Bank Holiday

I hope everyone had a good bank holiday weekend. Here in Cambridge the weather decided to gripe a bit on Monday, but K and I had already decided that we didn't really want to move terribly far from the flat all weekend (with the exception of a little canoeing with Scouts on the River Cam first thing on Saturday morning). Instead, we spent most of the weekend revising, refreshing and acquiring our dressmaking skills.

Regular readers may recall a post about dressmaking rather some time ago. Well, much to my shame, I never actually found the time to make that skirt and the sewing machine has stayed under wraps for most of the last year. Recently, however, there have been stirrings of determination to actually do something with it, and K hit on the rather good idea of offering to make little pinafore dresses for a good friend with a one year-old daughter. Said friend kindly consented to be our guinea pig (she has already received several knitted and embroidered gifts with very good grace) and we acquired a suitable pattern.

This weekend, our flat was a wonderful chaos of fabric, thread and moved items of furniture. We quickly concluded that we don't really need a living room (it's the only room we have, aside from a miniture bedroom, bathroom and kitchen), but that we do very much need a sewing room. Definitely something to aspire too when I grow up :-) Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to take any photos, but I can proudly annouce that we can now:

- Thread the machine without having to look up how to do it first

- Cut out a pattern with confidence and fairly minimal wastage

- Assemble, pin and baste the pieces, complete with interfacing

- Sew a reasonably straight seam

- Topstitch a reasonably straight seam

- Pull out the tacking thread without wrecking everything, despite having sewn over much of it with many, many tiny stiches.

- Sew a buttonhole (although they haven't been ripped yet)

There seems to be a good chance that the skirt will get made soon after all!

Dressmaking

My very first sewing patterns arrived in the post yesterday. Rather unbelievably they came all the way from California. Now I do not normally encourage this king of thing, but I was driven to take such a drastic step by the utter lack of sensible dressmaking patterns in British shops. The companies in question seem utterly convinced that people will only buy their patterns if they have either a) frills, b) ruffles, c) rouches, d) flounces, e) sparkly bits. Who knows, they may be right, just as there seems to be a great market for the kind of yarn that comes out in many different colours, or is bright pink. My grandmother springs immediately to mind.

But all I want is a skirt. A long skirt with no trimmings, no flounces, and certainly no sodding ruffles. By far the best purveyor of patterns for such skirts appears to be Brown Paper Patterns, and they are indeed based in California, so California it was (I will try and come up with some more ways to reduce my carbon footprint ASAP).

I'm extremely excited about the prospect of dressmaking. Admittedly, I was quite disappointed to discover how much fabric cost. I had (of course) fallen in love with the most expensive cotton in John Lewis (there is a strong argument to say that this serves me right for going to John Lewis in the first place), but I think it would be quite hard to make a skirt more cheaply than it costs to buy one. Plus, I don't have the time, and I'll probably make an epic mess of the whole thing the first time I try. But when I do finally succeed, it will be entirely mine, and I won't have had to rely on the good inhabitants of South Asia to make it for me. I feel that this is an important step on my way to full earth-motherhood.

So, if anyone has any tips on how not to totally mess up a first skirt, please do let me know.