End of year 2019

So the big thing I managed to do this year was move house. Which if you are reading this and in rental you may be like, that’s no big deal, we do that all the time. But we were trying to sell a one bedroom flat, in the middle of the fun Brexit mess, at a time when first time buyers were rather thin on the ground, & solicitors are getting increasingly nervous of leasehold properties, & so fussier and fussier about dotting every I and crossing every t in the contract.

So all in all it took us nearly 2 years to sell the damn place. It was not too bad from a sewing perspective in 2018, we put the flat on the market in May, it was only on the market for 3 weeks so within a month I could get back on with my sewing while the sale car crashed for 6 months, it fell through just after New Year 2019.

After that I came down with the most dreadful series of colds and illnesses I’d had for a very long time, with hindsight I was probably run down with the stress.

The flat went back on the market in March, this time it took 10 weeks to sell (thanks to Brexit the few first time buyers there were out there originally had evaporated into thin air) so there was literally three months when I couldn’t sew. After that things moved very quickly and we were out by mid November.

I haven’t been able to sew since. We exchanged our one bed flat for a three bedroom unfurnished rental house, & despite the addition of a load of furniture from Jon’s grandfather’s house we’d inherited when he died, there was nowhere near enough furniture to go round for the rooms we needed.

I left my cutting table behind when we moved as I used to use the kitchen island, my fabric wardrobe needed reappropriating to become an actual wardrobe, my sewing table was completely the wrong shape for the new room and our aged Ikea Billy bookshelves didn’t survive the move. So I need entirely new furniture for my sewing room.

So we’ve ordered a load of stuff from Ikea, which arrived on New Years Eve, and even though we’re constructing it as fast as we can, it’s going to be 3 weeks at least before I can sew again.

So I’ve literally had 5 out of the last 12 months I’ve been unable to sew, & another 3 months on top of that when I was just way too ill.

So it’s pretty much a miracle I sewed anything frankly.

So here we go.

A top I made for Jon’s Mum in January

The set of ten cushion covers I made from Sam Wilson fabric (5 of them are in our living room and the remaining 5 have gone to live in my parents summerhouse)

My Iolanthe designer fabric dress

My sheep goddess dress I made for Fantasy Forest festival,

All blogged or partially blogged.

Also this yellow high necked jersey dress

And this Tarot card and floral fabric dress I made from a Vogue pattern just before we moved.

Neither of which have been blogged yet.

Which brings the total to 6 (or more optimistically 15 if you count the cushion covers separately, but I’m seeing them all as one rather large project) which is about half my normal total, but considering the fact the blue fantasy dress and it’s accessories and the cushion covers were both monster projects that took a lot more hours than the stuff I sew normally do, and considering I only had 6-7 months I could have possibly sewed at all and I spent 3 of them ill, I’m counting this as a reasonable achievement.

Next year I am intending to be much more productive. As soon as I have my sewing room up and running again, I can’t wait to get on.

I have a unicorn print jersey from Stoff and Stil already cut our ready to become a handkerchief hem frankenpatterned dress, & I am planning a Dear and Doe Belladonna out of this fabric…..

Which I have been sitting on for years waiting for the right pattern idea to come along.

After that I want to make a few floaty prairie dress inspired numbers, and I desperately need to overhaul my midsummer wardrobe – the combination of extreme heatwaves in this country pretty much every year and Jon’s mum having emigrated to Mallorca, I desperately need linen or viscose dresses to wear when the temperature hits 40 odd as my usual summer collection of jersey dresses or cotton a-line skirt dresses is just completely unsuitable.

I have a similar problem with my midwinter wardrobe. In the coldest part of the year I tend to live in my sweatshirting Tilly and the Buttons Coco dresses and a couple of similar shop bought ones. I only have about 5 and 2 of them are properly showing signs of age/cheap fabric (buying most of my fabric as high street deadstock from a market stall sometimes means it doesn’t have quite the longevity you would expect if you bought it first hand (this actually Massively pisses me off! – the idea that some high street fashion is produced and the fabric is only designed to last less than 10 washes, let alone when you get to the stitching, is totally awful for the environment!)).

Anyway, this would all be fine if it was only that cold for two weeks in January, but now we’ve moved to the country it is colder than London, & it’s been a miserable autumn, so I’ve ended up wearing this small range of dresses a lot more than I expected to be wearing them. So I desperately need new ones.

All of which is going to keep me very busy next year. To say nothing of my long term ambition to start making my own coats.

Also the local lewisham market stall is sadly no longer local, there is a stall in Hitchin but it’s nowhere near as good, which means I will no longer have easy access to 2 and 3 quid a meter fabrics. So I’m going to have to work my way through my stash. This is actually not a bad thing though as it was growing somewhat out of control.

So anyway, Happy New Year, hopefully next year will be a lot better for us than the last few years have been.