Sewing Clothes Part 2

showing off my wears

Still stealing from Piero della Francesca, this huddle is taken shamelessly from his ‘Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’

Following on from my previous post on sewing clothes and the joys and frustrations of this latest time-guzzling hobby, I thought I’d share a few of my makes so far…

Can you tell that the pyjama trousers are on the inside of the hanger? Anyway, they’re in there and you’re not missing much.

These pyjamas were the first clothes I made, and while the pattern and instructions were way beyond my non-existent skills at the time they somehow turned out fine* (after many desperate Googling breaks where I tried to understand what on earth I was supposed to be doing).

The pattern is from Merchant and Mills, and so is the linen fabric. It seems kind of insane to have started my sewing journey on such a complicated pattern and not-inexpensive fabric, but I really wanted the pressure of a project that I felt motivated to get right and where I needed to pay attention to all of the details. The more I’ve sewn the more it teaches me that no detail can be ignored (and that there are a hundred more details than you think there are, even with the simplest of projects).

*If you only see them from the outside, the inside is a mess of zig-zagged seams and poorly finished sleeves, but they haven’t fallen apart yet.

A brief divergence from the olive green colour palette, don’t worry it won’t happen again.

A recently completed second pair of PJs, much more fancily finished this time (with flat felled seams inside), but with no less swearing along the way. Is this a tricky pattern or am I just sweary and bad at sewing?

Pattern is again from Merchant and Mills, as is the fabric.

I love this fabric so much that the slighlty odd fit of the shirt barely matters!

Guess who can’t stop buying Merchant and Mills patterns and fabric?

This was my first non-pyjama shirt and for some reason* I got very ahead of myself and thought I could alter this men’s pattern to include a pleat at the back and shorten the hem without really understanding how the pattern worked (or really anything about what I was doing). It was almost disasterous as I made the pattern way too short despite all my measuring, but I managed to save it with some very curved front hems at the front and a lot of improvisation.

*hubris

I hope you can make out the pleats and pockets, they were such a pleasure to make.

I’m already planning on how to survive another London summer (horrifyingly it reached 40°c here last year), so after making my short sleeved shirt I thought making some not-quite-matching shorts would be the perfect way to to survive the heat when it arrives (and an ideal excuse to buy more beautiful block printed fabric).

The pattern used here is the Xanelé shorts from French Navy, which is really well written and diagrammed and would make a great first project for anyone who wants to give sewing clothes a try.

Accurate illustration of how Peanut will react when I finally get around to making a coat for her.