Step into my Handmade Closet! Everything I've Sewn in 2021

It took me a minute, but I climbed back up on the YouTube horse, and I did it by swirling around in every technicolor thing I made in 2021. (One of those things was finished right under the wire, I might even be lying a little bit in terms of stitching the hem...maybe that was in the first week of January? Eh. Time is a fiction!)

Physically modeling a garment is one of the many things I'm surprised to find myself liking about videos. Don't get me wrong, I'm an actress, I love being a ham in front of the camera. But I've always enjoyed my sewing content static. Maybe because it used to be an escape from the entertainment industry for me? It's an eye-opener to see handmade clothing in action--and, it prevents the sewist (points at self) from snapping a perfect picture for Instagram and dropping the mic, uninspected. On the other hand, I also found out I like a couple garments that were previously on the chopping block!

If you'd like to step into my little slice of New York Narnia, the video is right here waiting for you: check out my handmade wardrobe 💗

Hope you're getting some sewing in on this long weekend here, or wherever you are!

Sewing for My Man: The Neverending Story.

 

Help me Rhonda, it's time to make Rob a blazer. It's been time for years now. But in my defense, this man is a VERY PICKY DRESSER. This is strange, considering the 22-year-old dusty mauve oversized t-shirt that I just am not allowed to toss, regardless of the many holes and various bleach splatters.

This t-shirt is the ugliest thing in our closet. NO YOU CAN'T SEE IT. I refuse to take a picture of it and validate its continued existence.

But here's some evidence of pattern choice and toile:

I'm using Vogue 2616, nabbed at the 2019 American Sewing Guild Maryland Annual luncheon, where I was the guest speaker on the topic "Remix, Redesign & Recreate." I ran around a packed Hilton convention room with a mic and a rack of garments, and sweet baby Yoda, was it ever a wonderful day. What a marvelous, multiethnic, creative mix of humans! It's something I've been meaning to holler about here, but shortly afterward, life events (and then world events) prevented that. A trip down memory lane is on the way.

A good chunk of that speech was all about thinking outside of the pattern envelope. Technically I shouldn't be allowed to talk about pattern envelopes--considering the horrific way I treat them, I'm surprised they haven't collectively sought out a restraining order against me. But I do love to beat a different path when it comes to the prescribed journey! When the ASG sewists heard that I had yet to make good on my promise to Rob, they steered me towards this pattern in the swap portion of the luncheon.

The heavyweight flecked purple yardage (modeled by ole blue eyes above and found at Osgood Textile) was my intended suitor for this blazer, and it's very much not the right choice! It's way too heavy for a suit jacket. Though I'm itching to make it happen and go against the envelope recommendation since it's a Rob-approved, technicolor choice. These sort of choices don't happen errrrry day! 

I'll probably go with a much more conventional yardage picked out by the man, the myth, the legend: Sam of Chic Fabrics. I took our YouTube audience out shopping with me to source the right fabric and found Sam on duty! We had a very, very good masked romp through the aisles. You can see the picks in this video!

I've got a few options to help me along the way: the Basic Tailoring edition of the Art Of Sewing; any number of Craftsy classes, and the mac daddy of them all: Kenneth King's Smart Tailoring course, graciously gifted to me by the Threads Team when the subject of The Missing Blazer came up in Episode 36 of Sewing With Threads. Thankya Threads team!!! Now I just have to find the time to watch the King at work, fit the Rob at hand, and SEW THE DAMN THING.

Have you ever sewn a tailored blazer? How did it go? Wins and horror stories alike are welcome...