Hi! Are you a new or recent visitor to my blog? I hope you stick around and have a bit of a read. To make it easier to keep up to date with new content, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Of course, feedback is always appreciated and leaving a comment is a great way for me to come and check out your site.

Today we celebrated Emma’s 4th birthday (it was actually on Thursday) with family. We were originally just going to have a bunch of family over for a simple lunch but then Jack suggested we all go Ten Pin Bowling and Emma loved the idea! I hadn’t been bowling for ages and I have always loved it, though I have thrown more than my fair share of gutter balls over the years.

There were 9 adults, two teenagers and 3 little ones (we had two lanes going) and we all got into the spirit of things and had a great afternoon. Luckily enough, because of the kids we could request the “bumpers” without embarassment. In case you don’t know, they can put up bumpers to cover the gutters which is really helpful for little ones (and their mums and grandmas) so that even if you throw it very wonky it just bounces back into the lane. With the bumpers on, I am actually pretty good. Well, definitely not bad anyhow!

While we were there we saw a flyer advertising “Coffee Club” Bowling on a Wednesday morning and my Mum and I are going to go along and have a look. We only hope it is social and they don’t mind us putting the bumpers up!

I baked a lovely cake to take along and decorated it with crushed Flake bars and Strawberries as well as butter icing.

We all had two games of bowling and we took a break in the middle for birthday cake. Here is Emma looking very serious while her Dad lights the candles. Maybe she is thinking up a Very Good Wish.

After she had blown the candles out, we relit them for Jack to blow out and then again for little Grace to have her turn! Everyone was happy!

Actually one person wasn’t happy the entire time we were there. Poor Sam. He is 15 and really did not want to be there AT ALL and he made sure everyone knew it. I felt so sorry for him, bored out of his brain and there against his will. I was all for letting him stay home but Paul insisted that he come along as it was his little sister’s party after all. Fair enough too, but I did feel for poor Sam. Ah, teenagers.

I have been sewing since forever (I made my first wrap skirt with mum’s help when I was eight) and there was a long period when I used to sew almost all of my own clothes. About 15 years ago, I was on a real sewfest for many years and made stacks of really nice work clothes, teaching myself lots of tricky techniques and getting really professional results. That lasted for many years and then due to various reasons I put the sewing machine aside for quite a long while before getting back into it like a crazy person about five years ago.

For the last four years I have sewed many, many children’s clothes (for my own kids as well as millions of things for my business which started off as children’s wear only) and many bags and other things besides. I honestly feel like I have the know-how to sew almost anything I want to. Sewing for Red Instead has been keeping me busy of course, but over the last few months I have really felt the calling to sew myself some clothes again. Funny thing was, the few things I have sewn for myself lately just haven’t been quite right. I wasn’t getting the amazing results I used to back in the early 1990s. I was getting frustrated and couldn’t work it out.

Then I realised something very obvious. Last time I sewed all my clothes, I had a little size 10 body with small and perky b00bs and everything I sewed fit me wonderfully, without any changes to the pattern. Fifteen years and two pregnancies/extended breastfeedings later, things had changed a bit. Of course, I realised that my body had changed but I for one didn’t know that pattern companies draft all their patterns for a B cup. Until recently it never occurred to me that there was something called a Full Bust Alteration (FBA) and that as a D cup, I ought to be making this easy change to all my patterns before cutting the fabric.

When I sewed so many of my own clothes years and years ago, there was never any need to tissue fit a pattern (pin the pieces together and try it on) to check the fit, and make any necessary changes. Now that I have my Pinny (my body form) I was able to make changes to the pattern and then go to Pinny and see exactly what that change had done and know that the finished garment would fit me properly. Usually I would just keep sewing along until the end and then wonder why things didn’t fit as they should. Dumb, Deluded, I know.

I also learned that there are lots of other things I could do to my patterns to make sure they fit me properly. I have found this book to be excellent: Fast Fit by Sandra Betzina and really recommend it if you want to learn all about different body shapes and how that translates to flat pattern alterations. It’s been really interesting and helpful to understand exactly what is happening with the pattern and how you can cut a flat piece of tissue apart at all the right places to make a better 3D fit for your body.

The other major thing that I realised was this: I was cutting my patterns at a smaller size than I needed, because of, yep you guessed it, vanity. I would take my bust or waist measurement to see which size I should cut out, then look it up on the back of the pattern. I would find that I ought to cut an 18 and freak out! “No, no, no!” I would say to myself, “that can’t be right, I am a (RTW) size 14 so that is the size I will cut” and funnily enough, things haven’t been fitting so well. Adding a cm all around when cutting or overlocking (serging) with an almost zero seam allowance took care of some of the wrong-size issues but I have since found that forgetting about the numbers (vanity!) and just cutting the size the pattern said I needed seems to work much better! Will wonders never cease?

I decided to start on a fairly simple item to try out my alteration skills. After resolving to cut the pattern at the correct size even though it was much bigger than my RTW (ready to wear, ie. shop bought) size, I realised that the size range on the pattern I had bought was too small for the size I actually needed to cut out. I needed to cut an 18 and the pattern I had only went up to 16. So I consulted my handy dandy manual and made lots of changes to my pattern, tissue fitting on Pinny as I went. Tissue fitting works wonders, try it and see!

The pattern is Simplicity 4076 and I was making the round necked long sleeved tee with the gathered neckline, bottom left illustration.

This pic shows the alterations I made to the front pattern piece. The darker (red) area shows the original front pattern piece and the lighter (pink) area shows where I have altered the pattern to bring it up a couple of sizes and to allow for a full bust and rounded tummy. I also added 10 cm length to the front and back pattern.

I sewed it up in some op-shop (thrifted) oatmeal double knit that cost me all of $3, so there was no pressure. I used a twin needle on the hem and sleeve hems and bound the neck with self fabric, again using the twin needle for the RTW look. This is how my tee turned out:

I am pretty happy with it, especially as the pattern I had started off crazy small for me. I know I could have just bought the pattern again in the correct size to save myself some trouble but I still would have had to do the FBA and doing it this way, I really learnt a lot. I think the bunching up in the middle is due to the way I was standing and not to too much fabric at the centre - I had just run back from setting the camera onto auto and was trying to smile and act natural all at once.

If you have kept reading all the way to down here, thank you very much! I hope this was helpful for anyone else whose figure may have changed over the years, but their pattern cutting hasn’t caught up!

Next I think I will make another one of these, in a jersey (I think this pattern would benefit from a more fluid knit) and I have already made an alteration to the sleeves to fit better. I am not so fussed on the bell shaped sleeve so I have made it more of a regular sleeve shape, as well as slashing and spreading at the top of the sleeve head to give a bit more wearing ease in the upper arm area. I think I could also add another 5cm (10?) to the length too.

My baby turned four today. I can’t believe what a big girl she is. She had a great day, waking me at some ungodly hour with the excited words: “Mummy, I’m FOUR!” and it just went from there.

Last night Sam and I made these little tiny cupcakes for the kids at Emma’s Playschool. No, not that Playschool, this Playschool is one morning a week and it is like a Pre-Preschool. Anyway she had a lot of fun telling all the kids that it was her birthday today and that she was FOUR! JUST LIKE ANN!

Happy Birthday, Emma.

More refashioning. Making new from old, I am so loving this!

I found this 3/4 sleeve tee at the op-shop (thrift store) on the weekend and picked up a matching plain long-sleeved tee at the same time, thinking I could put them together to make one new long-sleeved grey stripey top. I really liked the colour - grey is proving to be “the new black” which is replacing the “old black” which was brown. Isn’t the collar great?

I was a bit too lazy (or in too much of a hurry) to take a “before” pic, but if you just imagine the top without the plain grey pieces at the sleeves and waist. I simply cut these pieces off the plain grey tee and sewed them on.

The plain grey tee was a little smaller so I got the gathered-in effect I was looking for. I kept the original hems on all the pieces and just sewed them on as if they were ribbing, stretching them to fit. I am pretty happy with this and in fact I wore it today and I am still wearing it right now!

You probably can’t tell from the photo, but I tweaked Pinny (my dressform) last night too. I got Paul to do all my measurements and then I measured and adjusted Pinny in the same places. I then found an old bra and put it on her, stuffing it to get my D cup - all body forms come with a standard B cup - and I even had to make her a little rounded tummy too. Now she really is my size and we are enjoying getting to know each other.