Hello all you lovely subscribers and welcome to another newsletter. I'm working on a toile for the Lilou Dress from the book Love At First Stitch, and although it's slow progress in limited spare time, it's such an important stage that I don't want to hurry it. For me, the biggest benefit of sewing my own clothes is that it's entirely customisable - the choice of fabric, design and of course the fit. I have come to realise that all those clothes that end up in the pile waiting for a charity bag to come through the door, are all because the fit isn't right, even if I absolutely adore the fabric and design. |
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Fitting garments is a skill I have much to learn about and so I recently purchased The Palmer Pletsch Complete Guide to Fitting. The method involves using the tissue or paper pattern to refine the fit before moving onto fabric. What really appealed to me is streamlining of the fitting process, making several adjustments to the pattern but without having to cut and sew a new toile every time. This is the first pattern I've tried it on and I really like the process. Once I've got more experience with this technique, I'll write a detailed blog post on my thoughts about it. |
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The Lilou Dress is sleeveless and so I wanted to cut off the seam allowances on my toile at the armholes to see where they would lie on the final garment. This very nifty tool - the Clover double tracing wheel, made it a doddle to trace out the seam allowance. In this blog post and video tutorial, I show how to use it and what else it can be used for. |
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I recently bought the Omnigrid 30 x 15cm ruler, sometimes finding my Janome 60 x 15cm ruler on the large side for some tasks. As I was browsing, I came across InvisiGrip, a plastic film that can be applied to rulers to stop them slipping when drawing or cutting along it. This is a problem I do come across particularly with the large ruler, so I decided to give it a try and I'm pleased to report it works brilliantly! See my post for more details, and how to apply it bubble-free! |
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