Rosetta, the glamorous assistant - Isn't she amazing?

Guys I think I just made my best Hallowe'en costume to date and it's all down to the fabric.  Ok, it's somewhat down to the pattern as well, but Oh.  My God.  The Fabric.  Instead of the usual 'dress up as something scary' shindig my awesome friends threw a circus-themed murder mystery party and I was assigned the role of glamorous magician's assistant.  Obviously my brief for that was going to be skin-tight, shiny, and as tacky as I can get, so I nearly wept when the aptly named Cheap Fabrics threw up a pink and purple leopard print/zebra print monstrosity.

OH MY GOD YES

I used the Nettie pattern from Closet Case Files, which I got in the Sew Independent bundle last month - I will readily admit this is not the first thing I had in mind when I saw the pattern, so I'm sure it will be re-used for slightly more real life appropriate garments.

I cut a straight size 10 low-neck, low-back dress with no modification other than to lengthen the skirt and leave a slit in one side - this isn't the most forgiving fabric so I had to suck my stomach in a fair bit, but I imagine in a slightly firmer knit it would be a damn good fit.  I may give the low back a miss next time though; as Heather rightly pointed out in her sew-along having only half a shelf bra does pull on the side seams and gives the shoulders a tendency to slip off.  I still think the shelf bra is genius though - being able to go braless in October with nary a peep of neeps is ruddy marvellous.

Of course no costume is complete without accessories, so I finished the look with fishnets, a feather headdress, the cheapest feather boa I could find (Poundland FTW) and as much make-up as I could fit on my face.  I think I left bright pink feathers all over Alix's house.

Stole my friend's boyfriend to be my magician - he didn't get the memo about the pink.  Very disappointing.  I don't think my friend minded too much as she was secretly having affairs with both of us while being married to the murder victim.  Who then turned out to be faking his own death to frame the swindling knife thrower.  Meanwhile I had an inescapable alibi as I had apparently managed to lock myself in box.  All prime fodder for some excellent drunken ham acting!

Hope you all had an equally silly weekend!

Sun lounging

I'm writing this on my phone on holiday - I'm not sure about the mobile app for blogger and I definitely don't like the app,  so who knows how this is going to look when I hit publish.  (I miss WordPress a bit but I'm wondering whether 3 posts into the blog resurrection is a bit premature to think about moving it.) I suppose this is my comeuppance for not blogging about this sooner, but on the other hand I'M ON HOLIDAY!  I have made a thing for the sun which is ACTUALLY BEING WORN! IN REAL LIFE SUNSHINE! I may even get someone to take a picture of me on a sun lounger before I publish to prove it. 

When I say I should have blogged about this sooner I actually mean a month ago, before my pyjamas, and before another dress which I haven't even photographed yet, which means that this is the very first garment I've made from a pdf pattern - celebrating the fact that I finally got round to buying a new printer.  It's also the first thing I sewed from start to finish in years and I wanted to just whizz through it without getting stifled with ideas of perfection,  which hopefully explains why I didn't even consider matching the prints or...err...making a muslin. I should have made a muslin. The pattern (Mojave) is from Seamwork, so it's designed to be simple enough to not really need a muslin but yeesh.  The thing was gargantuan. 

I mean come on,  I know it's supposed to be an easy breezy loose bikini cover up, but surely the point of a bikini cover up is that it, you know, covers up some of your bikini? And the back? 

Oh, hello potato sack. All is good now though,  after hiking up the shoulders about an inch I cut a centre back seam which took a good 5 inches out of the top and up to 6 or 7 at the waist! 

It's still a little bit 'is there a stealth pregnancy under here?' in the front, but woohoo! I have a spine again!  Definitely good enough for lounging outside the holiday villa...

Yeah baby!  Trashy novel - check.  Gin and tonic - check.  Wet patches on my boobs to prove that I have been in an unheated pool,  outside, in mid-October - check.  Love you Portugal x

Rescue Mission

Ah...err...so it's been a while, hasn't it?  Four and a half years ago in fact, and according to the blog the last time I posted was when I was spending all day stuffing envelopes for an insurance company, which feels like a lifetime ago.

In brief summary, these are the latter years of my twenties (oh dear god where did they go):

• Walked out of said insurance company in disgust when the somewhat more interesting job they kept promising me went to someone else
• Walked into an HR job in a recruitment company and spent the next year and a half being shouted at by temp staff who couldn't quite grasp the fact that no, they weren't going to get paid if we didn't know that they went to work, and yes, they do have to use the sign in sheet for us to know that.
• Watched one of my best friends go off travelling the world and developed seriously jealous itchy feet.
• Shamelessly copied her and left the job to go backpacking around Asia for a year (I actually managed to keep on top of a travel blog as well)
• Miraculously stayed with the same boyfriend all this time despite the fact that I callously left him back in England on his own - his year of waiting devotedly goes some way towards explaining why I can forgive him for the constant fart jokes
• Finally moved out of Martin's parents' flat into a lovely sparkly flat of our own, which has a second bedroom which we have christened the Nerd Lair as it is full of half yarn and fabric and half Warhammer models.
• Got meself a new job in payroll, passed my payroll technician certificate with 98% because (my view) it was a really bloody easy exam, or (my parents' view) I'm phenomenal, aaaaand
• As of this week, started college again part time to learn AAT Accounting, which I'm rather excited about, because payroll is fairly dull (no, of course accountancy isn't dull as well, accountancy is a thrilling rollercoaster every minute)

But in other news, I'm resurrecting the blog because I SEWED A THING!

This isn't just a rescue mission for the blog though, I won the pattern for this dress in a blog giveaway 4 years ago and rather ungratefully it has been sitting abandoned and unfinished for almost as long as Pie and Handkerchiefs because I couldn't get it to fit.

The pattern is Lonsdale by Sewaholic, and I'd like to stress that the not fitting part was down to my pitiful attempts at a full bust adjustment rather than the pattern itself - if you don't do so much inept faffing about with it it's a lovely design and the instructions are very well written.  I'm sure my old college tutors would be horrified with how badly my adjustments went, but I maintain that it's very different fitting something to yourself rather than another body that you can walk around and look at from a distance.

I promise, I did do a muslin of my changes, which seemed to work fine, but my first error, and potentially my first indication that maybe I should slow down and think this through logically came when I somehow managed to cut the bodice from my adjusted pattern and the skirt from the original pattern.  Of course this meant that the skirt didn't come close to fitting on the bodice any more, and I didn't have the fabric to cut another one, so I was forced to cut additional 2" wide panels to fill in the gaps at the side seams.  But - I had several long skinny bits of fabric left, so I decided to make extra long strips and gather them up so the panels looked like a purposeful design feature rather than a bodged up repair job.

THE PERFECT CRIME! I am a GENIUS!

Off I go happy as Larry, sewing up all the pieces, finishing all the seams and inserting my ruddy perfect enclosed invisible zip and making everything look beautiful until it comes time to sew the hem and I tried it on for (what was I thinking) the first time, and it didn't fit.  At all.  I could fit approximately six of my boobs in here and two of those could have migrated to my sides if they really wanted to.  Clearly when I fudged around with the skirt, I really should have checked whether it still worked with my bodice adjustments.  At this point I wanted to cry, so I screwed the damn thing into a ball at the bottom of a box and sulked about it.  For four years.

Fast forward to last month and it appears that it was quite an irrational sulk, because now that I've calmed down and matured somewhat it was quite an easy fix - just taking in the side seams and hoiking up the waistband at the centre front.  I'd thrown out all the excess fabric and there was no way that I was unpicking all the finishing, so it was a case of pulling things around on the inside and slipstitching the outside into submission, which means that there are some odd folds going on inside the dress, but who cares?  The outside fits!

Weird insides

Gratuitous close up of the boobs neckline.  The ladies don't behave when I leave them unfettered so I have to wear a clear strapped bra, but I can live with that.

Best part of the dress though, is without doubt:

Pocketses!

I love the pockets so much and kind of want to put them in everything.  The sudden finishing of the dress was down to a last minute invitation to a wedding, and I left with cake in my pockets just because I could.  I had intended to wear this again to my friend's 30th last week but had to change my mind due to less than stellar weather.  I ended up wearing a shop bought dress which was admittedly warmer, but did not share the pockety magnificence of Lonsdale.  I was disappointed all evening. Handmade dresses win.

I am back! And grrrrraduated.

Look! I'm a real grown up person! I graduated...err...a month ago and got to ponce around in an unflattering gown at silly o'clock in the morning. Wheeee! Just what I've always wanted!

The month since has been somewhat blah, jobsearching is sucking at my soul and because the jobcentre is run by robot monkeys I'm not eligible for job seekers allowance. But hey, I have a lovely (and highly convenient) boyfriend and he has a lovely mother who doesn't want to charge me more than enough to cover the extra food in rent, so I have a place to stay until I find a job and a flat of my own.

(See, if I call it 'a place to stay' rather than 'living with my boyfriend' it's a lot less scary.)

All my worldly possesions, aside from a few clothes and the essential 8 or 9 knitting projects, are now in storage, including my poor neglected sewing machine, which got one last outing after uni to finish my dress for the graduation ball.

This is the best photo I've got of the dress, which is the one that was originally intended for Nancy and Olly's wedding last year before the previous sewing machine blew up. Or possibly just stopped sewing. I forget. It's a shame I didn't get a better picture of all the gathering on the bodice (it took me long enough), but apparently I was more focused on getting drunk and grinning/grimacing like a loon for the camera to get a good shot from the neck down. I think it was worth it. Although, the celebratory amounts of alcohol made it all the more confusing and disturbing when the dancing dwarves came on stage. I know I wasn't imagining this - I found photographic evidence the next day. Also, I'm wearing my Mia! At last!

The other costumes I made last month, for the other ball (yes I got two :D ), were somewhat less sophisticated. These were for the Summer ball held by the Bournemouth University - they kindly allow us Arts Institute types to latch onto their social events like creative little barnacles. My boyfriend and I went this year as the Queen and the Prince from Katamari Damacy/We Love Katamari. I'm not quite sure how to explain this. Katamari is a bizarre Japanese Playstation game in which you roll a ball around picking up things and making the ball grow bigger so you can pick up bigger things. And...um...that's all there is to it. And I love it intensely.

Anyhoo, I found some patterns online and I sent the link to Martin in an 'OMG, look at these, they are so hilariously weird' moment thinking nothing more of it and he came back with 'summer ball costumes please'. Who am I to deny a request for giant knitted earmuffs from my beloved?

I feel I have to add that this was ALL his idea, right down to the green shorts and lovely purple tights. I'm fairly convinced no one had a clue who we were. I did get one high five from a stranger but I think it was because he thought had a pair of boobs strapped to my head.

I can see why he thought that.

Stay tuned (maybe) for new socks! The whole of south east Asia! And the other new resident of Martin's bedroom!