Holiday Capsule Wardrobe Planning

This summer my family and I are going on a holiday of a lifetime to Australia for 3 weeks: 4 days in Singapore, a week in Perth, a week in Sydney and the rest at the Great Barrier Reef. This adds up to 21 days of travelling. When I travel, instead of picking up fridge magnets and key rings as souvenirs I pick up fabric, and I have been assured that Singapore at least is a treasure trove for fabric. I was slightly concerned about fitting all of my new fabric in my suitcase to take home with me so my plan is to take a practically empty suitcase to fill up as we go from place to place.

 This called for a capsule wardrobe. My challenge is to wear a different outfit for each of the 21 days from 13 pieces of clothing. This will be made more difficult by Singapore's summer weather and Australia's winter weather. The reason I'm planning so far ahead is because I actually only possess 2 of the 13 pieces of clothing. If it makes it slightly better I do own the fabric for 5 of the 11 remaining pieces. Plus I own all of the patterns apart from 1 so that isn't too bad.

Whilst planning and preparing my capsule wardrobe I focused on a specific colour palette. White and navy are my neutrals. Olive is my nearly neutral and purple and other blues are my accent colours. 

Outerwear (row 1)
For my outerwear I've chosen to make a navy lace bomber jacket (underlined with a ponte knit). For this I'm going to use the hoodie pattern from Sew U Home Stretch without the hood.
I already own an olive jacket but because it's supposed to be a mens jacket it has no waist definition so I do want to sew bias binding around where my natural waistline hits so I can thread cord through it.
 The last item of outerwear is going to be a purple Victoria blazer which is the item that I need to buy the pattern for. I'm planning to make this out of purple ponte for comforts sake and to minimise wrinkles from being in a suitcase.

Tops (row 2)
I chose to use shirts instead of t-shirts because I feel more together in them and also because I can tuck them into skirts and knot them on top of dresses making them super versatile. I already have a refashioned white shirt and am planning to make the navy one using the archer pattern using a navy bed-sheet I found in the charity shop for 2.50. I'm also planning to make a bustier using an amazing navy and green floral fabric found in the charity shop for 3.99 for 2 metres. Obviously I couldn't let that one go. I'm also planning to make matching shorts to go with it so it can be a super cute playsuit.

Bottoms (row 3)
I'm planning to make 2 basic half circle skirts in ponte knit which will be super comfy and easy to travel in. Highwaisted jeans are also on the cards as I love wearing jeans, but only high-waisted ones work on my and I don't currently own any! I have some size 18 jeans from the charity shop which cost 3.50 and I'm going to cut a new pair out of.

Dresses (row 4)
The first dress will be a classic fit and flare dress using my sloper and I'm really looking forward to doing some interesting dart manipulation with the stripes on the bodice. The navy dress is gathered into a yoke with an A line silhouette. I've been really wanting these looser dresses for hot days so this should be perfect. The purple dress is the same kinda thing apart from the angled yoke and the cross over straps. I'm planning to use this awesome purple tie-dye fabric that I inherited from my Grandma. Both dresses I'm planning to draft using my sloper as a base.

I did some basic drawings on photoshop all drawn to fit a croquis so could create outfits by making the things I wanted visible and the things I didn't want visible could be made invisible. To see how useful certain items would be I created every outfit possible with them. The items that could only be worn with a few items were nixed. I'm so sad that the wide legged polka dot linen trousers didn't make it. They were going to be SO GOOD. Maybe when I've finished making all of this lot...

Here's an example of the outfits I made to go with the white shirt.

That's all my thoughts on capsule wardrobes so far. Expect to see some of these items cropping up in the near future!
Thanks so much for reading!
Lauren xx

Floral Pinafore

Way back in January Emma, one of my closest friends, asked for my help because she wanted to make her sister Lucy a pinafore for her birthday, and I of course said YES, so here it is! Emma did practically all of it, with a bit of guidance from myself.

We didn't use a pattern but used one of Lucy's existing pinafores for the bib and drafted a circle skirt to go with it. The straps are just long rectangles which cross over at the back. The beautiful photos were taken in Worcester College in Oxford where Lucy goes to uni.

I had great fun making the pinafore with Emma, and it was really nice to teach somebody a bit of what I've learnt so far.
I have my last A Level exam tomorrow so very very soon I'll have time to sew up the millions of projects that are in my head!

Thanks very much for reading!

Lauren xx

Sleeveless floral archer

Hi! Today I present to you my first every shirt! And of course I used the Grainline Studios Archer pattern. I have a lot of shirts on my list to make but I chose to make this one so it would fit in with the floral week at Project Sewn. I also chose to make this floral one first because I only had 1 metre of it (bought in France last summer) and I wanted to do a couple of new things at a time, i.e. if I made a sleeveless Archer I don't have to worry about cuffs and whatnot and can focus on the other new things like buttonholes and a collar. 

The only issue I really had was that I was arrogant enough to assume that if I just left out the sleeves it'd be fine. It wasn't. There was some serious gape-age in the armhole department. After some googling I found this helpful tutorial made by Jen herself which would have worked a lot better than my "I'll just take in the side seams and it'll be fine". But in the end, it isn't that bad, but next time I will follow her instructions.

Apart from that it's all pretty much okay I think. I must have not done the collar quite right because if I wanted to do the top button up the collar crosses over so I'll try and figure that out for next time. I really need to buy another water soluble pen because there may be some orange dots marking out the buttonholes still on there... Talking of my first buttonholes, I have never been so tense in my life! I've tried them a numper of times before and the first one has been lovely and all the rest rubbish, but this time I reset the type of stitch each time which seemed to do the trick.

I love wearing the shirt tied up, but it also looks good tucked in. What it really needs are some high waisted jeans which are going to happen ASAP. I did also try pairing it with a maxi skirt, but I'm not convinced by the black, a navy or a lighter colour would be better. Also, I feel that it's too short for a maxi skirt. I had to wear it low-ish so it looked half decent. Looking at the print close up I'm not even sure it qualifies as floral? Reminds me a bit of camo really, apart from the colour scheme.

That's all that I can think to say at the moment.

Thanks so much for reading! I'll be linking up to this weeks project sewn sew along so if you like mine best of the bunch feel free to give it a heart when the voting begins tomorrow.

Lauren xx

Me-Made-May 2014 Week 1

  Here's my summary for my first week and a day of me-made-may 2014 :)

 1st May 

I wore an asymmetrical skirt that I wear all the time for school that just never got blogged.

 2nd May

I wore my me-made suit with a peplum top. Really really need to work on this posing thing.

3rd May

I wore my camden lady skater with my black hoodie. Both of these I wear to death and I really need more of them. A hoodie in every colour of the rainbow would be fantastic.

Day 4

I put a wrap skirt over a black dress. I have issues with this skirt. The fact is that it's fastened with poppers. Every time I move an inch, pop! and I'm half naked. This one is going to be going into the mending pile and the poppers replaced by buttons and buttonholes.

Day 5

I wore my floral top. Love this top, wear it all the time, need more of them.

Day 6

I wore my newly finished archer shirt for the first time! (I say finished, well no one can see the lack of a hem...) and my grey suit.

Day 7

Black pencil skirt. The waistband of this skirt was originally attached with snaps but this was also a grave mistake. Regrettably it took me over 6 months to change the snaps to hooks and eyes, and now I'm not feeling round the back of the waistband every 5 minutes to check it's still fastened which is a plus.

Day 8

I didn't even manage a selfie, but I wore my grey suit again with this red top that I wear to death and need to make a copy of.

Day 9

Today I wore my black half circle skirt which I love but attracts fluff like crazy :( Need to make one of these in navy.

That's me up to date! All the me-mades seen in this post can be found on my portfolio page, apart from the asymmetrical skirt from day 1.

Thanks for reading!

Lauren xx

Leading Ladies Challenge: Gathered purple circle skirt

My inspiration was from Lauren Bacalls outfit in the film Key Largo (1948). The aspects of her outfit that I took were the full gathered skirt and the white skirt. I love how simple and elegant this outfit is. 

For the gathered circle skirt I added 5cm onto my normal circle skirt measurement, cut it out and gathered it to fit my waist measurement. I did struggle with keeping the gathers in place so in the end I gathered it with elastic, turned it over and top-stitched. However, it doesn't look quite right without a waistband so I wear a ribbon or a belt over it.

The skirt material is from one of two curtains that I bought from a charity shop for five pounds. They look and feel like silk dupion but are actually 100% polyester. Because of the added waist measurement the skirt is much shorter than I wanted it to be but thankfully it is still wearable...just. To conserve the length I did an improvised version of a narrow hem which consisted of an overlocked edge turned under and stitched about 1cm from the edge. I really love the extra fullness that the gathered circle skirt gives.

The shirt is one of dads that I refashioned about a year ago by removing the sleeves and collar, taking it in at the sides and elasticating the waist. On reflection I wish I hadn't gathered the waist because the gathering always shows if's tucked into anything and looks kinda weird.

I love this photo because I look like I'm about to fall on my face when I'm actually just running...

That's all I have to say about this outfit! Thanks to Project Sewn for inspiring me, because otherwise this skirt would never had existed! Oh and also thanks to Ed for taking photos.

Thanks for reading,

Lauren xx