It's only a hobby.

From this:



To this:




back view




That's what I tell myself when I look perilously close to taking myself too seriously on the sewing front.

Thank you for your advice about my jacket. I can tell you now that I've finished it that you were all right. How can that be? Simple - the proportions of the jacket required it to finish at the fullest part of the hip, but the pre -existing welts looked wierd held in suspension on my waist line. The only way they belonged to the jacket was to place them two thirds down the front and then they were proportional to the hem length.

No matter which way I cut it, something was going work and something was not going to work.

That, I feel, will be my first and last refashion. It was twice the work of cutting from scratch and I had to think all the time. Fancy that! Thinking all the time! At no point could I just sit down and sew something, I had to figure out how to I was going to make those pieces come back together. And how to reinterpret the design? I couldn't just sew the pattern as is.

So that's when I came up with my "it's only a hobby" mantra - take the stress out of seamstress.

It was that mantra that lead me to purchase some silk I fell madly in love with from Global fabrics. "It's my hobby, who cares if I ever wear it." (you see how useful this mantra is for justifying any kind of wildly-inappropriate-to -lifestyle fabric choices.) I had in mind Burda 05-2009-125. I was thinking that the style was too young for me, with all those frou frou details - you know the gathering and ribbons etc, but then, once again, my mantra came to the rescue. "Who cares if you're too old for it, you know it's only a dress, and making that dress is your hobby."



Here it is pinned ready for sewing on the dress from. When I bought the fabric I thought it was randomly lined, imagine my horror to find they form a 4 line repeat print that needed to be matched! Too late, I'd cut it out AND I bought the last 3 metres in the shop. Guttered. Non matching horizontal lines, how that cheapens a garment.

Thank goodness it's only a hobby.