NPRINS

Here's wishing everyone in blogland a happy holiday, whatever or whenever that may be. :-) Here at Loohoo Manor we celebrated Christmas this morning with a few gifts, having spent too much money recently (ahem serger) to justify any more extravagance. I bought this fabric at Stonemountain and Daughter during my Thanksgiving trip with Christina to make DH a shirt, and have been stealthily working on it ever since. Discreet sewing takes a different skill than speed sewing, but they both have their difficulties. I am terrible about cleaning up my floor when sewing, and will often leave fabric scraps on the ground for weeks. Ask my husband how much he likes that. Anyways, I didn't want to leave scraps from the shirt on the floor for him to see, but I also didn't want to clean up everything or he'd be suspicious of that too. So I painstakingly picked out the shirt bits from the rest and mostly left the mess. I think I should just start cleaning up after myself. Thank...

I finally got around to finishing my first pair of pants, this Vogue pattern that Adriana nailed recently. If mine look half as good as hers then I owe partial credit to her for all the help she gave me. Thank you Adriana! The other half of the credit goes to luckylibbet , who kindly invited me over to her home to help fit the muslin and take measurements. It was like talking to a library's worth of fitting books! Thank you H. I guess I'm out of halves, but I also got help from other bloggers and patternreview, you know who you are and thank you!! Here are the adjustments I made to the stock pattern after all my tweaking: -Straightened hip curve to a straight line from waist to hip -Redrafted my own waistband from a piece of 2 1/2" bias canvas -Added 1/2" darts over the back pockets -Took in 3/4" from each side seam in the back -Narrowed legs by 1/8" on inseam and outseam -Changed slant pockets to double welt pockets Fabrics and notions: -An amazing ...

What to do when you've got a Christmas party to go to and nothing to wear? If you didn't sew the answer would be shop. :-) Now the only thing that pops into my head is, "What do I have in my stash?!". I remembered this BWOF pattern I had copied from Cidell's issue, and how she was able to make it on short notice too. I had some stretch wool leftover from another project, and a few colors of silk charmeuse available, so I whipped this up in about 12 hrs total, from the time I started adding seam allowances to the traced pattern. Not bad. I did do flat pattern adjustments before starting, and I have to say they got me really really close. I straightened the hip curve, adjusted for swayback, and added booty room in the back. I checked the armholes against my favorite TNT silk tank pattern and added a little where it would have gaped, and that was it. The back darts still needed tweaking but it was surprisingly close. Since this was speed sewing, I committed...

Thank you everyone for the kind wishes, it's amazing to me how many people are all too familiar with that feeling of violation you get after a home burglary. ************** I have been sewing a lot lately, but using my limited minutes at the machine and not the computer! So again, I apologize for the lack of updates. I had a fabulous Thanksgiving week, I took the entire time off work and sewed, cooked, played with the dog, and slept. I stayed away from the malls completely, and only stopped into one store on Black Friday, Stonemountain and Daughter Fabrics in Berkeley, CA. Christina was visiting from Seattle, so I enticed her with a 20% off coupon they sent me. It wasn't hard. I snapped up some DVF wool knits for, guess what, more DVF knockoffs. As well as some shirting for DH, silk charmeuse for the top of a dress, and a gorgeous DVF woven that Christina said I just had to have. I will take pics of all of it and post so you can drool too. :-) Christina and I in front of a wal...