Me Made May week three

Week three collage:

(I am wearing, top to bottom and left to right: Sew Over It circle skirt; Sewaholic Cambie dress; Sewaholic Cordova jacket (plus barely seen Gertie Sews Vintage Casual cropped sweater underneath); three-pattern mish-mash Liberty top and Sew Over It tulip skirt; By Hand London Elisalex and Butterick 4443 mash-up dress; BONUS Closet Case Files Sallie jumpsuit; Colette Wren dress; Sew Over It wrap dress)

This was the most difficult week so far, and it made me worry about the final week (which is also nine days long, so yay). By mid-week I found myself thinking "oh God, I NEED to make more stuff" even though I had more than enough stuff left, which probably means I need to do some thinking about the other things in my wardrobe. The photo of the black and white Liberty jersey top was taken literally seconds after I finished making it in a rush of relief at having come up with an outfit, which probably isn't a great sign.

I also made the jumpsuit this week. I haven't actually worn it outside yet, but I finished it on Friday evening and was so excited that I had to post it immediately. Blog post coming soon!

Week three observations:

1. This week looked a lot more subdued and although I love my greys and navys and blacks, I'm not sure that's the direction I want to go in.
2. I could really do with some more comfy things, both for loungewear and general wear.
3. Much as I joke about having all the tulip skirts in the world, I've found that I really like wearing skirts and tops and I actually don't have enough of either.
4. I seem to have decided that three items of shop-bought clothing per week is my limit.
5. The handmade stuff that's simple and versatile will get a decent amount of wear even if I'm not really in love with it.
6. I like either "super practical and comfortable" or "I feel pretty fancy dressed like this" and I've not got much time for anything in between.
7. If I knew right from the beginning of the month that I wasn't even going to consider wearing certain things I've made, why do I still have them?

I'm going to do my final nine-item collage on Thursday next week rather than having a stupid little extra one with two pictures, and hopefully won't just consist of pictures of me looking panicked and wearing tops I don't like on my head. This is not entirely outside the realms of possibility.

wrapper's delight

(I'm sorry. I promise that not every post is going to have a pun in the title. But this won't be the last, either.)

See this?

This right here is what I wanted. To have a dress in my head and then make it into a real live thing that I could wear.

I bought this material a little while ago, some time before I learned how to work with jersey. I know it looks it should have a pensive wolf in front of it and be on a new age T-shirt and worn by that slightly odd beardy guy who used to turn up to house parties and was perfectly pleasant but nobody was ever quite sure whose friend he was or what he was doing there, but I had to buy it.

ME: [touches fabric] Ooh, that's soft.
TEEN GOTH JEN: [pops up suddenly] WE'RE HAVING THAT.
ME: But it's jersey.
TEEN GOTH JEN: Don't care.
ME: It'll just sit in the cupboard.
TEEN GOTH JEN: It has TREE BRANCHES and THE BEST COLOURS and I don't know why you think you can fight me on this.
ME: But...
TEEN GOTH JEN: NOPE.

So I bought three metres of the ridiculous stuff and Teen Goth Jen went back to sleep again. I knew immediately that it was going to be a wrap dress because a) I wanted a wrap dress and b) it seemed like a good way to de-Gothify it a bit. After making the dress once I decided I was confident enough to cut into this material, so my rotary cutter and I got to work. Based on my last experience, I added 6cm (I think) to the hem.

Mostly it came together really quickly, though this fabric really, really didn't want to be machine hemmed. I gave up after half a dozen tries and hand-hemmed the rest of it, so it's currently a bit of both. At some point I will get round to unpicking the machine stitching, but I'm terrified of making holes in the jersey. A project for a less anxious day, I think.

(This is definitely me being pleased and not me getting a bit too into singing along with the music in the studio. Honest.)

Incidentally, the reason I'm suddenly in a studio is that I got offered some free studio time and I took it, because of course I did. This was my first ever attempt at studio photography and studio lighting, and the reason everything looks a bit unfinished is that I couldn't be bothered to fight with my dying laptop long enough to Photoshop it properly. Slapdash!

And now, for your viewing pleasure, an outtake, where we definitely weren't dancing around to Taylor Swift or anything.

See? Definitely not. 

Sawrap Dressica Parker

(I'm SO sorry, I couldn't help myself. I'm not even sure this one works written down. But now that I've thought of it I can't name it anything else, so we're all just going to have to put up with it.)

Behold my first ever wrap dress:

 

You may have noticed, if you were paying attention, that this is not the dress I posted last week. Why? Because that was the second one. I got overexcited and made two in two days.

When I was first looking into learning to sew, I spent hours on the Sew Over It website looking at their wrap dress class and sighing wistfully. That dress was my goal, my motivation to start sewing, and it existed inside my head for the best part of a year. Once I was secure enough in my sewing skills to consider trying jersey, I waited for them to release a class date. They did... in September. Following my none-too-eventful cowl neck top experiments, I got confident/optimistic/impatient enough to just buy the pattern and do it myself.

This was EASY. All those people going round the internet talking about how knits are difficult and scary are bastard liars. I had this sewn up in a few hours, with only a couple of instances of my machine trying to eat my sleeve hems.

This is the jersey I picked up in Bristol for the purpose of Wrap Dress the First, on the basis that it wasn't particularly stretchy and would be less difficult to work with. It was not the best choice of fabric, because it's also super thin and a bit scratchy from all that silver stuff. I need to wear it with a top and shorts underneath otherwise it just irritates me too much.

As I said, this was a really easy pattern to sew, with five pieces and very clear instructions. It is pretty low cut, so I'm not really comfortable wearing it outside without a vest top underneath. It's also super short on me. I haven't hemmed this (and I don't need to! Yay jersey!) because I really don't want it to get any shorter.

Pictured: SHORTNESS

This length is just about wearable (sort of), but I've made a note on my pattern to add a bit of length in the future. Also I can't get the facing to stay on the inside. Other than that, it's a great pattern - comfortable, flattering and not over-complicated. I started making another one about twelve hours later, as you will shortly see...

Interim wraport

(I'm sorry. That is an awful, awful pun.)

Proper photos of this will come next week, but for now I am VERY EXCITED and wanted to share a terrible phone photo of my Actual Wrap Dress What I Made Myself:

Look at that. Look at it! I made that! It's like I'm someone who can actually make dresses or something!