All posts filed under: Miscellenia

Rate the Dress: Scarlet Suit-ed

Last week’s Rate the Dress was very Southern California summer: perfect for sunsets on the beach and glam parties in the dawning years of Hollywood. This week’s pick is much more Wellington winter: just what you need for keeping cosy while going to an Edwardian soiree where you want to be sure you’re dressed better than that upstart Annie Beauchamp. Last Week: 1920s dress in complementary velvet hues Orange is having a moment, and that may have helped with the response to last week’s sunset hued number – or perhaps it was just that the luscious velvet was irresistible. When the dress did come in for criticism it was mostly for the belt: the braiding did not age well, and many of you thought it was clunky, heavy, and looked like a last-minute addition. Interestingly, I thought the belt, while it clearly had suffered the effects of age, was what ‘made’ the dress, and the beading was the pointless afterthought! It takes all opinions! The Total: 8.5 out of 10 That may be the best …

Climate Change, Mental Health, Costuming & Me

Warning: this post contains triggers. Sometime in late April my brain figured out how bad climate change is going to be. I’ve been aware of climate change for as long as I can remember. I wrote a paper on it for school when I was 15. I got into a massive argument with a professor about it my first term in university and derailed the entire lecture (still not sorry). But I managed to be aware, without grasping how bad it’s going to be. It’s going to be bad. High likelihood of completely dead, un-swimmable oceans bad. Mass extinction bad. Potential death of all humans by 2050 bad. My mind took the realisation…badly. By badly I mean I went from blithely happy to extremely depressed in less than 24 hours, and became so anxious that in one four day stretch I spent more of my awake hours having panic attacks than not. I had so many panic attacks I pulled a muscle in a my chest from hyperventilating. It was not good. I’m seeing a …

The Mahina Cardigan: Tester Makes!

Testers are such an important part of the indie pattern design process. They help ensure that a pattern fits just right on a wide range of bodies and makes sense to the average sewist across the world. Good testers help me to polish off any last bits of roughness from a pattern, asking all the questions I might have missed answering. The testers for the Mahina Cardigan were just wonderful. You can tell how amazing they are by how many of them made multiple cardigans, just because they enjoyed sewing them and wearing them so much! Here are the tester makes! Gillian of Crafting a Rainbow@craftingarainbow Gillian made the Mahina View C out of a delicious purple knit that looks incredibly soft even in the photos. It shows off the drape of the cardigan beautifully! Read her blog post for a full review of the pattern. Kerstin of Hertzwerk-Freiburg Kerstin’s Mahina is a wonderful example of what the cardigan looks like in a very light, sheer knit. And she sent me photos with 13 different …