Hoodie Love

I am very much in love with the pattern for this hoodie from Heidiandfinn. I saw it about 3 weeks ago but was very restrained and held out til pay day on Monday before I bought it :) At about £3.70 it hardly breaks the bank, but it was a treat rather than necessity.

It's a fantastically easy pattern. It was sent as a pdf which you then print out and cut and stick the pattern pieces together. There were really detailed instructions too. It took me an afternoon and evening to make, but that included printing off the pattern and tracing and cutting the pattern pieces.

My fabric choice probably wasn't the easiest option - a medium weight baby blue fleece and a chenille stripe stretch jersey - but I found it surprisingly co-operative when I was sewing. Ok, ok, I broke a needle sewing the hood to the body, but after I put in a chunkier needle I found it surprisingly co-operative when I was sewing :) Lesson learnt.

It is super soft and snuggly, and will do a good job of keeping Munchkin warm around the house. I'm trying to ration the central heating after our recent gas bill :/ We're off to the magic fabric shop tomorrow to try and find some other fabrics to make it in.

I have this fabulous grey stretch fabric that looks like knitted cable, and I want something bright pink to go on the reverse. Incidentally, the top seems entirely reversible, but for some reason this isn't mentioned anywhere in the Etsy listing or the pattern instructions. Maybe I sewed it wrong!

I had added the rest of Heidiandfinns patterns to my Christmas list, and if Father Christmas didn't come up with the goods then I was going to buy one every pay day. But then I went to leave feedback today and saw that they had a special weekend sale on - buy 2 and get one free. And my hand just slipped and I pressed some buttons and oops I've bought three more patterns :)

What I are Lerning - weeks 3 & 4

I've combined this week and last week for a couple of reasons - because I was ill I missed my class on Monday and went along on Wednesday instead, so I haven't really had time to do a post about it, and it was a bit of a boring (but necessarily so) class.

My excitement about buttonholes and pockets was short lived, as our tutor has slowed things down a bit and we did seams. Yawn. We have been promised buttonholes next week. I think because there's 15 of us it's taking a lot longer to cover topics, and some people are complete beginners, so the pace has been adjusted accordingly.

I did learn things about seams though. The first thing was if you don't have an overlocker and you want to neaten seams but you're a bit lazy and don't want to zigzag everything, use pinking shears. The second thing was I need to buy some pinking shears. The third thing was I really want an overlocker.

This week was far more exciting. We made a dress! From jersey!! Which up til now has been my most feared fabric. Yet I have conquered it :) It's a very simple dress - rectangular boob tube up top, rectangle skirt below. Mine is all shiny because my theme is around Ndidi Ekubia's work, and she works in metal. You can wear it loads of different ways - I've decided to fold the boob tube bit double, so the skirt is shorter and more tunicy. Here's the dress with the boob tube at its full length:

I don't think it looks as nice this way, it's a bit too eighties, although that may just be the fabric (£1 a metre from the old magic fabric shop). Plus it makes me look short :) Here it is with the top doubled over. See, much taller!

I managed to get the whole thing sewn in class, although when I got home I looked at it closely and really wasn't happy with the gathers along the skirt, so I unpicked it all and redid it. We'd loosely pinned the skirt on to the top at 8 different points, and our tutor suggested we make the gathers up as we go along, pulling the top tight and runckling the skirt fabric as we sewed. My runckles weren't small enough and so looked very patchy. Instead I pinned little rough pleats and then sewed so it's a bit more uniform.

It's not quite finished, as I want to make a belt to go under the bust line with some of the leftover fabric. Grandma pickledweasel's given me some interfacing, so I think I'll do a broad shaped band with some sort of stitching on the front, but I need to give it a bit more thought. This dress is our first assignment, so we have to reflect and evaluate the whole process, as well as provide sketches. Eeeek. Drawing. Help! Our homework for next week is to do four still life sketches. I won't embarrass either you or myself by sharing my feeble efforts.

I'm not planning on wearing this sparkly affair by the way, it's just for my assignment. And apologies for the 'I don't know what to do with my hands' modelling poses :)