full disclosure

Saturday saw the sun arrive in all its loveliness to coincide with a day of sewing inside for the lovely ladies of the East Midlands MQG.  Ten of us gathered at stitchcraft in Grantham (a fab venue and great cake!) for a Weekender Bag workshop.  Lots of photos of the day are available on our Flickr group, including some of Di's fab-u-lous finished bag.  Mandy helped us all out, including providing canvas and wadding scraps.  Despite my best laid plans, I had managed zero prep beforehand so I spent the morning cutting cutting cutting.  I had to leave at lunchtime and I still have more cutting to do.  I'm MM'ing it and here's a preview of how it's going to look...

still to be ironed!

I'm worried a little that this will stay in its box for the next 6 months so I think I'll plan to do a little every week to keep things moving.

This week I've committed to doing at least 1 hours sewing kids' clothes (KCW Spring 2013) each day .  I started a day early trying to take advantage of the super long naps the wee man has started to take (nearly 3 1/2 hours on Saturday and over 2 hours yesterday).  Nudged by the lovely Mary, I dug out my (as yet untouched) Sewing For Boys book and decided on the Treasure Pocket Pants.  I pulled some Essex linen and a lovely wee check from the stash and got cracking.  I found the pattern really difficult to follow - I think this was because I'm a total dressmaking novice but it wasn't very clear until I googled and blog read and worked it all out.  It didn't help that there was an error in the size of one of the pattern pieces, which I only discovered after I cut everything out and couldn't figure out how to put it back together.  Why do they not check these things properly?

Anyhoo, after some fun with elastic (not), I made a faux fly front, French seamed the seams and sewed it all together (minus waistband and hem). Ta da...

#epic fail

Can you see what I've done?  I didn't even notice that I'd sewn the legs wrong and created a long skirt rather than troosers until Laughing Boy asked if they were really for the wee man.  Then I looked and D'oh!  Now, my wee sister tells me I'm too hard on myself and there would have been a time in the not too distant past where I would have had a right strop and probably burned the monstrosity long with all of my books and dreams of being a competent dressmaker.  But I am not like that these days...it's all a learning process and full disclosure of oopsies is good for the soul.  So I finished for the night, had a wee glass of wine and caught up with Broadchurch (last one tonight!)

Refreshed this morning, before I started work, I unpicked and resewed and once again...tah dah!

much happier

French seams, baby yeah!

I'm hoping the lovely Patrick would approve! So I hope to get the wee man to try them on tonight so I can sort the waistband and hem and finish them off.  I'm thinking of making the easy linen shirt next.  All good prep for starting my own clothes making journey #excited