Dress form evening

Oh boy, things are going to get moving starting tomorrow - I've got one less day than I thought I would in Bucharest so lots of meetings with lots of people will happen. And some shopping, I hope.

I spent this evening in front of my laptop looking at dress forms. It seems that the only real options out there are made by this Kentish company, adjustoform. I also toyed with the idea of making a mold after myself but ended up dismissing it as too much hassle.

I've finally decided on getting a Lady Valet, which comes in two colors, black and cream. Truth be told, I prefer the cream version more, but the black one is cheaper and it also comes with some seemingly useless things (flimsy-looking hem-maker, brush, measuring tape). Well they probably aren't useless, but I haven't had a problem with my hems yet and I already own the other two things. The cream is prettier, however, I suspect I will need to pad it at the waist line, so the black one would end up looking cream anyway.

Unfortunately, the official website doesn't sell the cream version online. I have, however, found it at 119 pounds here on the sewing world website (thank you Google!). I'm actually considering phoning the factory to ask if they have any showroom on site. I'd like to see these forms for myself before I buy and Ashford is fairly easy to access from South London. I'll discuss it with Mr. T - at this point I'm still considering whether travelling there is worth it. Maybe he has some input on this.

Images from adjustoform website.

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How to make silk bias binding

I promised this tutorial a while ago, but was too busy with work to get to it. This tutorial will focus on how to iron and fold the binding, rather than how to cut it. I have three links to good tutorials about how to do the correct cutting.

Here goes: a tutorial for properly making bias binding. Apologies for picture quality, I was using my phone.

Tools needed:
* silk square for the bias, sewing machine and scissors to make the continuous bias strip that will be ironed into place
* a 2-inch (5cm) wide piece of cardboard
* some sort of vaporiser, filled with water
* bias tape maker - for these pictures, I used a Clover which makes 1/2" binding (starts with 1" strips), but if I were to do this again, I'd use the one which makes a 1" binding (out of 2" strips)

Naming:
* left-side: bias strip not yet passed through the bias maker
* right-side: bias strip which has been folded by the bias maker

Steps:

1. Cut bias strips out of your silk square. I like this tutorial…

Pregnancy Pattern Round Up

Whilst I have been sewing these past 9 months, I haven't been posting much because in the past I was not massively keen on reading about people's pregnancy patterns. However, at some point I realized that I'm wrong and having some review out there would be useful, so decided to do a round up post about what I've learnt works and doesn't work in terms of this kind of sewing. This is a very long post :)

I had a fairly easy pregnancy, so I was perfectly positioned to have good results with sewing, which is great since maternity clothing is either decently priced and of bad quality, or expensive. Dime for dime, you get more out of non-maternity ready to wear.

Some lessons I learnt along the way:
Some non-pregnancy patterns will work for pregnancy. Sort of. As bump size increases, in the best case scenario you will get the mother of all pooling at the back, as if a gazillion-inch swayback is required (but isn't!). If that doesn't bother you, you're fine; otherw…

A new shirt

I made a white shirt. I cut this out sometime in late September, and I used McCalls 6035 again. I managed to finish it around Christmas. I wanted a nice white shirt, with a bit of a twist, so I added grey embelishments to it.

I am very pleased with how the embelishments turned out. I did a few things:
- embroidered the collar with French knots
- added grey/white twill tape to the sleeve seams
- used mother-of-pearl-with-grey-tint buttons

The effects are subtle, but they are there and I like them.

I embroidered the collar using two shades of grey, in a "burst" pattern. I tried to be relatively consistent about density of the French knots, but I think a bit of difference isn't very bad.

The collar was the first thing I finished, and it stayed there for a long time, until I found the time to get back to sewing.

I used a lot more interfacing on the collar than I normally do, and I think it shows. The buttons and tape on sleeves were added later and they're not very speci…

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