2018 Re-Sew-Lutions

Happy New Year, Dear Reader!

New Year is a time to reflect on the passing year and looking a head to the new year, setting up goals and resolution. On wednesday, I showed you my Make Nine collages for 2017 and 2018. Today, I am back with my Re-Sew-Lutions for the new year.

I am not good at keeping up with challenges that require you to make something on a monthly basis to fit a particular prompt. Therefore, I will not try to participate in the Historical Sew Monthly or the Sew My Style challenges this year, but have set some more universal reSEWlutions.

So, without further ado, I'd like to present my reSEWlutions for the coming year:

1) No Buying RTW Clothing! Sew All The Things!

I have joined Sarah Gunn of Goodbye Valentino and about 1000 other sewists for the 2018 RTW fast and mean to keep to it. It is a sewing community set up to support each other in sewing your own clothes instead of buying RTW, pushing yourself to learn new techniques on the way and to save money.

2) Sew With What I Have!

The stash-downsizing is not going too well. Since September, I have added about 50 meters of fabric from various sources and have only sewn about 40. As a result, I now have more fabric than when I started, about 410 meters. 110 meters to go before September 1st!

I will not but a direct ban on myself, but I will be more conscious about what I add and perhaps spend my fabric-money on patterns, better notions and tools instead. Also, I will clean out my stash around Easter, when my sewing room gets a fresh paint-job.



3) Sew More For My Boyfriend!

Like so many other seamstresses, I am notoriously bad at sewing for my significant other. Inspired by the Love To Sew podcast episode where Caroline and Helen interviewed their husbands, I am in the process of sewing my boyfriend a pair of True Bias Men's Hudson Pants and hope to follow up with a few sweaters, hoodies, boxers, chinos and dress shirts.



And that's it for my resewlutions! I hope you have had a nice start to your 2018. I will be back shortly with another make. In closing, here is my #2017BestNine from Instagram:

Make Nine

Happy New Year, Dear Reader!

New Year is a time to reflect on the passing year and looking a head to the new year, setting up goals and resolution.

Today, I will start by looking back on 2017 and then ahead to 2018 in the form of the Make Nine Challenge. This is a "gentle challenge" for makers created by Rochelle of Lucky Lucille, now Home Row Fiber Co. You choose 9 patterns that you haven't made before to try and make throughout the year.

As shown above, only 2 of the nine patterns from 2017 were sewn up. You can see the Zinnia skirt here and the Elmira cardigan here.

The corset and 18th century dress were postponed, as my historical events got cancelled.
The vintage shirt dress and the Mimi blouse got postponed due to the fabric being missing after our move last year.
The bras and the backpack were postponed due to the number and cost of the specialty materials.

For the 2018 Make Nine, I have chosen these 9 patterns:

- B6031 - Gertie for Butterick.
- B6380 - Gertie for Butterick
- The Boylston Bra - Orange Lingerie - Carried over from last year.
- B6217 - Gertie for Butterick.
- The Lamour Dress - Gertie for Charm Patterns.
- New Look 6107
- The Rosie Dress - Sew Over It
- A Pencil Skirt - Pattern TBA
- The Vintage Shirt Dress - Sew Over It - Carried over from last year.

I hope to do a little better this year, making more that 2 of these patterns. So far, I have written them all into my excel planning sheet and packed some of the fabrics for a post-exams sewing holiday in late January. Wish me luck!

Are you participationg in the #2018MakeNine?

Sewing Statistics - Part I

So, I recently "inherited" this iPad 2 from my boyfriend. He had bought it used from my twin brother around Christmas 2 years ago and found that he just didn't use it enough. So I got to play around with it, MWAHAHAHA.

And what did this sewist do? Installed some nifty sewing apps, of course! And one of them was Cora.

Now, if you don't know Cora, it is most likely because you have Android on your phone. Me too. And Cora only works for iTunes/AppStore/Apple products. Like the iPad 2. Aha!

It is a fabric stashing app, where you can catalog your fabric and then browse through or search it. You can filter your stash by type, weight, wash status, star-markings or by the minimum length your next project will need. The fabrics are beautifully displayed and a long tap on the picture will show the photo in full size while a short tap will show all the details you cataloged it with, including type, fiber content, location, design, length, price, source, colors, wash status and more.

Now, I quickly got addicted to the Cora app. It does cost money to get past the first 5 fabrics added, but it has been worth every penny so far. And 251 fabrics later, I still love it!

It does have 1 little drawback, though. It will tell you just how much fabric you've REALLY got. And it told me that I got a total of 400 meters! Yikes!

At this point, I was halfway in denial. How the h*** do I have 400 meters of fabric?!!! Then, a week later, when the hard truth had settled in, I made a plan.

I will sew up, give away, sell or discard enough fabric, so that I reduce my stash to a total of 300 meters by September 1st, 2018. 
 
And then I went crazy in Microsoft Excell. I have charts and graphs for everything now, stash size, type, and color distribution and spreads just for planning makes and blog posts.

Let me show you :)

Above - stash data taken directly from the Cora app is put in and processed to give a net flux for each month as well as a total for the time period until Doomsday, aka Sep 1st, 2018.

Above - A stash size in meters over time plot with the pink being total, blue being wovens, purple being knits and light pink being others. The points at February and June shows "stash size goals".

Above - Fabric type distribution in stacked percentages. Purple is wovens, pink is knits and blue is others. I have no end goal for this one, I just thought it could be interesting to see. My mother has roughly the reverse distribution of knits and woven than me, for instance.

Above - Color distribution. I didn't know I had so much blue?

Above - A chart of finished make by garment type and recipient. The chart calculates a "selfish rate" that I'd like to keep around the 85-90% as well as a make count for the entire period for each garment type. Joost is the name of my boyfriend, BTW. 

Above - 2 graphs to visualize the makes chart. I love to see them grow as I type in my latest make. 

And lastly, my Makes Planner. The dark pink makes are finished. Light pink ones have been cut out and/or is in progress. White ones are only temporary plans. I love how I can move the cells around as plans change, and how I can see ahead to upcoming projects. It makes pre-washing fabric and buying notions so much easier to do in advance. 

I do find that having the Cora app and keeping detailed statistics keeps me more focused and thus more productive in my sewing. I get a little "kick" every time I get to downsize or delete a fabric, change the color of a cell in the Makes Planner and so forth. I am having way too much fun, people!

So, for now, I will keep the statistics going. I will return on September 1st, 2018 with more statistics, showing you how it all went. Wish me luck!

Sewing Room Tour

I thought it would be nice to start my new blogging adventure by showing you my new sewing space. It's not big or fancy, but it's nice to have a dedicated sewing space, a luxury I have never had before.

It is a couple of months since we moved, and I finally feel like this little space is coming together as I had envisioned it. It is actually not a sewing room, just a big wall in our massive bedroom. However, it does feel like a room due to some creative painting of the walls. The sewing- and office-related areas of our bedroom have minty green walls, while the bed-area walls are painted white.

This is the view in front of my sewing machine. The table is the Finnvard/Linnmon combo from Ikea, and I love it so much. The height can be adjusted very easily, and thus the table works for both cutting (highest setting), ironing (middle setting) and sewing (lowest setting). The shelves in the trestles holds my sewing machine and overlocker respectively. To the right of the table is currently some un-unpacked moving boxes, but in the future, it will only hold a trash bin and my ironing board. On the table is also my iron and "quilter's cut 'n' press" for in-progress ironing.

To the left is my big Expedit shelving unit and my little Råskog cart. Both are from Ikea. The shelves holds my patterns, fabric stash, scraps and extra machines. On top I have sewing books, my yarn stash and pretty hat-boxes with notions.
The cart is really handy and holds small tools, office supplies and current projects. I begin to understand why it is such a favorite among sewing bloggers! Rolls of interfacing, pattern paper, gift wrap and my 1-meter-ruler hides out behind the cart.

On the wall to the right behind the chair, I have a small shelving unit (it's from a local hardware store), my mini-ironing board and my dress form. These shelves holds my jewelry, nail polish, thread-boxes and binders with pdf-patterns. My dress form is sporting my current project. I am posting in-progress pictures over on instagram.

I have this nice rail from Ikea hanging on the wall behind the sewing table. It holds my scissors, rulers, a basket with patterns and little pots with tools and notions.

And that's it for my little sewing corner! We also have a small nook in the opposite corner of the bedroom, where my boyfriend builds lego and sewing guests can set up their machines (wink wink, Trine!). I have a nice view through the apartment from my table, and the lighting through the windows is amazing during the day.

To round things up, here is a collage of our current fabric stash, all nicely rolled and labelled with yardage, width, fiber content, purchase information and if it has been washed or not:

Where do you sew, and how do you organize your fabric stash?

/Angelica