When I haven’t been making I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  Actually I really need to do some more thinking: I need to slow down and let ideas percolate a little and then coalesce into something with substance rather than rushing around and tossing everything into one big bowl and mixing it furiously. 

I catch up with a group of other school mums at a local cafe each week after school drop off.  Last week the owner was wearing a lovely top with sleeves that draped from front and back princess seams.  It looked beautiful.  I’ve been trying to work out how to recreate it ever since.  I know I can use a shell top pattern with princess seams – but how to do the sleeves/drapes?

I’ve always done a lot of reading about sewing and more recently about patternmaking.  Actually, I reckon that I have a pretty good handle on the theory, but for some reason I’ve never completely put it into practice.  I’m going to do some sketching and more reading and go through my sizeable pattern stash and try to pull together some basics that I can create some basic slopers from.  While I’ve always mixed and matched design elements from the one commercial pattern (and sometimes across patterns by the same company) I think it’s time that I stretched my wings a little more and experimented.  That might be my new year’s sewing resolution.

Although I’ve been sewing garments for over 30 years, I think that my skills stagnated for a fair portion of them.  I was fairly adventurous in my sewing in my early twenties – I remember making a hot pink raw silk suit from a Burda pattern (I bet it’s still in stash) with a notched collar without thinking twice about whether it would be difficult or not.  I sewed with velvet, with lame, with silk, with satin, with cotton, with cord, with denim, with stretch fabrics.  I made dresses with boning, I made collars and stands, plackets, inserted zips willy-nilly, made buttonholes.  No worries.

But once I had that technical skill base in garment construction, I don’t think that I really developed much further for a long time.  Now I’m more concerned about fit, and I’m interested in developing slopers that work for me.  I need to learn more about fabrics and their properties and get even better at selecting the right fabric for the job.  I want to use better construction methods.

There’s always so much to learn, isn’t there!  Do you look at what other people are wearing and try to figure out how it is constructed?  How you could replicate certain elements?  I certainly do!  Visit Kirsty to find out what’s going on in other creative spaces.