Cheers to three years

We’re taking a little break from zero waste jeans this week to charge the glasses for The Craft of Clothes’s third birthday! I thank you all sincerely for reading, your lovely comments and helpful insights.

There have been many hits and misses in my blogging/sewing life over the past three years. Let’s recap some of the highlights and lowlights….

Hit: Mending. Last year was The International Year of Mending. I tried my hand at invisible mending (also known as the Holy Grail of Mending) and later in the year did some visible mending which was much more fun. A small gallery of my visible mending samples is here and a review of the visible mending workshop is here.

Hit: The Dressmaker’s Companion. If my husband had to write the blurb for this book, it would say: This book tells you how to do stuff.

And it does; this contains pretty much everything I know about sewing clothes (all learnt the hard way). I recommend it for your sewing library.

Miss: Wearing a Square, from the book Pattern Magic 2. This jacket was really fun to make and so unusual. However, it didn’t turn out to be very comfortable to wear and the bias sleeves dropped making them too long. I gave the jacket away when I did a wardrobe clean out. Still, it was a fascinating cutting concept which would be fun to re-visit and tweak.

Hit: Considering Zero Waste Fashion. This post was the beginning of my foray into zero waste pattern cutting. The book Shaping Sustainable Fashion started me off.

Miss (but repairable): The Built by Wendy dress. I like this dress and it’s comfortable, but I made the collar a fraction too wide, bordering on clownish (to my eyes). It bothers me every time I look in the bathroom mirror. It’s totally fixable though, and I like the dress enough to unpick the collar and fix the problem.

BTW, in spite of intense lobbying by the “no belt” factions, I wear it with the belt.

Hit: the free wrap skirt pattern. Undeniably THE most popular post and followed up by the (related) zero waste wrap skirt pattern and the 3-gore maxi wrap skirt pattern. I always get compliments when I wear this skirt.

Miss: the Japanese cardigan. I’ve since gotten rid of this cardigan, because it had short sleeves and I just don’t wear cardigans with short or three quarter length sleeves. I get chilly. I did enjoy making it though, and I appreciated the unusual cut. A week after finishing it I got rid of the back drape (too much fabric, too heavy to wear). Think this could be another pattern to re-visit and maybe try to make with long sleeves.

The skirt I made to wear with it, however, is a definite hit. I’ve since unpicked the matching back pockets after one of my children said they looked like bum cheeks (she was right; take a look at the post and you’ll see).

I thank you again for your support. Know that I appreciate that you read my blog and it means a lot to me.

Birthday Cheers!