Sewing Gage

When I was at the Sewing Bee Live exhibition, one of the patterns that I got my hands on was for this shopping bag; Now, this isn't something that I wouldn't normally make, but my mum's 70th birthday was coming up, so I thought it would make a nice personal present for her. She loves owls, so I found this canvas material at Minerva Crafts  which was perfect. The cream cotton material I used for the inside was from the haberdashery department at John Lewis The pattern was fairly easy to follow, I did have difficulty with the inside pocket, but I kind of went off on my own and did my own thing with it and it all came together in the end, and mum was happy with her present.

I loved watching this show when it was on, so I was excited to see that they had an event at the ExCel centre in London. The event boasted 200 plus dressmaking and sewing suppliers, 250 plus workshops and demonstrations (I never made it to any), and a live theatre featuring the presenters Patrick Grant and Esme Young. I managed to pick up a few free sewing pattern, I was persuaded into subscribing to Love Sewing magazine Oh, and I picked up a new machine, and industrial one for £299 from Eastman . I had never heard of them, but speaking to a friend later, and looking into the company, I seemed to have got myself a bargain; A couple of weeks later I received delivery of the machine, and my sewing area in the lounge is slowly expanding, soon to take over the whole room. I love this machine, its so sturdy and quiet. It only performs a straight stitch, but that stitch is perfect!

​So whilst creating the club kids outfit, my fairly new overlocker decided to break down. The machine was threaded correctly, but it failed to form a correct stitch. The timing seemed to be out of sync (if that happens). I decided that rather than go through the hassle of sending it back I would go to a local repair shop. I needed the machine to do a couple other outfits, so needed it fixed quick. After a quick Google search I found a shop nearby, Sew Amazing. I gave them a call and he said said to bring it in in the afternoon and he'll take a look. So that afternoon I took a short bus ride to Roman road and paid him a visit. He saw the problem straight away. The cutting arm was not the original. It had came from an industrial machine, and there was no way of isolating the arm. He asked where I got the machine from, I told him it was online at the British Sewing Centre. He told me that this company was notorious for bad customer service, they have been investiga

Continuing with the geometric origami design I went about researching a headpiece, and settled on re-creating this one; It took me a while to find the correct shape, but I got there and started by making it from paper; Once I was happy with the shape I then made it out of black and white card and made the final piece;

Club kids was the next theme at Cybil's House and at first I didn't have a clue what to do. But after a bit of research online I decided to go with some kind of geometric origami design. I don't know if this fitted into the theme but thought it would be interesting to do. Some of these designs were pretty complex so I settled on creating one like this; I had to take the piece apart mentally and created a miniature version of the pattern pieces so that I could get the correct shape. I then scaled it up to my measurements.  Miniature pattern piece The fabric I used was a thick white canvas type material Ultimate Craft in Camden. The material was stiff so that it would stand up (hopefully). It was also easy to cut out and sew together. I used my overlocker which makes things a bit easier going through layers of heavy material. However, it was at this point the overlocker broke. See more about this story in this post . It wasn't quite stiff enou

I just want to state, here and now, that I hate to work with is Chiffon. So when Jim asked me to make a coat for club kids out of chiffon, it was not something I was looking forward to making. It's not a material that I've had a lot of experience using. I find it difficult to work with, constantly freying and puckers easily.  All the same, I accept the challenge and get to work on it. The look he was going for was something like the following; So, as a base I used Simplicity pattern 1284, and then puff out the sleeves to achieve the above look.  The material Jim chose, was pink, graduating for a darker to a lighter pink. Although there was no pattern matching, I still wanted to get the graduated colours to match, going from the darker at the top to lighter at the bottom.  The pattern itself is fairly straight forward, if I was using a material for which the pattern was design for. I was planning to use the overlooker, to speed things up and to hav