Into my sewing history - part 3

After sifting through all my clothes when installing my new wardrobe, I promised you a whole series of blasts from my sewing past.

I've shown you two.

The old achievements were quickly pushed aside by new projects and newer plan... much like... No, let's not get philosophical about that. It's not so bad, after all, those old achievements were the building blocks of all mycurrent crafty endevours... much like.....

Joking aside, I thought it would be nice to do one more post with my old skirts. Completely apart from their looks, they represent an important step in my 'development' as a seamstress. They are the result of my very first tentative steps into pattern making.

I made these before taking lessons in pattern making, using a (unfortunately Dutch-only) book called 'Rok en co' (skirt and co'), with the subtitle 'for the lazy seamstress.

I would recommend this book to all beginners who like the notion of making patterns but lack the time or the love of math/technique to go all the way. It has loads of fun illustration and tutorials for several simple skirt patterns. And the sort of can-do attitude that encourages you to use it as a starting point for your own experiments.

I made these skirts based on the book's pencil skirt. The first one is long, has a little flare from just above the knee and a curved-up hemline. The second one is plain at the front but has a lace-up center back with three rows of circular ruffles underneath.

This skirt was based on the book's gored skirt tutorial. I made a long, plain 6 gore skirt before. This one is treated as a 6 gore skirt at the front and as a 8 gore skirt at the back. Instead of widening the gores themselves, I inserted the red satin godets. The skirt also is quite a bit longer at the back.

The pattern worked out fine, but this was the item which really showed me I needed some extra sewing skills. I had no idea how to make a good hem on such flared bits and the zigzagged seam allowances at the back were on show all the time.

The last skirt was a quick high-summer option. I used the pencil skirt pattern as a base for the yoke and the circle skirt tutorial to calculate the hole I had to cut in the rest of the fabric.

When I went to my first sewing technique and pattern making lesson, I took both of the knee length skirts and the voile blouse with me, to show the teacher my starting point. She was very nice about all of them and told me all I really needed to learn were some finishing tricks. Of course, then my sewing addiction really kicked in, I learned much, much more from her and the rest, as they say, is history.

Cold snap

When I posted last week's 'weekly outfit', I fully expected the snow to be gone pretty quickly. That was why I took the effort to take the picture on my balcony. Usually, any snow we get here melts within two days. Little did I expect what happened next. On Saturday, the snow didn't melt and on Sunday, it was snowing again. We had snow all day on Sunday. It ended up being a layer of between 10 and 20 cm. In The Hague, the Netherlands! I haven't seen this much snow in my hometown for at least 5, but more likely 10 years. I know it's pretty pathetic compared to a lot of other places, but it's pretty impressive here. There were no trains on Sunday. A collegue of mine was stuck in another city and didn't get home until Monday afternoon.This is what it looked like from my kitchen window on Sunday morning (the layer of snow got thicker later on).

The snow is slowly starting to melt now, but might freeze up again tonight. Luckily, I can walk to work. Normally I ride my bicycle, but I'm not biking on slippery surfaces. Now, I walk through an eerily quiet city (the trams are still not back to their usual timetable). The pavements are covered in caked snow, the roads are muddy slush. You can't actually see where the one stops and the other starts, so I take big steps over the snow/slush mounts at the edges of the roads.

As M says, it has been great weather to stay indoors. Which is just what E and I did on Sunday. That gave me the time to do some sewing and look through my stash materials. I didn't really get to my fabrics because I spend a lot of time looking through this, and another (less picturesque) box like it.

My grandmother gave me her old boxes of buttons last year. There is no really fancy stuff in any of them, but I just love the stories these little collections tell. Similar buttons are oftern threaded on pieces of string, to keep them together. With the small ones, they often don't all match. It seems that some ladies in my family would cut the buttons of all worn-out, un-salvagable pieces of clothing and kept them in these boxes. As organized as possible. I used some of those not-quite-matching little mother-of-pearl button for my white shirt, and as always, told myself to come up with a design which would make use of some of the more eye-catching buttons. There are two other, very small boxes holding old cufflinks, plastic broches and a belt clip. I'll show you those later, hopefully when I use some of their contents.

I just love sewing supplies with a history. Do you have any of those stories as well?