhole anxiety. So I resolved to give it a try on my own.

Look at it! It's a shirt!

The pattern we went for was Vogue 9220. Patrick is very particular about his shirts and didn't want front pockets or floppy collars or fake anything anywhere, which narrowed it down considerably, and this pattern had both fit options and cuff options. I haven't seen another pattern for double cuffs, and it's one of his favourite things. I initially said I would start off with regular cuffs and work up to the fancier ones, but decided as I was cutting it out that these weren't appreciably more difficult so I may as well just dive in head first. The shirt comes in standard, tailored, or slim fit, and this is (allegedly) the latter.

The main reason Patrick hasn't been able to find shirts lately is that the prints have been wrong. Again, he's got very particular taste - he likes loud prints, but stylish loud. He wouldn't look twice at a novelty shirt. He's very into Liberty prints, mostly florals and paisleys, and his colour palette is quite specific. While I could find several fabrics that fit the criteria, they were all £16 per metre and up, and I wasn't prepared to spend that on something that was an experiment and could very well be unwearable. I also didn't want to just buy a plain cotton and make him a work shirt, because that's no fun at all (also they're covered by a suit jacket all day and it would feel like a giant waste of effort). I searched for a little while before coming across this viscose at my favourite stall in Walthamstow. Seriously, they have everything. While orange is not one of Patrick's colours, it's sparing enough to work, and though it isn't cotton it also doesn't have any polyester in it, so shouldn't be too sweaty. And at £6 for two metres, I wouldn't cry if (when???) I messed it up. Viscose is very much not the ideal fabric for this kind of shirt, structure-wise, but it was good enough for a trial run.

I got everything cut out and interfaced, then it sat around for a couple of months while I had nerves at it. Finally, in mid-June, I decided enough was enough and got the shirt finished up to the point of making holes in it in a few sessions over the course of a week. And really? It wasn't that hard. The only place I really had difficulty was making the plackets, which was totally new to me and not the easiest thing to comprehend from the brief instructions. With the help of a couple of tutorials I got them to be functional if not especially pretty, and I'll now have a better idea of what I'm doing when I try again. What I should have done was poked about on the inside of one of the many shirts already in the house, but I didn't. Next time. But the yoke, the collar, the sleeves, the flat felling, and the double cuffs all went pretty smoothly. Even my topstitching wasn't too hideous.

At this point I got him to try it on. We decided it was too big in the shoulders and WAY too long in both the body and the arms ("oh, by the way" said Patrick as we were doing this, "I have incredibly short arms"), but that it was still wearable so I should carry on and finish it. You can see the huge folds of fabric on the sleeves in all the photos above, and witness the utter ridiculousness that is the back length:

Look how long that is. It's practically down to his knees. I think it's partly that this pattern runs long and partly that we're using a dress shirt pattern to make a regular shirt because there's no such thing as a regular shirt pattern with double cuffs. Sigh. The shirt then sat almost finished for AGES while I panicked about the whole button/buttonhole situation. I was pretty sure that I'd get the alignment of buttons to buttonholes wrong (spoiler: yep) and that would make the whole thing look like shit. It was well over a month, if not two, before I leapt on a random trailing thread of motivation and got everything finished.

In terms of my first attempt at buttons and buttonholes, it's not hideous, but I did mess up the alignment on the top and bottom buttons. The bottom one I was able to cut off and redo, the top one not so much. We decided it wasn't that big a deal as he never uses the top button on his non-work shirts anyway. I also bought a pack of bog-standard buttons and I really don't like them. Solid white next time.

Me: I mean, you're probably not going to wear this one so I -
Him: [affronted] I will.
Me: But it's way too big.
Him: I will wear it and I will look styling.
Me: But...
Him: I. Will look. Styling.

Once I realised he wasn't budging on this point, I insisted we shorten the shirt to a less ridiculous length. I didn't want to force him into two separate photo sessions, so what you see above is the shirt pinned into place (I have since hemmed it properly, don't worry). Though the sleeves are still obviously too long, it's much better like this.  Look how much less ridiculous the back is now:

This did not go as badly as I feared for a first attempt, but there's a lot of work to be done here. For a start, while this isn't necessarily a bad fit for a shirt to have, it's not how Patrick wears his shirts. This is supposed to be the slim fit cut but there's still a LOT of ease in here. Patrick has narrow shoulders so I always thought there might be a need to go down a size in the shoulders, but a smaller size overall will probably get us closer to the fit he likes. Having done some measuring of his normal shirts compared to this one, I think a decent chunk of the sleeve problem would be resolved if the shoulder seam sat in the right place, but I would still take a couple of centimetres off the sleeve length next time. Patrick also thinks the double cuffs are a bit skimpy and would like more length taken out of the sleeve then added back in at the cuff. I think for this I'm just going to measure the cuffs on his regular shirts and make them that size.

My guess is we'd be adding an extra centimetre to these. Also, say hi to either Alphonse or Ernie (I'm not sure who lives on which side), the massive bejewelled lizard cufflinks I got him for Christmas last year. 

For my own ease of reference, the adjustments I'll make next time:

- size down to a 38, possibly even a 36
- shorten the sleeves by 2cm
- reduce size of dip in back of shirt
- shorten hem by 2cm at the front, 5cm at the back
- increase the size of the cuff by 1cm
- ignore the bit where it asks for different sizes of button for no real reason
- burrito the yoke instead of slipstitching then topstitching and wasting a lot of time

He's pleased, though, so it's okay. 

As I mentioned in my autumn plans, before I make another one of these I want to have a go at the Sew Over It Hackney shirt (sans front pocket, because Patrick thinks shirt pockets are for dweebs). Partly because I downloaded the pattern in my mass Stitch School harvesting session and it would be nice to use it, but also because - unusually for Sew Over It - they provide a full range of finished measurements upfront. Chest, waist, hem, collar, shoulder width, back length, sleeve length, underarm seam. I think that will be really useful in trying to get the fit right. My hope is that eventually I can merge the two into some kind of Patrick Frankenpattern and be able to create the perfect Liberty print shirt by his 40th birthday in March. Which might be a bit of a tall order as Liberty is not looking especially Patricky at the moment. We've had a bit of back and forth over whether a shirt in the same print as my Minoru would work, and he has concluded that he just won't know until there's a shirt of it in front of him. This is not a risk I am prepared to take. For now I've got a navy and white cotton lawn with stripy background and floral foreground (which has now arrived and is eminently shirtable) from Abakhan, and we're going to see how that goes.

Up next: either Pietra trousers or B6621 dress, depending on what I finish first!

Vogue 9220 shirt attempt

Fabric: Japanese viscose from Walthamstow
Cost: £6
Pattern details: Men's formal shirt in standard, tailored or slim fit, with collar and collar stand, sleeve plackets, and regular or double cuff options.
Size: 40
Alterations: None for the first try
Would make again/would recommend: Yes/Yes

My First Burda: a paisley velour hoodie

For the first almost-three-years of my sewing journey, I never touched a Burda pattern. Two main reasons for this: one, I am awkwardly sized so that my top half fits into their regular range but my hips are well into their plus range; and two, the tracing. Oh God, the tracing. I rarely trace my patterns at the best of times (unless I'm forced to or know I won't be able to replace it) and just looking at the mass of overlapping lines gives me a headache. I will have to deal with this soon, because the only leather jacket pattern I like is Burda and is in the one issue of the magazine I have. I could buy it again separately, but I'm pretty sure that my £5.99 could be better spent elsewhere.

What I've done here is neatly sidestepped both those problems by acquiring a men's paper pattern.

I don't make a lot of handmade stuff for my boyfriend. I don't want to be making stuff for the sake of it and he's picky enough that it's fairly rare to find something he really wants which is also within my skill set. But when something does fall in the middle of that Venn diagram, it usually requires a bunch of new techniques that I wouldn't have got round to for years if making stuff for myself and I come out the other side marginally stressed (because it matters more if it goes wrong) but with a pile of shiny new knowledge that opens up doors to a new variety of Jen-shaped patterns.

New technique number one: use of paisley velour.

I've never got round to using velvet or velour for myself because the one time I tried to cut into some it started shedding all over everything like an over-enthusiastic sheepdog and I decided I didn't need that kind of negativity in my life. But then I said "paisley velour hoodie" to my boyfriend and he started gently glowing from the inside, so I powered through and got it done. The shedding was nowhere near as bad with this fabric (another Abakhan purchase) thanks to its shorter pile and its print, so rather than a blue floor I just had some slightly furry scissors by the end.

The hoodie has raglan sleeves and a typical hoodie front pocket, and it went together very easily. It's a very well-drafted pattern (which I was expecting given how many Burda fans there are out there) with fairly sparse instructions. It's not a complicated pattern so that wasn't an issue, though I do think they called for an unnecessary amount of basting. I got as far as sewing the hood sections together, and then I had some more learning to do.

EYELETS.

This was my first foray into installing hardware on clothes. It was one of the goals I set myself for the year and it was nice to have an impetus to get on with it already. I'd bought a starter kit but not bothered to read the instructions, so five minutes after I sat down to get learning, I had to stand up again and go and buy a hammer. Why did it not occur to me I'd need a hammer? Who knows. Apparently the idea is to punch a hole in the fabric using the hammer and eyelet tool, but the fabric would not be punched, so I just cut a hole instead. I don't know whether this was my fault, the fabric's fault, or the tool's fault. I had one practice go at installing an eyelet on a piece of scrap fabric and it... went in fine and looked like an actual eyelet, which I was not expecting. I put the next two straight into the garment, and they also went in fine and looked like actual eyelets. I spent the next couple of hours feeling incredibly smug.

(This is as close as a representation as we'll get of me looking smug after installing eyelets correctly for the first time.)

The pattern calls for ribbing on the cuffs and waistband, but the ribbing I ordered turned out to be a horrible colour mismatch and I didn't have time to get any more. I used the self fabric and I think it's fine. The drawstring I bought matches the fabric exactly, so weird dusky blue ribbing would have looked extra wrong.

This has been an exceptionally well-appreciated present. Patrick wears it almost every day at home, and when we have people over he insists on going to put it on and modelling it for them. Sometimes he just says "paisley velour hoodie" for no reason at all. I'm very proud of it - it couldn't be more perfect for him, and beyond a couple of slightly wonky stitches I think I've done really good work here. I would definitely make this pattern again, and it's really making me want a hoodie of my very own. 

 I'm not sure what will be next up. I've been struggling for motivation over the last few weeks, and the things I have finished I hate too much to ever photograph on my body ever. Hopefully things will pick up a bit this week and I'll be able to get some finished garments and nice photos before we head to my in-laws at the weekend. Though I have my FIFTH dental operation this week (apparently two of my teeth died inside and my dentist can find absolutely no explanation for it! What a joy it is), so we can't count on it. Fingers crossed one of my experiments actually works out for me.

The Liberty print Christmas present of doom: my MANY THOUGHTS on Butterick 6837

ALRIGHT. Welcome to the most expensive and time-consuming project I have ever embarked upon.

I've been promising Patrick this dressing gown for at least the past two years. I don't make many things for him because everything he likes to wear is super-complicated and his standards are pretty high, but I thought this would be much closer adjacent to my wheelhouse. The reason it's taken this long is that it was impossible to find the right fabric. Patrick has extremely specific taste in prints and there just didn't seem to be anything that was right for him. After scouring Goldhawk Road, Shaukat, the Liberty website and anywhere else that claimed to sell Liberty silk, we concluded that silk just doesn't come in the kinds of prints he likes, and picked this Tana lawn instead.

That's some print, right?

The pattern is Butterick 6837. I'd never made it before, so I decided to make a toile out of an old duvet cover that had fallen apart in the wash. It was a nice soft duvet cover, so I had in the back of my mind that I could claim it for myself once the final version was finished. Sadly it was not to be; the toile was enormous, fit completely differently on each shoulder, and was generally unwearable for either of us. Assuming it was a cutting error on my part (which at least some of it must have been), I bought some cheap silky fabric and tried again. The second toile definitely helped me see where the errors were much more clearly, and having finished it I felt confident enough to move on to the proper expensive fabric. I learned a lot from that toile, most notably that this dressing gown looks horrendous on me. Turns out that "unisex" means "for men". It comes in men's sizes, is designed to fit a man's body, and in some cases makes design decisions which make the thing unwearable for women in ways that really wouldn't be the case the other way round.

Let's start with: it's giant. I started out making the L, but for the final version downsized to an M, and it's still pretty huge. I, with my gigantic hips, have plenty of room in this thing (I tried it on several times during construction, mostly for pocket placement things). I've never worked with a men's pattern (sorry "unisex pattern") before so I don't know if this is normal, but all the reviews of the pyjamas included in this set mentioned similar things. I did have a go at the tank top, which is the only thing in the envelope sized for women, and that definitely did NOT go over my hips, FYI.

Second: all the details are positioned very strangely. On the second toile I initially placed the belt carriers as I was told to, and was basically belting the thing over my ass. To get the belt to sit at the waist I had to yank the entire dressing gown up in a very ungainly fashion. I know I'm short-waisted, but I've never had this problem with dressing gowns before and also have never met a woman whose waist is where my ass is. I then discovered that this doesn't even work for men, because when I tried the toile on Patrick the first thing he said was, "Can you move the belt loops up? This is kind of uncomfortable." He's the exact height Butterick men's patterns are allegedly drafted for, so this is nonsense really. I moved them up two inches, which he said was much better. (For the final one I made my carriers by folding the raw edges into the middle, folding in half and edge stitching rather than making a tube and spending ages trying to turn it the right way round.)

According to the illustrations the pattern is designed to hit somewhere around the calf on the body they've drafted for, so I added several inches to the length. Based on the fabric guidelines and what I had I was expecting to be able to make a pair of matching shorts, but that turned out not to be the case, so I made a longer dressing gown and a nice work tie instead.

I also felt the pockets were placed way too low, and for the final robe I dispensed with the markers altogether and positioned the pockets directly on the finished garment as I was wearing it. That didn't make for the easiest pocket-attaching experience, and I still don't really like the way they look, but I do think this is an improvement. All of the detailing seems to have been designed for a man with a crazy long torso and crazy short legs. I put strips of contrast fabric across the top of the pockets because I felt it needed it, but since it was just me making things up the execution isn't great. It's the only thing I'm displeased with, though, which is quite a relief for a project this size.

I used a raspberry-coloured crepe-back satin for the contrast, and I'm very glad I did. On the toiles I used the same fabric for both the main and the contrast, and honestly it didn't look great. I also think using a slightly heavier fabric for the collar helps it to sit better. I know there's a kind of edging of the self fabric around most of my contrast pieces; that wasn't deliberate at first, but when I tried pressing it away I decided I didn't like that as much and left everything as it was. I also used some of the satin to make a spare belt (which I forgot to photograph, soz) since I'm fairly sure that the Tana lawn belt will be pretty disgusting after a few months of hard wear. It's already impossible to press the creases out.

Modelling!

Construction was fairly simple, aside from the shawl collar, which I'd never done before and was completely perplexed by. There are a million sewing tutorials on the internet, but none that were prepared to explain shawl collars to me in idiot-proof language. This was my third go and it didn't get less perplexing, but I think I managed it okay. I'm not in a hurry to do it again though.  The Tana lawn was wonderful to work with as always, the satin somewhat less so, but we got through it with only minimal threats directed at inanimate objects.

EDIT: I'm coming back to this a year and a half later to add something about the shawl collar. I didn't write about this at the time because I assumed that was just what shawl collars were like and I was an idiot, but I've now discovered that no, this pattern is weird. When I tried to pin the collar to the back shoulders I was absolutely convinced that the collar piece was way too long. I'd clipped into the corners but that wasn't making too much difference. What I eventually discovered (through a long and confusing internet rabbit hole that I can't even remember now) is that the point you have to clip to is WAY into the garment. The clip circles were so far in that I didn't realise that's what they were. I actually think calling it a "clip" is misleading, you have to chop into that corner to get the back shoulders to match up with the collar piece. At the time I assumed I just had an embarrassing gap in my knowledge, but it turns out that no, other people have been confused by this too. So if you're reading this because you're trying to make this pattern and got stuck at the collar, this may be what's throwing you!

All of the exposed seams are French seamed, and I finished all the unattached raw edges with Liberty bias binding. I'm not going to come anywhere near the expense level of this project for quite some time.

Overall I'm really pleased with this. Making it was kind of a fraught experience (stupidly expensive materials + unreliable pattern + intended for somebody else = ARGH) but I'm glad that I've done it and he really likes it. This style of dressing gown is exactly right for him, so from that angle I'm happy that I used it, but as a pattern I was not impressed at all. The next project in my queue is a dressing gown for myself using Vogue 8888, and I pray that goes more smoothly than this one did. Still, it's done, and I'm happy. And so is he. 

Before I wrap up, I'm going to share my tip for taking photos of camera-shy boyfriends: shout out a string of really terrible dad jokes. 

His favourite: Doctor doctor, I think I'm a bridge. What's come over you? Two cars and a lorry.

My favourite: Why is a duck in a microwave like an old soul singer? Because its bill withers. 

Goodnight, folks. I'm here all week.

Knitted hats, sewn hats, hats that look like Pokémon

Hey, a Thursday post! I'm doing this for two reasons: one, this is a not-particularly-in-depth post illustrated with photos from my phone that I want to have here but doesn't really merit being my one weekly post, and two, I am having severe difficulty getting my sewjo back after Christmas. I've switched my machine on exactly once in the last four weeks, and I don't think I like the dress I started making. I'm hoping that getting through my backlog of posts and spending a bit more time actively thinking about sewing will get my brain back into gear. At this rate most of my winter plan will go unfinished, and I really don't want that. So: hats!

About this time last year, Patrick and I decided we were going to learn how to knit. I'd tried once before and not got on very well with it (that was ten years ago, and I discovered shortly before she died that my grandmother still kind of thought I was incompetent because I'd had to call her and get her to talk me through casting off. The fact that I finished my first hat a week before she died and didn't call her to tell her is one of the things that still really nags at me. Gah.)

Anyway, I made a hat and a scarf:

We signed up to an Intro to Knitting class at Sew Over It, and it was terrible. I wish I'd said something, but the problem with being a complete beginner is that you have no way to judge how terrible something is. Patrick and I came out of that class thinking we'd never be able to make anything else ever because we were so bad at casting on, and then a couple of weeks later I watched a five-minute Youtube video and realised it was actually really easy. I have no idea what kind of complicated shit she was trying to get us to do, but it so nearly put me off for good. (As an aside, I feel like Sew Over It classes in general are such a lottery when it comes to teacher quality that I don't think I'd ever go to another unless the only teacher listed was Julie, who is magic.)

Our first hats were more or less write-offs, so I bought us some more wool and we tried again, more successfully this time. Then we decided to knit matching scarves, without looking up how many stitches we should start with, and spent the next several months knitting enormous five-ball blanket things. I actually really enjoyed that; no pattern, no need to count stitches, just sitting next to each other on the sofa and peacefully knitting away. Shame I don't have much use for multiple giant blanket scarves. 

A couple of months ago, Patrick left his hat on the bus (I'm pretty sure I still have mine, but I couldn't tell you where or anything) and bought us a ball of Wool and the Gang super-chunky each, because colours. 

This photo is from Bruges, and it's one of my favourites because if you look at his front eyebrow he's kissing me on the cheek, but if you look at his back eyebrow he's stuck to my face and is quite annoyed about it.

Suffice it to say you won't see a lot of knitting here. So far it's been this and a baby hat each (for other people's babies, let's be clear), and while I like the thought of knitting, mostly because it's portable, I'm just not sure I have the patience. Maybe I'll try and find something else small to have a go at. If anyone has any great beginner knitting patterns, I'm open to suggestions. 

So back to sewing. I made hats for both my father and brother for Christmas this year, and we'll start with the simpler one:

I used the Named Delia beanie pattern for both these hats. I've had it sitting on my computer for a while because they tend to put it on sale for a euro every now and then, but this was my first go at it. It was a pretty straightforward make, the only issue being that the sweater knit I bought probably wasn't quite stretchy enough for the pattern. It fits Dad though, and Mum tells me he's worn it every day since Christmas despite being given three other winter hats on the same day. (Dad has a tendency to lose hats.)

The second hat, mind you:

You may not know what this is. This is a Nosepass hat. Nosepass is my brother's favourite Pokémon purely because of how stupid it is. I don't think Nosepass is anyone else in the world's favourite Pokémon, meaning that when I got a stupid idea and searched Etsy for "Nosepass hat" there were none to be found, excepting one person who would make it to order and charge £70 for it. Which is a fair price, but I didn't have £70 lying around and so decided to make one myself. 

The hat is made of fleece and has a panel inserted in the front, partly for the look of the thing (Nosepass is carved out of rock) and partly because the fleece didn't have enough stretch and I wasn't sure how to size the hat up. The eyes and nose are made of fabric scraps and felt, both glued down and sewn on. It took me FOREVER to work out sizing and scale, and the whole process deepened my respect for competent pattern-makers. The end result is not the most shining example of my work, but James is pleased enough with it to wear it out in public, which is about as much as you can ask when you make someone a Nosepass hat. 

Now to try and persuade myself to get started on my coat. Wish me luck!