This month is passing so quickly I can hardly keep my head on straight. I continue to put homemade garments on my body every day, but the outfits are starting to repeat, and in the interest of not boring the pants off anyone, I’m not sharing them all here. But I did make a new top last week, and I love it!

I made an impromptu stop at Britex when I was in the city last week, and picked up two pieces from their remnants floor, with the specific intention of making two new Sorbetto tops. Here is the first:

I love this fabric: it’s a simple shirting cotton, with a nice textured stripe in light blue and grey. It was very easy to sew with (a quality I’m appreciating more and more). And I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

I even made my own bias tape to finish the neckline and the arms.

I do want to create a little tutorial on making this bias tape. There are some good tutorials online, but I found that I had to use two or three of them cobbled together to get a really good sense of how to do this. So I thought I’d try my hand at clarifying some of the pieces that I thought were particularly confusing. Keep your eyes open for that…and be forgiving. It will be my first tutorial attempt.

In other news, we had a lovely weekend here, with hiking:

And beverages in the sun at a nearby urban beer garden:

I cannot believe next weekend is Memorial Day weekend. What the what? Sigh.

The shortage of me-made tops around these parts became glaringly obvious to me when I started trying to wear them. I decided to remedy this situation, and fast, by finally making the Colette Pattern’s Sencha blouse I’ve been thinking about for awhile now. I bought this awesome cotton voile a few months ago, and had in mind exactly this blouse for it when I bought it. So this week, I decided to try to whip it together in order to have it in time to wear it Friday.

This means I was sewing for a LONG time last night. But it looks great, right?

Nope.

This thing is HUGE. I pinned in the excess fabric in back so I could still get away with wearing it today (a cardigan hides a multitude of sins). But wowza. I need to take in at least 4 or 5 inches from this thing.

Dudes. I made a muslin and everything.

Does this look too big to you? I mean, I know Bessie and I aren’t EXACTLY the same size, but I didn’t think we were that far off from each other.

This is not what this top looks like on me.

Sigh. I never thought blouses would be so tricky to make. In ready to wear, tops are about the easiest things in the world for me to buy, because my up-top shaping is pretty standard. And yet…I have made four tops (five, if you count the one I threw away because it was so horrible), and most of them have some kind of strange fitting issue. I think I know what my mistake was here: I ended up grading out the pattern at the hips, because I knew that with its long-ish hem, it would need a little more space to fit my derriere. But I think I didn’t need as much space as I assumed I would. Maybe? There is also an insane amount of extra fabric around the waist, so I don’t know.

I think the part that baffles me the most is that it fits my dress form very differently than it fits me, and I honestly didn’t think my dress form was that hugely different to my actual body. I think I need to spend some serious time padding out and forcing in and generally re-shaping Ol’ Bessie.

Anyway. I’m still wearing it. Cardigans are my friend. I’ll fix it soon.

This is the skirt I meant to share with you all over a month ago. I like to call it The Desk Set skirt. It’s a lined wool pencil skirt made from the pencil skirt pattern in Gertie’s New Book for Better Sewing. I bought the wool in Seattle, where I fell in love with its soft hand and shape-shifting color at a cute little fabric store called Stitches. I spent a lot more on this fabric than I normally do (100% Italian wool!), so I took extra care to make this skirt well.

This is the first lined skirt I’ve ever made, and some parts of the lining process were a little baffling to me. Like, what do you do with the lining around the zipper opening? Hm. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do mine right, but at least it’s on the inside.

I sewing a blind hem on this bad boy by hand. Took forever, but was totally worth it.

The only visible goof on this skirt is on the back of the waistband. My first buttonhole was too far toward the end of the waistband, causing the skirt to gap. I made another buttonhole, and it fits better, but I haven’t quite figured out how to get rid of the original hole. However, the button I found for this skirt is SO BEAUTIFUL that I hope it distracts from the extra buttonhole (ok, not quite, but a girl can pretend).

My favorite thing about this skirt is that the color of the wool is kind of indeterminate. In these pictures it looks closer to black (and the button looks blue), but in some lights, the skirt is more of an olive, and in some, it’s more grey. The button also is somewhere between green, blue, and grey. Such a lovely color.

Here’s the skirt on Bessie (geez, she’s kinda frumpy looking).

And here’s another picture of the skirt on me, yesterday. Yes, this fabric wrinkles terribly; I did iron it before I put it on.

This has quickly become my favorite thing in my wardrobe. It makes me feel pulled together and professional and classy. It might be retired for the summer (wool in July just feels wrong), but I think it’ll be around for many years to come.

Rolling right along, and still wearing me-made clothes. Love it! This outfit even includes a me-made necklace, oen of my favorite pieces I’ve made so far. But the top is the garment of the day.

This is based on the Portrait Blouse from Gertie’s awesome New Book for Better Sewing. This top almost didn’t make it. It was stitched together last winter, but it just wasn’t right, and I’ve been futzing with it ever since. I ended up taking the tucks out of the back because it was way too tight, and I didn’t include the side zip, because the fabric doesn’t really need it. The hem of this top is really high, and until recently, I didn’t have any pants with a high enough waist to work with it. I tried a few different methods of extending the length, but nothing that quite worked.

However, my new jeans have a nice, high waist, and they are perfect with this style of top. I ended up just finishing the hem with narrow single-fold bias tape, but it’s still not perfect. There are a few little places where the fabric slipped out of the tape and missed being sewn in. That drives me CRAZY. I will probably end up taking the bias tape off and re-doing this with a wider tape, but for today, it’s just fine.

I am reaching the bottom of my me-made closet, so there will be a fair number of repeats in the coming weeks. Hopefully I can think of different ways to wear my separates so that I’m not just wearing the same outfit over and over again. Which I have a tendency to do, because it’s easy. I’m also feeling pretty inspired to create some new stuff FAST so that I have more to wear this month.

My loose-weave sweater is kinda dead in the water right now (wah wah), but I’m going to start working tonight on a Colette Sencha bouse, which will hopefully be finished in time for the weekend. We shall see.

Are you me-made-ing it this month?

This skirt is my most recent creation, and I love it. I did the bulk of the work on Sunday afternoon, and finished up some fitting and the hem last night, which makes this perhaps the fastest thing I’ve ever sewn. It is also the most well-made thing I’ve sewn to date: the seams are all nicely finished, I pressed everything, I didn’t take any shortcuts.

The pattern is from the Sew Everything Workshop book; it’s the Naughty Secretary pattern, with a waist band that I drafted from instructions in Threads magazines. The only bummer is that, despite the fact that I have made this before and didn’t remember these fitting issues, it is kinda big on me. I even changed the back darts to take a full two inches in at the waist and it is still too big. I think I can fix that, though, without having to take the whole darn skirt apart.

The fabric is a William Morris-inspired print I bought at Michael Levine in LA. I love William Morris designs, so I was pleased as punch to stumble across this very Morris-esque print. I think it might be quilting cotton, but I don’t know. It was a lovely fabric to sew with, though: It stayed right where I put it. That’s probably why I was able to do such a good job with it.

Once I get the waist fitting just right, I think this will become a staple of my summer wardrobe. It is just my style: interesting but subdued, totally classic, but a little unexpected. And it matches perfectly with my favorite grey suede heels.

PS – I have no idea why I’m standing with such a weird posture in that picture. I’m still not super comfortable with pictures of myself, but I’m getting better at it. I think.