NPRINS

It's a good thing this award is called 'Kreativ' and not 'Frequent' or I'd never get it. Thanks to Ann Smith and Sewuptight for nominating me, sorry it took so long for me to acknowledge the honor! ************************** I finally finished up my sewing for hire projects a couple weeks ago and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I made 17 dresses in January, and 5 more in November/December from the same design, in 4 different sizes and 4 colors. I ended up customizing almost all of them, either different hem lengths or morphed sizes. Everyone has been thrilled with them so far, but I'm a little sewed out and my shoulder/elbow is still recovering from all the pressing! But I somehow managed to eek out one for myself after I finished all of them, this is the navy color. The fabric is organic merino interlock from Near Sea Naturals . The dress has a stand up collar, split cuffs, and side waist ruching. Pretty simple to put together, but the effect is fl...

I've been putting off attempting a coat, just thinking about the time and effort required was too daunting. However I own exactly one 'nice' coat, a 3/4 length J. Crew wool one, and my closet has been crying out for another one. Not that it gets too chilly here, but I do prefer the longer length in the winter time. The Burberry fabric I bought from Michael's fabrics about a year ago has been calling to me from my stash ever since, and with the almost two weeks I had off around Christmas and New Years I managed to choose a trench pattern, make a muslin, adjust it for fit, and construct most of the coat. I was looking at two Patrones patterns, and this BWOF from 1/2008. I decided to go with the BWOF due to the raglan sleeves, the fabric is a thick two-sided cotton, and I didn't think set-in sleeves would ease very well. The line drawing is accurate in my opinion, it is very a-line without the belt and was too voluminous for my liking. With the belt it bunched u...

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...

There's nothing like a home burglary to steal your sewing mojo.  That's right, just a few months after Christina's home was broken into, I came home one night about a month ago to find our house had been robbed.  I can't even explain how terrifying it was to have walked into my house, set down my purse, and gotten all the way over to the bedrooms before I saw all the drawers pulled out and realized what happened.   Apparently we had a considerate burglar, because he shut the door on the way out and didn't disturb anything in the house besides taking several guns, my husband's laptop, and one of my jewelry boxes.  A bunch of other random small things on the desk were taken too, but overall we were lucky.   I'm going to take a second to encourage everyone to prepare for something like this, no one is immune, and if the police and insurance companies are right this sort of thing may be happening more often.  First of all, the second you realize your home has b...