Warderobe architect

Latley my sewing motivation fell asleep a little bit. I can´t motivate myself for new projects and I´m having a hard time with desicion making. And as I wore off store bought clothes a while ago I really need to build up a good basic warderobe. With this in mind the warderobe architect challenge from Coletterie came at a perfect time!

While I was down angina I had a lot of time to overthink and plan my warderobe. My core style is mostly based on comfortable clothes. I hate it when clothes pinch or squeeze or annoy me in any way. I mostly wear straight cut pants that sit on the low waist and I hardly wear skirts. I don´t know why because I have a lot of skirts and I like them. But in my everyday life I mostly go with pants. For fancier events I love dresses. I almost every variation except with gathered skirts. My tops are mostly unicolored and Renfrew like. Sometimes I love a good button down shirt. The easiest style element are the shoes. I basically have only three types of shoes: Converse, winter shoes and running shoes. What I really love are jackets and coats. In many styles and variations, they´re my favorite garment to wear 🙂

My patterns are:

– Renfrew top

– Heavily modified Jalie 2105

– McCalls 7018

– Grainville blouse

– Oakridge blouse

– Archer shirt

– Bruyere shirt

– Undercover hood

– Coppélia cardigan

– Ottobre jeans Lady fit

– Modified Thurlow pants

– Ooh la Leggings

– Bellatrix blazer

– Robson coat

– Pavot coat

– Belladone dress

– Cambie dress

 

When I´m fabric shopping I tend to grab whatever catches my eye without thinking of combination possibilities and colour matching. This left my with a warderobe full of clothes in a lot of colours but hardly anything that goes together. So I tried to find out which colours I like to wear and fit me.

I came up with these basic neutral colours that go along with everything:

These are my nearly neutrals that are easy to combine:

 

These are my statement colours, they should only be paired with the neutral or nearly neutral colours. I´m not so sure if I like the orange. I just felt something missing in the palette but I don´t think I´ll want wear it.

 

I included a lot of blues and greens, which are my preferred colours for clothing. Suprisingly I don´t have that many garments in these coloures. It´s about time to start buying fabric with a little bit more thinking!

So, that was my part for the january challenge. Let´s see what february brings along!

 

Georgia dress, all finished

The sewalong is not yet finished, there´s one more post coming – the zipper and hemming.

I, of course, couldn´t wait and finished the dress today. I had so much fun putting it all together, it´s such a great dress!

The pattern pieces went together easily and the instructions were pretty straightforward. So it all went faster than I expected.

I used size US 4/ UK 8 from the bodice to the waist and size US 6/ UK 10 for the waist. I was in between those sizes at the hip measurements, so I decided to go for the larger size to ensure that the dress will be comfortable.

I never got why so many sewists are scared of the invisivle zipper. Once I figured out how to put it in, I´ve been able to sew it faster than a regular zipper. I have an “invisible zipper foot”, which was really quite cheap at my local fabric store.

This is how i sew in my zippers: First I finish the raw edges with my overlock, where the stitch is exactly 5mm wide. I use the edge of the stitches as guidence for the zipper tape. I pin it in place with a few needles. Then I set in my invisible zipper foot, set the needle position to the middle and start sewing. The foot rolls the theeth of the zipper out of the way and sews it in with almost no effort. After that I just close the rest of the seam with the regular foot.

I don´t like how the zipper end just hangs loosley in a dress, so I made a litte zipper end cover. I used a 4x6cm scrap of fabric, folded it in half, turned the opening edged 5mm outside. Then I stitched the side seams with 5mm seam allowence. At last you just need to turn it over, stick the zipper end in and close it.

The fabric photographs horribly. It looks more grey than black in the pictures.

I love my musical tights!

Next time, I have to make a SBA, the bust has 2 tiny crinkles that are bothering me, even though you can hardly see them. And I can take the side seams in for about 5mm at each side.

In the last picture I´m standing in a kind of weird way but it´s the only picture where you can see the pattern properly.

All in all I´m very happy with my very first little black dress! It is very comfortable and perfect for formal or informal occasions! Just throw it on and feel fancy 🙂

 

Georgia Sewalong

I recently got my hands on the Georgia dress pattern from Byhandlondon!

I ordered it as soon as they announced that it was available, it´s such a great looking dress! So a few weeks ago I read on their blog that they´re hosting a sewalong! Just click on the image to get to there! It will start on january, 27th, so I have this week to buy the fabric, everything else I already have in my stock. I´ll make the dress with the narrow shoulder straps, I can´t decide on a colour, though. Little black dress? Emerald green? Ink blue?