It's been too long! | Cashmerette

Do you know that saying, that work expands to fill the time that you give it? Well I seem to have discovered another: that creativity shrinks in inverse proportion to the amount of time you give it.

3 weeks free to cavort about and do sewing… what did I achieve? Well, I did make one dress – my first wrap dress in fact. Which isn’t bad! But it also only took a day and a half, leaving about 2.5 weeks of… going to yoga and failing to do sewing.

Now that I have a full time job and two school classes? Ideas coming out of my ears and boundless energy! Which I have decided to embrace. Creativity apparently needs boundaries, so now it’s happy.

Here’s a few things what I have been up to:

1. I have been wearing the aforementioned first dress, though I don’t have photos of it yet. This will be addressed, next time it’s clean.

2. I finally finished my fabric stash box covers! I’m pretty pleased with them, and they provided a lot of entertainment embroidering while watching TV.

3. I made a t-shirt! After failing to find any nice stretch fabric anywhere, I bit the bullet and bought the expensive 100% natural bamboo jersey from Gather Here that I’d been fondling on and off for weeks. I used the Sewaholic Renfrew pattern, and once I figured out how to put twill tape in the shoulders (which was hard….) I made it in a mere afternoon. Ok, so the neckline is *slightly* wonky, but I was overall pretty pleased. And this garment really opened my mind to all the possibilities of altering things to be *exactly* how you want them – the right neckline, length of the sleeves, length of the top and so on. Once you have the basic skills this dressmaking stuff is ace.

Cutting the fabric from the pattern I traced onto butcher paper:

Those tricky twill tape shoulders! Need a bit more practice to avoid the wavy look

The emergence of a distinctly t-shirt looking garment (please ignore the irregularly widthed neckline…)

Et voila!

I have a whole queue of projects coming up:
– another wrap dress with fabric I had custom-printed from Spoonflower.com
– a Colette Sorbetto top made with Liberty Fabric (will be swinging by Gather Here for the sidewalk sale at the weekend in the (vain) hope it might be at a discount!)
– an “infinity dress” made with some super-soft damson coloured jersey that I found
– some more t-shirts, once I can find decent fabric