I follow several Vloggers and one of my favourite is Jessica Lorraine who lives in Australia. She has recently launched a challenge called Sew My Style 2018 and I was taken by the January pattern.
Basically there are 12 patterns from Indie pattern makers who offer a different one each month at a discounted price.
The first one, January, was the Sunny Top / Dress from Friday Pattern Co.
Now you are all aware that I nearly always use my Sure-fit Designs body Blueprint but I have a new goal this year. Don't get me wrong, I haven't forsaken SFD but I need to push my horizons somewhat.
I have spent a lot of time making clothes that fit using SFD and it works. I have trousers, jeans, shirts and tops but I am not a natural designer and looking through my wardrobe I have come to the conclusion that it's boring and predictable, only the fabric choice seems to show any sort of design element apart from the occasional embroidery.
The Sew My Style challenge was supposed to launch me into a direction of using pattern designers instead of self drafting but this first pattern did nothing toward that goal. My first attempt was using a white stretch rib left over from another project to make a wearable muslin. After downloading the PDF pattern and sticking it together, I cut the medium size.
The pattern had no sleeve notches marked and the method of construction could have been a lot better. This is meant to encourage beginners but I know from experience with knits especially, that attaching the sleeves 'flat', before sewing the sleeve and sides seams in one go is much easier and produces great results but the instructions would have you sew the seams first and then struggle to fit the sleeves in after.
The pattern itself did not look like the picture. The sleeves were far too baggy and the back neck gaped as you can see in the photo. I took the sleeves in by quite a large amount and they are still larger than I would normally expect a T-Shirt to be. I put a couple of small darts in the back neck and altered my pattern accordingly. I also added length to the main body as I prefer to wear my T-shirts a little longer.
My next attempt was far better and again I used some scrap fabric from my stash yet once more I was falling into the trap of plain old boring so I added an embroidery element to make it my own.
I will wear this when the weather is warmer [a lot warmer!] but I could have made this easily with SFD so I wonder why I bothered with this pattern. Maybe I just feel I'm missing out but have I got this all wrong? I didn't need a badly drafted, ill fitting, complicated method of construction to tell me I could have done much better without it.
Next month the pattern is for a coat but I'm not going to rush for this one until I see what others make of it.
I have a lot of Burda Style and a few My Image Magazines with plenty of inspiration on offer.
Well that's probably one of my New Year Resolutions out the window.... I've changed it to 'Stick to what you know but do it better.' Maybe that'll work!