Me made May Day 9-22

As I mentioned in my last post, the last few weeks have been a bit rough so I decided to be kind to myself and not worry about what's happening on the blog or about my Me Made May photos.  Therefore you're getting the photos that I remembered to take over the last few weeks.  I have been fully participating though and actually this is the first year I have not really struggled any morning to pick myself an outfit that is at least partially me made.  

Day 9: lace belcarra blouse and strawberry circle skirt (unblogged) 

Day 10: pleather circle skirt and blingy refashioned jumper.

Day 11: 70s tartan dress for my mummy's birthday dinner. I made a cake that almost matched my dress!

Day 12: floral pencil skirt and RTW top to see the Vogue exhibition! 

Day 13: Angelica top and ultimate trousers. I really need some more of these tops in my life-I got so many compliments on it and I wear it loads. I couldn't be bothered with a photo today. 

Day 14: jeans and a Dolores top. This was a terrible day so I again opted out of the photo taking.

Day 15: Pleather skirt and vintage top.  This outfit never fails to get me compliments and I love it, however again was not in the mood for photos.

My mend this week was a summer loose knit jumper which had developed a serious hole.

Before:

After:

And its ready to wear again

Day 16: Going with the 'any photo is better than none' attitude!  Wearing my Sallie jumpsuit to go and watch the Great British Sewing Bee at the meet up hosted by Cocowawa and Sewitwithlove.

Day 17: New Orla top (that I will blog about shortly) and jumper refashion

Day 18: Stripey lady skater

Day 19: I was full of the cold and was working from home and all I really wanted to do was stay in my pyjamas but as I did have to leave the house I wore jeans, a black Dolores top (unblogged) and my owl jumper.  No photo though.

Day 20: Strawberry circle skirt and owl jumper

Day 21: This is where my me made wardrobe failed me.  I was on a friends hen do and I needed a night time party dress and I have not made any of these.  Thinking about it most of my handmade dresses are fairly casual day time ones like my lady skater dresses.

Day 22: Birdie Renfrew top (unblogged)

This weeks mend was sewing a button back on my winter coat.  I wore it to a wedding at the beginning of April and it got caught on my bag and the only way to detangle it was to snip off the button.  I'd say less than 2 months to sew it back on is pretty good going. However it really was too banal a mend to photograph so no picture.

Good luck with the final stretch of Me-made-May everyone.

Perfect autumn day

The perfect autumn day deserves the perfect autumn dress!  By perfect autumn day, what do I mean? Well not today for a start, I am so not a fan of this horrible rainy misty weather that we are getting.  However, just look at these pictures which I took on Sunday:

However, I'm not sure I'm equally correct in my statement about the dress, a scuba dress may not be perfect autumn wear, however I'm pleased with it.  I have a pretty new dress and it ticks off another item from my Fall essentials list.

This is my lady skater/Renfrew mash up dress in a gorgeous Scuba that I just could not resist from the Man Outside Sainsbury's in Walthamstow.  The mash-up really was so easy to do I just laid the lady skater bodice piece over the Renfrew bodice piece and graded between them for the waist.  The top bit is all Renfrew but the lady skater is more fitted at the waist and the bodice is a lot shorter.  After that I sewed up as normal.  I sewed it all on the sewing machine rather than using my overlocker as the scuba felt so thick that I didn't want to risk causing any problems to the poor overlocker.  My sewing machine has taken a lot of abuse over the years and I've learnt to handle it and judge what it can and can't do, I don't yet have the same relationship with my overlocker.

I made the cowl version of the Renfrew which I love, its like a scarf and dress all in one.  However, it means that this dress eats fabric, it would be a great stash buster (you know if I'd had something suitable in my stash and hadn't bought the fabric) as it used up almost 3m.  I would really like one of these now in a lovely wool jersey, something warm and snuggly (and breathable!)  

Right I'm off to stare at pictures of beaches and pretend that we are not hurtling towards months of rain and snow!

Lace Belcarra Blouse

Today I have one of those sods law tales to tell you.  I made the top that I'm wearing months ago, wore it a couple of times and it promptly disappeared.  I was so upset as I really liked it.  I searched for it for ages and eventually I decided it must have been lost when my boyfriend moved house and resigned myself to making another.  Literally about 20 minutes after finishing sewing the new top, I discovered the original one hiding in the back of a drawer!  Oh well, it has been gifted to a friend and I am going to move on with my new top!

I hadn't realised quite how rumpled I look in these photos, they were taken at the end of my holiday and my linen skirt really could have done with an iron!

On my uni days I am surrounded by 23 well dressed women whose clothes I am always staring at and trying to work out whether they would work on me and how I could recreate them.  Thanks girls for the inspiration (sorry boys, I'm not spending much time on your clothes).  Anyway there have been a lot of lace tops featuring in the girls' wardrobes recently which I guess is reflective of the summer trends and I really wanted one.  And so my next Belcarra blouse was born.

I knew I wanted to have the front piece as a lace panel and originally I was considering creating lace sleeves too but having never sewn with lace before, I thought I would keep my life simple and just stick with the front panel so that I didn't need to worry about working out how to hem the lace.

The main fabric is a cotton jersey that I bought from Simply Fabrics in Brixton and the lace was an offcut that I bought on the same trip. Although the Belcarra pattern is not meant for stretch fabrics I thought I would give it a go and it seems to have worked.  I simply tacked the lace panel to the jersey front piece and then just sewed following the instructions.  The only part I changed was that I eliminated the sleeve bands as I wasn't crazy about them on my first version and also I wanted slightly shorter sleeves.

Now does anyone have any other suggestions for top patterns?  I'm always on the look out for good tops, I don't know why but I really find this the hardest pattern to find to suit my body type.