Category Archives: patterns written by others

A little delay and so not right for the season

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I still owe you pictures of my coat Zsazsa by susalabim. I made it back in May I think when it was really not the weather for a coat. And it is still not. Never mind. I do not own anything to wear it with anyway. But it looks amazing on my dress form.

Susalabim is a fantastic designer for lillestoff. Obviously I had already bought at least one of her fabrics without knowing it and it is actually through the pattern for this coat that I discovered not only Susalabim as a designer but also lillestoff as supplier for organic fabrics.

The coat can be made out of one fabric but Susalabim uses it to show off her designs as a patchwork coat – ideal to use up left overs. So ideal for me one would think. Except that I was really intrigued by the fabrics she had used in her video – jaquard, something I haven’t used so far. So I actually had to order small portions of different fabrics to fake a pile of left over jaquards. They were all so beautiful. I spent ages in arranging them and sending pictures to my dear colour and style expert back in London. Apart from her totally wrong and unjustified advice that orange elephants would be too childish she helped me a lot. As usual.  But enough talking.

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Initially I had in mind to only use a 2 or 3 fabrics for the sleeves and to have larger blocks. But as those fabrics were so nice, I didn’t want to waste any of it and used the small bits too. But I underestimated how much they would shrink in the washing. So actually I couldn’t cut the sleeves properly and had to do real patchwork in two places:

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I love having the seams on the outside. It is so venturous and makes it cool and trend-setting.

However my banned from chocolate for life and boring 7 year old finds it wrong and embarrassing.

So what do you think? Are you boring or setting venturous trends? 🙂

I’ll take this coat to RUMS for now and wait for more appropriate weather to be a cool trend-setter.

 

 

Scrap Sunday still (I never said I can only post one a week): Best buddies

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As mentioned in my last post, I have, for the first time in my life, bought a fabric, last-minute, just because I had read a post by biostoffe that they had only a few metres left and that it had already been sold out in Germany.

So I bought 70cm of the – well lets call it – iconic building site fabric by lillestoff.  I felt guilty for being silly enough to follow a hype. But, I would like to point out, that I had asked my son if he liked it, before ordering. And he was at the time very into building sites and determined to become a builder one day (followed by a short yet strong firemen period and currently settling on actually being unsure about his professional future but we are once again loosing track.)

So, I made him a T-Shirt, using my usual pattydoo pattern.

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Quickly followed by a pair of Sachensuchershorts as seen in my last post.

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About 6 weeks ago, I had to make birthday presents for his 2 best friends, a set of twins, who were about to leave nursery (and therefore leave him).

A search through the fabric cupboard quickly led to the decision to make a pair of T-Shirts using up those last few cm of the building site fabric.

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Initially, I meant to make non matching shirts but when I found those last bits of fabric, I thought it might be a nice reminder of their best friend and their time in nursery.

For the applications, I used freestyle machine embroidery rather than zigzagging the edges to match the style of the drawings. I guess I should not have used those precious pieces for practise but the boys won’t look that closely.

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I really like the look of those two shirts and I am more than happy with my use of this particular fabric. I only have a tiny piece left, I think I have about two vehicles left that are still intact and could be used as applications.

 

pattern: Leo by pattydoo

fabric: jersey Baustellenfahrzeuge by lillestoff and stripy jerseys

 

Cosy Clown Coat

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Remember, last post was about family members who are pleased with my creative work. But this is not always the case. In fact, just the same day, my husband looked at my work in progress, a cosy hoodie jacket,  and said: “You always have to do things three times because you are doing them before thinking.”  Obviously this is totally unjustified, fake news,  and just because at some point during the creative process the jacket  had looked like this:

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Honestly, just a minor mistake, and nothing that a pair of scissors and an additional seam couldn’t solve. And anyway, I only had to do it twice, not three times.

I am glad that he hadn’t seen that I had accidentally cut the hood halves not as pair (like gloves) but twice the same.

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I bet he would have interpreted this as yet another proof of his strange theory.

But back to the purpose of this post, said jacket.

I have bought the Janice pattern by pattydoo ages ago, clearly hoodies are a staple garment and every woman should have one or two.

Let me give you just a piece of advice here, from a fashionista and colour expert: When it comes to staple clothes, one should have them in neutral colours, I would suggest monochrome,  no pattern as one want to be able to combine them with all of these other crazy things in my  one’s wardrobe. So the fabric you have already seen, is clearly just perfect for it. Luckily I bought lots of it as I meant to make another Carol dress  out of it but continuous breastfeeding seems to make dresses a bit pointless these days.

But enough talking, let’s have a look at the result:

 

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a little bit of contrasting hood lining peeking out, just to add a splash of colour

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I am rather pleased with the result and know it will get worn a lot. Luckily we still get chilly mornings. Annoyingly during day time it is already rather warm and sunny around here.

I think it is a bit too long though. The pattern is designed for the use of normal shop bought zips so the lengths of the different sizes go in 5cm steps. If I wanted to use a normal zip, I would have to shorten it 5cm otherwise I have to adjust the zip. Which I have done before for the children’s jackets but it is always a bit messy.

So when I make the next one, I will have to see, how long I really want or need it. Obviously with those low-cut trousers these days, it is also nice to have a long jacket to get my middle-aged and always freezing back and bottom well covered up.

If you are by now thinking that I seem to have too much sewing time lately, you might be right. I do get a lot done and I am making a lot for myself.

I am trying to get ready for Me Made May and I will see what challenge I will set for myself this year.

In the meantime, I will jump over to RUMS and see if other ladies are getting ready too.

Scrap Sunday: It’s the little things

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If you are following this blog since a while, you will know how hard I have tried in the past years to please Mr. No thank you. This madness culminated last September when I made the most amazing play mat. For a 5-year-old. I mean how often is he going to play with it, really?

Because it’s so amazing, here are the pictures again for those who were too lazy to click on the link:

At the time, it was well appreciated, but now I keep hearing a complaint. It seems that I have ruined the whole thing by forgetting the road marking on a very short piece. Except that I did it on purpose. To have a little “one way only” challenge.

Anyway, lets just forget about this big failure of mine.

At least a year ago, I dared pointing out the huge holes on the far too short pyjama, stupidly suggesting that we could throw that old piece away. Goodness. How could I not have known that this was his favourite piece of clothing. Ever. So I suggested to use the fabric to make something. Like pyjamas for the doll. Phew, the offer got accepted. I then put it in my box of future projects where it stayed and matured.

After a little accusation reminder a couple of weeks ago, we settled on a cuddling blanket and I got straight to work.

First I carefully cut along the seams to get the maximum out of it and obviously we needed to take the biggest piece to make the blanket. Everything else would have been silly. The biggest piece happened to be the back of the original onesie.

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When I folded it in the middle, I thought, it looks like a bunny so we made a bunny cuddle blanket with appliqued face.

 

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The blanket gets cuddled a lot and is most likely the best thing I have ever made. He will take it everywhere (when he moves house, not everywhere everyday). And he said: “That was really nice of you.” Which is definitely the best compliment that I ever heard re any of my makes. At least it feels like it after having tried so hard for years 🙂

And just for the record, I haven’t just managed to please the boy. The girl has also shown a quick smile once. She kept complaining that the boys have matching clothes and that she wanted to have matching clothes with the toddler as well.

So I made T-shirts. I wanted to use different colours for the sleeves but no, it needed to be the same. Although the mint would have looked better with dark pink sleeves. Just my opinion.

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Can you spot the difference?

Correct, different types of sleeves. Luckily I got away with that 🙂

The baby version is the klimperklein baby top with buttons at the side and the bigger version is my usual pattydoo raglan shirt pattern.

I love the fabric. When I ordered it I expected smaller lions and I was worried at first how the big ones would look on a tiny baby shirt. But I love it.