Sensible New Year Pattern Haul (SNYPH)

Planning! I am full of plans! So full of plans that it's actually a bit overwhelming! Help!

This year I want to approach what I make a bit more deliberately. I'm wearing the things I make on a fairly regular basis, so I'm not just looking for patterns that don't look too tricky and fabric that isn't too expensive. I'm trying to make things that I would buy if I saw them - a combination of things I think I need and things I'd really love to have, filling practical gaps in my wardrobe and making my wardrobe as a whole more interesting. The overall goal is to look attractively put together on a day-to-day basis with the option of going into vintage drag or something more casually interesting if I feel like it, while looking comfortable and like myself the whole time. Which may be a bit of a tall order. We shall see.

I liked the way the Unnecessary October Dress Pattern Haul worked out for me, and I'm planning to try it as a structure for this year. Four or five projects planned at the beginning of every two month period, and if I have the time and inclination to do other things too, then I will. Here are my patterns for January and February. Check it out - a sensible collection of patterns for the next two months AND a slightly less unwieldy acronym that could actually be pronounced like a word! Probably best you don't get used to that.

Sewaholic Cordova jacket

I've had this pattern for months, and I'd bought all the bits and pieces for it before I decided the fabric wasn't quite what I wanted. A little while ago I bought some black and white fabric for a cape and then decided it wasn't right for the pattern, so I'm going to repurpose it for this jacket.

By Hand London Holly trousers

I bought this pattern ages ago all excited about making a jumpsuit, and then when it came in the post I decided I was never actually going to make it up. However, it's also a pattern for wide-leg trousers and I think it might be just right for my swishy trousers. I'm going to make this first pair in black for practical reasons, though I haven't yet acquired fabric of quite the right swish.

Sew Over It 1940s wrap dress

I don't have a photo of this pattern as I'm going to a class to make the dress. I'll write more about it when I blog the finished project, but this dress is basically the reason I started sewing and I've been waiting for months for them to run the class again. I have some bright blue crepe to make it in and I'm planning for it to be my birthday dress (I don't have a birthday plan yet, so it'll probably come down to "where can I wear this dress?").

Cashmerette Appleton Dress

It's time I used my goddamn aubergine print jersey. I wanted it to be a wrap dress when I first bought it, and since all the wrap dresses I've tried so far have given me some gaping problems, it makes sense to try a pattern specifically designed for bigger busts.

These four are my priority for the next two months. I originally had five, but I have several pieces of jersey to make into dresses and I'm not sure which one to put on the list. I have plans for a border print Tiramisu dress, a blue patterned Moneta, a navy floral jersey tea dress, and a grey spotty Vogue 8615, so you'll be seeing at least one of those along with the rest of the list. I know, I know, I probably ought to just pick one. But there is such a thing as too much planning, right?

UODPH part three: Cambie

So I said originally that this would probably be the last of the UODPH I'd make for seasonal reasons, but then I made it third instead, because I'm crazy and unpredictable. OK, that's not why. I was getting a bit overwhelmed at the amount of fabric I was going to have to buy for the last three dresses. Three metres per dress is a lot, and when I try and buy for that many specific projects at once, I end up panic-buying and at least two of my acquisitions end up not being right for what I want to do.

After worrying about it for a while, I found myself reading the back of the Cambie packet and realised that view A wasn't a tight-fitting pencil dress like I thought - it's by no means a full skirt, but there are a few inches of ease in the hips. And view A could be made out of two metres of fabric. I got very excited - I had two metres of green crepe I'd bought for a trouser project I abandoned ages ago, and a ton of dark green lining that I could repurpose.

(This dress didn't come on holiday with me, so witness my first attempt at taking photos in my bedroom. They're not great, but they'll do.)

When I held my lining up to my main fabric, said main fabric seemed to have gone unaccountably blue all of a sudden and looked super drab next to the dark green. Huh. Oh well, no problem, I thought, I have two pieces of bright blue lining in my stash. I'll use that instead. So I got that out, and the fabric decided it was going to be green again and clash enormously with the blue lining. And I know it's only lining, but I also know it would bug the hell out of me. So I put it aside for several weeks. Finally I went lining shopping and it would seem that my crepe is the actual most awkward colour to match in the entire world. I couldn't find anything that looked good. So I bought a fairly neutral colour which looked like a very pale and unobtrusive buttercup yellow in the shop but turned into an odd apricot-y bedsheet-y colour against my fabric's stupid, stupid not-blue-not-green shade. So it still wasn't great but I couldn't find anything better and I figured it would do. The fabric looks really blue in these photos, but in real life everyone looks at me funny when I tell them this story because it's obviously green.

Apart from a bit of faff with the pockets (entirely my fault for trying to sew under the influence of a horrendous head cold and getting confused for no real reason), the first stages of the pattern were super easy and I had my main fabric sewn up in a couple of hours. I was a bit worried about the invisible zip stage, because my zip insertion skills still aren't great, but it went in fairly easily, and by following the extra instructions on the Sewaholic site, sewing the lining in was really easy too.

The sleeves don't look quite like the other Cambie sleeves I've seen, and at least part of that is that I couldn't get the fabric to gather particularly well. I think these sleeves are fine, but it would be nice to know I can do it the proper way and get to make the choice. I think I've worked out what I was doing wrong now, so we'll see.

I did have a concern that this dress was going to be a bit too precious for me. I've seen a lot of really sweet-looking versions that look great on the people wearing them but would look like a Hallowe'en costume on me. Pretty sleeves and a sweetheart neckline = possible Teen Goth Jen rebellion. However, I think the dark colour and the slimmer skirt take away the sweet somewhat and leave me with an actually super useful dress. It's also, I think, one of the more professional-looking garments I've made. How much of that is me improving and how much of that is a really impressively drafted pattern I couldn't say, but the way this dress came together makes me really want to try out Sewaholic's trouser pattern.

For my next Cambie (maybe electric blue in spring/summer time) I'm going to size down in the shoulders and do a full bust adjustment. I thought the fit of this was totally fine when I finished it, but this was the last dress I made before starting to experiment with full bust adjustments, and now the fact that it's slightly tight across the bust and slightly gaping at the top is really annoying me. I probably won't use this weird-ass polycotton lining next time, either.

Finally, a short series I like to call Jen Got A Hat For Christmas:

You will be seeing more of this hat when I start my Inspiration series and bore you all to tears on the subject of Phryne Fisher. Consider this your advance warning. 

tea in a tree

I'm back! Didn't I say I'd be back? I have lots and lots of plans for upcoming posts, which I will present to you very much not in the order I'd intended. I've had a sudden re-think on my January projects, and I decided that for some reason I'd get photos of my Unnecessary October Dress Pattern Haul parts four and five, but not part three. I think it made sense at the time. So now it's all going to have to wait because I don't want to rewrite the posts.

What I really do want, though, is to post another finished dress. Presenting my Christmas project, Sew Over It's 1940s Tea Dress, photographed in Sicily last week:

I'd been considering this pattern for a while and eventually bought both it and 2.5 metres of rayon crepe on a whim while ordering various bits of Christmas present from Sew Over It. I love dark dresses with white polka dots and I used to have about six of them, but they've all made their way to the charity shop over the last couple of years for not being quite right in one way or another.

I wanted to make this dress before going home for Christmas, but it wasn't until I went to get started that I realised I'd forgotten to pre-wash the fabric. I made another dress (coming soon!) in the meantime to use up my sewing energy, but instead of using it up it made it worse.  As soon as this fabric dried I got into a small fight with myself over whether I could start making the tea dress now given that I was a) leaving for Bristol in the morning, b) not even a little bit packed, and c) expecting my boyfriend to show up in a couple of hours. The only way I could convince myself not to was to pack the pattern, fabric and notions into my suitcase and suggest to myself that I could do it at my parents' house. Which, to my great surprise, I actually did.

I used my mum's fairly basic Singer, which she got free from a friend and has been sitting in the loft for some time. I quite enjoyed using it - I also used it to make a pair of tartan pyjama bottoms for my brother and it sewed through several layers of cotton twill without a grumble. My machine is less than a year old and it already whines and skips stitches when I try to sew anything more than two layers of lightweight cotton (plus it HATES knits), and the comforting robustness of Mum's machine even after several years of disuse has convinced me to upgrade as soon as I can feasibly manage it.

The dress came together fairly easily. The gathering was fine, the invisible zip was fine, the sleeves were fine. The neck facing was a bastard. It made the point at the neckline centre go funny and I've had to topstitch it down to make it stay on the inside of the dress. I've used many Sew Over It patterns now, and I love them, but they use these facings a lot and I find them to be an enormous pain. I cannot get them to stay on the inside no matter how much understitching and pressing I do. I think in the future I'll try a different way of finishing the neckline.

I'd like to make this dress again, but I'll be making a few changes. I cut between the 12 and 14 at the shoulders grading out to a 16 at the bust, but next time I'll cut the 12 and do a full bust adjustment (you'll see my first attempt at an FBA later this month. I'm slightly annoyed that all the people singing the praises of the FBA were completely right and I'll have to do one every time now. Hmph). Hopefully this would get the bust to sit under my actual bust, which it's not very keen on doing in this version. I could probably stand to go down a size in the waist (this one will need a bit of taking in before I wear it again). I'll also find another way to do the neckline. I also want to have a go at a jersey version of this dress, sized down and without the zip, as an experiment (and because I have 2.5 metres of navy jersey with a white floral overlay that I have no idea what to do with).

OK. Some pedant out there is complaining about the post title. We were to understand there would be trees, and you provide only boats? I would expect better of you. And in answer to that, all I have to say is:

Me: Look at that tree. It's huge. Looks pretty climbable too.

Boyfriend: Jen. Do you want to get in the tree?

Me: Well...

Boyfriend: You want to get in the tree, don't you?

Me: I really do want to get in the tree.

Boyfriend: Of course you do. Go on, then.

You tell me a better thing I could have been doing on New Year's Day than tree climbing in Sicily.

1940s tea dress: tree-climbing approved. 

resolutions

Every year since I was sixteen I've made ten resolutions every January, then come back to them at the end of the year to see how I did. It's such an ingrained tradition now that I forget that literally nobody else in the world does this. I've made my resolutions as usual, but I feel like before I take a blogging break for Christmas it would be nice to make another ten here, relating to my new area of interest, split 50/50 between sewing and style:

Sewing

1. I will learn to fit properly.

Since one of the major advantages of making stuff yourself is that you can fit it correctly, I want to learn how to do that properly. Mostly any 'fitting' I've done when not in the presence of expert tuition is of the "pull seam in a bit more here, sew it up" variety, which is fine but still leaves a lot of fit issues in my clothes and adjustments I could do with learning. I'd like to get a better understanding of my body's individual shape and fit requirements and how best to serve them.

2. I will plan my projects two months at a time.

I was surprised at how useful my Unnecessary October Dress Pattern Haul was. I bought five patterns at once, which is not unusual, but then I posted about them and began thinking of them as a set, which gave me a lot more incentive to actually work through them. I ran into problems with not having appropriate fabric at hand though, and I need to work on getting these two lined up a bit better. I'll probably end up writing myself a set of guidelines or something equally dorky to make sure that I get through some of the stuff I actually have instead of buying endless new stuff.

3. I will be more creative.

Because I'm just a beginner, what I do right now is: buy pattern, cut out as instructed, sew up as instructed. What I'd love to be able to do is understand patterns well enough to be able to mess about with them, change necklines and sleeves and shapes and turn a tank top pattern into a wedding dress or whatever the hell it is other people seem to be able to do. I'd also like to be able to turn inspiration into wearable clothes, and I have acquired myself some croquis with the intention of attempting this every month or two.

4. I will work out what the hell to do with my scraps pile.

At the moment, I have two bins and two bags full of pieces of material that aren't big enough to go in my fabric cupboard but aren't small enough to be thrown away without guilt, and I need a good way to reduce this to at least a quarter of the size and keep it there. I think using pieces to try out bodice fitting is probably not a bad idea to start off with, as is reminding myself that whilst random sewing bloggers are perfectly entitled to write appalled posts about how they would never throw out a scrap of anything, they aren't actually the governor of my life choices and I can throw stuff away if I want.

5. I will become a more disciplined fabric buyer.

My fabric buying policy so far has been "buy as much as you can as cheaply as you can", which I think is a large part of the reason my cupboard is so full of stuff I don't seem to be able to pair with a pattern. I will still buy cheap fabric for my first attempt at something, but I would like to keep at a similar level of spending and acquire smaller volumes of better fabric that's more compatible with my pattern queue.

Style

6. I will get a grip on my shoe situation.

It's only fairly recently that I realised how much better I feel in a good pair of shoes, and to be fair I have recently started taking steps to sort that out. But next year I want to build up a small collection of comfortable and pretty shoes that I can wear on a day to day basis without hurting my feet. The chances are that I'm going to have to get more of a grip on shoe shopping (which I hate because I have weird-shaped feet and it's so difficult to find comfy shoes), and also spend more money on each pair of shoes (which I also hate because even shoes that feel comfy in the shop often start hurting after I've paid money for them). But I will feel better for it, and I know that.

7. I will elevate my everyday casual wear.

I don't really want this to be anything drastic, I just want to have a slightly more polished baseline than jeans and a top, i.e. jeans + random top isn't an outfit, but jeans + specific top + specific jacket is. At the moment a lot of my handmade stuff goes unworn because it's too far above my baseline casual - I go out in a dress and it's such a noticeable shift in my style level that people ask me what I'm dressing up for. I'd like to be able to wear dresses on a day-to-day basis and not have people look at me funny, is all.

8. I will maintain a haircut.

This is weirdly fundamental to the success of my previous resolution. I find it almost impossible to dress in a put-together way if my hair isn't behaving itself, and my hair has spent most of this year not behaving itself. Having now got my hair cut into a proper style, I need to commit to getting it cut every couple of months and not letting it grow back into a mop.

9. I will shop more carefully and more ethically.

I haven't done a ridiculous Primark shopping spree in a while, but I think at this point I'm going to put a conscious end to them. I have done so many cheap-ass shopping sprees and thrown out so many of the things after one, two or no wears (I do have one Primark jumper that is amazing and is still alive and I love it and it was £9, but that was years ago and it's literally never happened again). No more buying disposable shit from places with dubious labour practices. I want a wardrobe that makes sense, which means not just chucking random stuff into it because I saw something purple that maybe doesn't exactly fit or go with anything but look, purple (genuine thought process I have had). I can afford to put a little more thought into this stuff.

10. I will find out what 'me' clothes look like.

This is the intended outcome of my "attempts to develop style" series, and it's something I want to work on next year because I think it'll make everything a hell of a lot less confusing. I want to have a very clear picture of what's 'me' and what's 'not me' while still leaving room for me to try shit that may not be exactly me but is fabulous.

I'm now going to take a couple of weeks' break. I'm at home with my family for Christmas, and next week my boyfriend and I are flying out to spend New Year in Sicily (yes, we suck, I know). But I shall be back in January with sewing plans of all kinds. Merry holiday time to everyone!

blog notes

Blog note the first: Posting is going to be light from now until I get back from Sicily in January, but I do have a resolutions post and a couple of other things scheduled to go up in the next couple of weeks.

Blog note the second: All of my Unnecessary October Dress Pattern Haul projects have now been completed (yay!) but will probably not be posted until next month. I was thinking about rushing them all out before I start talking about my next pattern haul, but I was forgetting the bit where I haven't made any of those things yet and would rather not have long stretches where I don't post any finished makes at all.

Blog note the third: I have to make/finish about six Christmas presents in the next two days because I have a fanciful imagination and terrible time management skills. Please wish me luck.

Jen attempts to develop style: observations and step one

Let's start off with a word dump.

Observations from hits post and past makes:

saturated colours
solids
graphic and tonal prints
black tights
sleeves
movement
structural details
streamlined
navy + white
shoulder detail
wrap style
waist emphasis
minimalist accessorising
red
comfort
very dark + very bright

And now some words I think of when I think about an aspirational style I'd like to have:

olive green
balanced proportions
deep shades + cream
vintage inspired
soft
swishy trousers
Italian style
legs
headwear
drape
effortless

There's a bit of crossover there, but Imaginary Jen appears to be more elegant, sophisticated, and subdued than Actual Jen. Given that so many of my favourite clothes are crazy bright colours I'm not going to try and bring Imaginary Jen to life, but I think I can accommodate a few elements of the second list. Enough that I can choose to swish around and pretend to be Sophia Loren and/or Phryne Fisher every once in a while and nobody will think it's weird.

And now, the tremendously exciting debut of my first step towards this whole style thing: after looking back at my old photos, I decided to cut my hair again. Now it looks like this:

I was worried it might be a tiny bit too short when I first saw it, but now that I'm used to it I think it's a lot better. My hair is super-thick, sort of curly but not curly enough to be actually curly, and never behaves in the same way twice, so when it's a bit longer it sometimes looks fine and sometimes looks like I've had some sort of horrendous accident with an electrical socket.  It was starting to drive me nuts, and the time was right for a symbolic chopping of hair, so here is my proper-short bob!

Having an actual hairstyle as opposed to a mop forces me to pay more attention to what I wear, and one of my resolutions (which you will be seeing in a couple of weeks) is to commit to regular hairdressing appointments. If my hair is up together I'm a lot less likely to fall back into the "eh, fuck it, that'll do" manner of dressing. I do think that what I wear is likely to shift slightly now that my hair is this short and I'll be keeping an eye on that.

Technically I've done step two as well; a few hours after I had my hair cut, a van turned up and took away several bin bags' worth of clothes and shoes I don't wear anymore, so there is now a small amount of space in my room for me to accumulate new and better things. Marching with grim determination down the road to progress, that's me. Also it's just over a week until I leave for Christmas and I'm having serious trouble convincing my brain that that's not sufficient time in which to make three and a half dresses. Sigh.

jacket in

(Sorry.)

A little while ago, I bought the Sewaholic Cordova jacket pattern. I loved the shape, and having seen on the envelope that lightweight brocade was one of the recommended fabrics, I had a vision of a black brocade jacket with an electric blue lining that rather excited me. But finding a brocade I liked and thought I'd happily wear as a jacket proved trickier than I'd imagined, and I started to look at other options. Eventually I bought some white wool with multi-coloured flecks, mostly because the online shop had named it "Joseph Boucle" (who's got two thumbs and enjoys terrible fabric/literature crossover puns? THIS GIRL) and planned to make the jacket up in that instead of brocade.

When I came to look at it, I realised that the fabric was a lot more multicoloured and a lot less white than I had in my head, meaning I wouldn't get the kind of contrast with the lining that I'd been hoping for. Apparently that was the main selling point of the jacket to me, because I then completely lost enthusiasm for the project.

A little while later, I bought a sewing magazine with a free pattern on it. I've now stopped doing this, because I've learned that sewing magazines always supply the smallest size and that's no good to me. The free pattern on this magazine is a New Look pattern with a much larger range of sizes - US sizes 8-20, it claimed. I thought that might bode well. Then I got it home and saw that this range of patterns only has a nine-inch hip-to-waist difference, and that their "US size 20", i.e. a UK size 24, had a hip measurement of 43 inches. I know sewing patterns are sized smaller, and I know I have a lot of hip, but given that I wear a UK 14-16 on my bottom half in ready-to-wear, I was not expecting to have this problem. Ugh.

The pattern was for a sheath dress and cropped jacket, and due to my ridiculous 14-inch hip-to-waist difference, the jacket pattern did fit my measurements. I threw the dress pattern away because what is even the point it's just a dull sheath and decided to repurpose the boucle to make the jacket.

This came out really well. The photos did not, because we took them at 4pm and apparently that's night time now. Yay autumn!

It isn't quite neutral enough to bring the Zombie Hoodie Replacement Race to an end, but it certainly covers some more of the bases. I found it quite easy to construct - the main problem I had was that this fabric frays really quickly. This was my first time inserting sleeves in a woven fabric, and it didn't give me any grief at all. There aren't any closures on it, which in some ways is great because I definitely would have put this off if it had a zip and possibly put it off forever if it had buttons. It's also unlined, and I'm not so keen on that because I have to look at my seams every time I take it off. When I make it again (which I will) I'd like to try and put a lining in, though I have no idea how easy it is to just Frankenstein a lining into something. Experiments!

(Also, remember when I made this top? I had no idea it would be so useful, but I get loads of wear out of it, especially now that it makes a nice outfit with this jacket. I must make some more.)

Posing Tip: Pretend to be looking at something far away. This is a simple way to find the light with your face, allowing your ridiculous expression to be shown off to full advantage.

Also positioning yourself in such a way that it looks as though you're lost in the wilderness of your very small North London garden. That's a good one too. (This is why you come here, right? The modelling tips? You wait til I do a whole post using Tyra Banks' 'pose with pain' philosophy.)

More jackets to come. I've not decided whether to make a more neutral version of this or have a go at the Cordova first, but it will probably be one of the two unless something else comes up. I am organised and good at planning. You cannot deny my truth.