patternhacking – Stitch Sessions

November 28, 2020January 26, 2023

Jumpsuits and Pattern Hacking – Simplicity 6926 + The Tania Culottes and Vogue 7583

Nell, a Caucasian person, stands in front of a wooden bench and concrete wall. They are wearing a blue floral jumpsuit, and have pulled the legs apart to show the split.

Hello friends! I am so excited about this month’s blog post as it signals a change in the way that I am approaching sewing and sharing my makes on Ye Olde Internete. I recently made the decision to move to a monthly posting format on both Instagram and my blog, as I realised that this would suit me so much better and give me more space to thoroughly test each pattern. So each month I will be focusing on one particular pattern and testing a few different variations of it, depending on what I’m inspired to make with the fabric I have in my stash. However, this change was largely inspired by the fitting adventures I embarked on with the bodice of Simplicity 6926 – a vintage dress pattern circa 1975, which I picked up second-hand. It was a thoroughly enjoyable challenge and I learned so much from the process that it inspired this series, as well as my first ever video tutorial which you will find below!

September 15, 2020January 26, 2023

Sewing Trousers with New Look 6718

Nell, a Caucasian person, stands in front of a wooden bench and concrete wall. They are wearing a black button-up shirt and highwaisted grey wool trousers. They have one hand on their hip.

One thing I love about sewing, among the plethora of things I love, is that it is a constant process of learning new skills and refining old ones. New materials pose all kinds of challenges, from learning to handle slippery fabrics, to testing thread tension, stitches – and learning to go back and forth between machines. Although New Look 6718 is hardly my first trousers pattern, it feels as though this was the beginning of quite a lot of adventures in learning and developing new techniques and revealing weaknesses in my current sewing practices. For one thing I worked on a range of tasks between the first of this make, and the second, and I feel I came so far between them that they were an excellent snapshot of my skills at each point in time.

May 17, 2020January 26, 2023

Butterick 9779, Shorts and Pattern Hacking

Nell, a Caucasian person, stands in front of a wooden bench and concrete wall. They have their fists raised and one leg kicked back - mid dance-move. They are wearing a white and brown striped shirt and highwaisted, green corduroy shorts.

If someone had tried to tell me this time last year that I would not only be making shorts that fit perfectly, and from a vintage pattern; but that I would also be pattern hacking to make pants and overalls! Well, I don’t think I would have believed them. But despite that I have now completed some of my most successful makes to date, and it all begins with my purchase of the circa 1960s pattern, Butterick 9779. It was a somewhat risky purchase for me, being a little bit pricer and coming from an overseas seller – my last experience of which had been truly terrible. However, I worried over nothing! The seller was lovely, the pattern arrived in a brilliant condition – albeit with a slightly wonky waistband from people accidentally trimming bits off. Over the course of one virtual craft evening with a friend I very gently ironed out the pattern pieces for the medium size and got to tracing and copying the markings into more modern versions.