But it can't be from Dolly Clackett. She gave me an Easter egg!

Hola! What's up, my friends? All good here: after a fucking crazy week last week I had a very restful weekend and, so far, this week has been moderately good. Maybe my expectations are lowered but to be honest, I think they're lowered all round. Nic and I watched the Liam Neeson film Non-Stop over the weekend, partly for the lols, but I ended up genuinely enjoying it. Yeah, it's silly, but Liam Neeson having a shoot-out with bad guys in a depressurised airplane cabin? That was awesome. And I love Liam Neeson. Even when he's in bad films (such as The Grey or The Phantom Menace) or flat-out hateful ones (such as Batman Begins or Love, Actually) he's always the best thing about them. I was going to find a funny Liam Neeson meme to put here, but I haven't seen Taken so none of them actually make sense to me. Ah well.

Yeah. So, the craic. That is it. I did also clean the kitchen, make two different dinners and bake a cake over the weekend. I clearly had some sort of psychotic break because spending time in the kitchen is not something I'm normally interested in - luckily Nic is the domesticated adult in our relationship - but mainly I spent the weekend reading and sleeping and trying to keep warm. Despite my best efforts, I can no longer ignore the fact that it is cold now and I have to wear tights and my eleven million pairs of sandals are going to have to wait until the milder weather. I'm still going to photograph finished sewing projects outside - lighting and all that - but, yeah. It's cold now.

I wore and photographed this dress the weekend before last, when it was still pretty mild. I very rarely buy sewing magazines, mainly because I'm not at all interested in sewing children's clothes, homewares, quilts or accessories, but I did buy last month's Sew magazine because the pattern that came with it is one I've wanted for a while. It was kind of stupid really because the magazine is (in my opinion) not worth reading and I could have bought the pattern cheaper on sale somewhere. Eh. The magazine was a bit of a diversion, and the pattern is pretty cute. It's Cynthia Rowley for Simplicity - 1873:

Now, I have to say, I was primarily attracted to the technical drawings of this dress. I don't know about you, but I think there's something really sad about the envelope image, although the fabric is lovely. The skirt is pretty cool: there are a few panels, which gives it fullness and body, and I like the pleating. I didn't have enough fabric to do this, and I mainly wanted to try the bodice out, so I used a simple gathered skirt on my version. I will go back and try the skirt, though!

The Cat's Pyjamas dress - Simplicity 1873 with a gathered skirt worn with Poetic Licence The Right Stripe shoes

The fabric is 'Cherry Jubilee' by Michael Miller and was a surprise gift from Sarah when she was clearing out her stash a few months ago. It sat in my fabric box for a fair bit while I tried to decide what to do with it. Although cherries aren't christmassy, there's something about this fabric that seems festive to me, so although the dress I made is sleeveless it does feel a bit seasonal to me.

Back view. I don't hate this!

The pattern itself was grand to sew. I took a chance at not toiling this one because I don't usually find I have to do much to Simplicity patterns to get them to fit me. I sewed the size 10 based on the finished garment measurements but it ended up - well, not being too big, exactly - just big enough to look a little bit frumpy. I went back after I had finished the dress and took it in at the side seams. It's not an ideal fix but, as I hadn't made a toile, I'm happy to treat this as a wearable toile. Next time, I'll toile the size 8 and go from there.

Bodice. I look a bit bald in this photo and, welp, there's a dart there that could have been pressed better. But do you like my cherry earrings? I got them in a shop in Folkestone and I think they might be made out of that Fimo clay.

There will be a next time. Despite the few issues I had - which were mine, not the pattern's - I really like this bodice block and I am looking forward to trying it out with the skirt from the pattern. It's not vastly out of my comfort zone, of course, but I like the lower neckline. For a pattern I got for 'free' (except not really) I think it's all good.

I accessorised this with green rather than red because - well, mainly I think because my red cardigan was in the wash.

Although I love the fabric and I like the idea of this dress, I don't love it overall. There's nothing really wrong with it and I am sure I will wear it - especially as I was so touched to receive the fabric - but I'm not sure that it's very flattering. There's something about it that feels a bit off that I can't quite put my finger on. I might feel differently after I have worn it again - maybe I will like it better if I wear it with red - but, in any case, I enjoyed sewing it and they can't all be winners all the time, right?

I did like the fact that I could wear it with these shoes, though:

Yes, they have detachable cherries on them! I know, right?

Actually, maybe the issue with this dress isn't the dress itself. I enjoyed wearing it and felt pretty good in it. I think where I started to feel ambiguous about it is when I thought about writing this blog post. I'm getting a bit bored of blogging about sewing, to be honest. It's mostly because I like to sew and wear very similar things. I'm absolutely fine with that and, for the moment, I'm not looking to go for anything especially more challenging or complex. But I AM getting a bit tired of blogging everything. I've been blogging here for five years now and I don't think I'm ready to stop - but I do feel like I need to make a change of some kind. I'm just not sure what.

Apologies for the outpouring. Who knew a dress could prompt such navel-gazing, eh?! I think I just need to take some time to regroup and recharge and think about what, if anything, to do next.

I do have one idea, though:

Right lads, I'm away here. Goodnight!

Hello strangers! What's happening?! I've had a few weeks' break from both sewing and blogging, but I thought it was time to break that streak. I'm still figuring out what I want to do with the blog but it was good to get back to my sewing machine. The break from sewing wasn't intentional. The weather has turned cold and the sewing/dining table is next to the window; work has been busy; we've had a friend to stay; the weekends have been busy and, to be totally honest, I was in a bit of a rut. That's kind of what contributed to the blog break - although I love wearing the dresses I sew, I was getting a bit bored of sewing them.

A couple of weekends ago I went to London to meet up with Lauren on her last day in the UK, at a sewing day at Tilly's studio in West Dulwich. I had brought a project with me - I wanted to make a toile of McCalls 6696 (which I did) - but mainly I was interested in drinking prosecco and gossiping. It was such a blast to finally meet Lauren and to spend the afternoon with lovely sewing friends. And, you know, prosecco. Always good. While I was there, Tilly very kindly gave me a copy of her new pattern, the Francoise dress. Now, I would not have bought this pattern myself - not because I don't like it, but because it is very different to what I usually like to sew or wear, and I guess I'm not very adventurous. Indeed, even after I had been given the pattern I wasn't sure if I would sew it. I had a little think, and as I had some suitable fabric lurking in my stash, I thought I'd push myself out of my stylistic comfort zone and go for it.

Miss Piggy dress - Tilly and the Buttons Francoise dress, worn with Irregular Choice Dippy Daisy shoes

So... a bit different to my usual attire, right? I'm not totally sure what I think about this dress on me. I don't know how much of that is down to it being different and being short - I don't really do short skirts! Nic likes it though, so there's that. It's pretty cute, but there are a few issues with this dress that are also making me unsure about it. I For one thing - I cut the wrong size. I measured myself carefully and looked at the finished garment measurements, but chickened out of cutting the size that most closely matched my measurements - 2 - and cut the next size up - 3. I ended up taking it in substantially at the side seams and at the raglan seam on the back yoke and I increased the waist darts substantially. It left me with a wearable dress that has some minor fit issues I'd be happy to live with in a shop-bought dress.

As you can see, it's a little big across the upper chest. The bodice is also a little bit long in the back. I did take some photos of it but they're horrible, so you'll just have to take my word for it! If I make this dress again I'll start with the correct size and take a wedge out of the lower back.

Still, sewing Francoise did get me out of my sewing rut. I might not wear this dress a lot - it's not going to be very practical over the next few months - but I like it and I'm glad I made it. I enjoyed sewing it, too.

The fabric is cotton sateen with a slight stretch to it that I bought in A1 Fabrics on Goldhawk Road a number of years ago. It's been sitting in my stash ever since and I had forgotten how bright pink it is. It is totally and utterly Miss Piggy but, as she is totally awesome, that's no bad thing.

So anyway, that's my Francoise dress. It's not really my style, but is good to branch out occasionally. I mean, check it out. I have knees!

That's the craic with me. I'm away for work this week and next week, but then I'm finished work for the year. Nic and I are spending Christmas in Leamington for the first time ever this year and I'm very excited about it. It will be a bit weird not to be at my parents' house, but I am really looking forward to creating our own Christmas traditions. I'm hoping that many of these new traditions will involve champagne.

Anyway, that's me for this evening. Catch you all on the flippedy flip!

Hello hello! I hope everyone is grand. I'm not too bad: tired and eagerly anticipating finishing work for Christmas, which I do on Wednesday. Before that I have to get through two days of what will most likely be an absolutely hideous meeting, but then it's going to be PURE PARTY CENTRAL over here. By which I mean: a lot of sleeping and knitting, some drinking, some sewing, and then more sleeping. Hurrah for the holidays!

I have had a busy few weeks. This time of the year isn't party season for me, but it's a very busy time at work and of course it's just a busy time socially. I was in London last week for another (slightly different) Two Days of Basement Meeting Hell and was able to make the most of it by having drinks with colleagues and a lovely evening out in a fancy bit of London with Nic. My hotel was in South Kensington, so we had a wonderful meal in Rocca on Old Brompton Road. The food was delicious and the evening was surreal and fun - Nic and I were maybe the only people in the restaurant without a hereditary peerage - or at least that's what it felt like - so it was a bit like being in our very own episode of Made in Chelsea. Very pleasing indeed. I'm staying in the same hotel this week so I'm sure we'll get out for an equally fun meal and, best of all, I can have a cinnamon bun from Gail's for my breakfast. That might sound trivial, but it's thoughts like that which are helping me face what are going to be a very difficult couple of days.

So that is the craic there. I'm running on fumes at the moment so I will be very glad to get through the next few days and then I hope I can get back into the swing of sewing and blogging, you know? I have a few fun projects lined up for over the break, including a McCalls 6996 shirtdress in red Liberty Carline poplin - see Mary from Idle Fancy and, obviously, Heather B for my inspiration. I made a toile of the bodice a few weeks ago and I need to revisit it, but I'm saving myself for when I can sew this dress at my leisure. It's considerably more involved than my usual sewing and, while it's not my first shirt dress, I'm hoping to learn some new techniques. Mainly I'm looking forward to having the time and mental energy to do that, so roll on the holidays!

I also have plans for at least two more By Hand London Kim dresses, which are just so much fun to sew. And it's a Kim dress I have to show you guys today! You've already seen one - but it was my second one - the Scarlett dress. I was a one of the testers but had so few comments to make on the drafting that my test version is very close to the finished pattern - so I'm going to blog it.

Together Alone dress - By Hand London Kim dress in wave print cotton from Birch Fabrics, worn with Vivienne Westwood for Melissa Lady Dragon shoes

Yeah I went straight for the full-skirted version because OBVIOUSLY. I was paired up with Josie from Fabric Godmother, who provided the fabric. I chose this Japanese-inspired wave print from Birch Fabrics. It's a bit different for me in that the print was smaller, but there was something about it that I just kept coming back to when I was picking the fabric. The print is stunning:

And there are my pin-tucks, which I admit are almost totally lost in the print. I knew they would be, too, but I wanted to sew the pattern as instructed so, pin tucks it was. I like them but they're fucking time-consuming on a skirt this wide, and a bit fiddly over that distance. I think I would only sew them again if they were going to be more obvious on the skirt.

Actually the pin tucks were the only bit of the pattern I had any trouble with. I (again) doubted my tape measure with this dress and cut this dress in a size 10. I didn't toile because I think princess seamed bodices are easy enough to fit on the fly, but I had to dismantle the bodice of this dress once I made it and sew it in the size 8. Job done, and I'm really happy with how this dress fits me.

It's not perfect - as you can see, the neckline does stand away from my body slightly. That may be a little bit to do with the fabric choice - this is a pretty crisp medium-weight cotton - but it could very easily be solved with a bit of cotton tape in the neckline. There's a wee bit of excess fabric under the bust, which could be solved by adjusting the princess seams at that point. But you know, nothing major. Oh, and I like the back, too:

That's not too bad, right?

I have made three and a bit Kim dresses since I got the pattern - I say three and a bit because I combined the Kim bodice with another skirt - so the pattern is already well in rotation. It's a fair bit lower-cut than I usually like - being so short, it's something I'm often a bit self-conscious about - but I must admit that I really like the shape of the neckline on me and it's hardly obscene, is it?!

I have even worn this dress to work with a cardigan, and I added a scarf for when I was in meetings and wanted to look a bit more formal. My workplace has a pretty relaxed dress code though and to be honest, the print on this dress is so much less 'conversational' than a lot of my clothes that no-one passed any remarks on it. All good!

That's Kim. The next one I have planned is going to be a border print one, in this outstanding Michael Miller flamingo fabric I have just bought from the Village Haberdashery. I know. It's not even officially winter yet and I'm still/already sewing summer clothes. Not sorry.

Right. I'm going to motor now because I've got stuff to do. I'm going to leave you with a photo, though. I got new glasses on Friday. I'm short-sighted and have worn glasses since I was a teenager, but I only rarely wear them out of the house because I didn't like the glasses I had. I finally had an eye test a few weeks ago and picked up two new pairs of glasses on Friday. I've been making an effort to wear them all the time and getting used to them is weird. The prescription is stronger but also being able to see clearly over distances is not something I've been used to, so it's kind of been like being drunk. Or like Father Jack when he sobers up. I'm still not sure if I like how they look in photos, but I might start wearing them in photos anyway.

So TL;DR. I got new glasses and now I look like this:

DORP! No, not really. They're not too bad, are they?!

Right-o. See you all later. I need to figure out why I'm still on this feckin island.

Hello, and happy Christmas everyone! I hope you've all been having a fun and festive time. I have - it's so nice to finally have some time off work! I've been thoroughly enjoying having some downtime at home with Nic - it's been made even better by the amazing faux-sheepskin lined slipper socks my parents sent me as part of my Christmas present. It's been hard to want to leave the house because, much as I love my shoes, I kind of don't want to take these things off. It's going to be hard going back to work, but thankfully I don't have to worry about that for another week. Yay!

The run-up to the holiday itself was pretty eventful. I was working until the 17th and was in all-day meetings in London for the last few days of work. I had anticipated that these would be utterly horrendous - the ones the previous week had been - but thankfully, actually, they turned out to be grand. They were long and totally exhausting days so by the time I met Nic at the end of the working year I was basically a husk of my former self! Immediately after finishing work, we got on the train down to Folkestone to spend a few days with Nic's family. Rather than staying with Nic's parents, we opted to go for an airbnb rental as both of us had been having trouble with insomnia. This proved to be a good decision for a lot of reasons, not least of which being that the place we stayed was so lovely! I woke up on my first day of the holidays to fresh coffee in a little sitting room with a sea view:

We had a great few days in Kent and it was a good way to start the holidays. Unfortunately, a combination of exhaustion and maybe a bit of overexcitement led to my downfall on the Friday night. After having afternoon tea with Nic's family, we had planned to meet our friends Mr and Mrs S for some drinks. I drank a bit too much too quickly - not all that much altogether, but clearly too much for my body to handle (I had four drinks in total and a sip of a fifth, which I then spilled) and I ended up giving myself alcohol poisoning. It was really horrible and although Nic had to call the paramedics, I thankfully didn't have to go to the hospital. I was tremendously embarrassed and ashamed as well as being thoroughly surprised, but the reaction I had to the drinks was not at all normal.

Anyway, it could have been worse. Despite being violently and copiously sick, I managed not to be sick on myself or on anyone around me, nor was I sick on Nic's lovely new vintage coat. The paramedic was amazing and not at all judgmental although of course I felt awful that he had to be called. I was conscious the whole time so I don't think my drink was spiked and although I felt horrible the next day (and indeed, I was still being sick the next morning) by the afternoon I was well enough for us to travel back up to Leamington as we had planned. I do like to have a drink but I hate being drunk, and I really hate that I got alcohol poisoning because, you know, I'm really too old for that kind of carrying on. Ah well, live and learn.

The rest of the holiday has been MUCH more chilled out. Nic and I spent the few days before Christmas seeing friends, doing some last bits of Christmas shopping and watching Christmas specials of our favourite TV programmes. On the Monday before Christmas we spent the day with Rick and Lauren, who cooked us an AMAZING Christmas feast, and I wore a Christmas dress! I had been dithering for a while over whether or not to sew a festive-themed dress, mainly because I didn't want to end up with a dress I could only wear a few days a year. But then my friend Hattie sent me a parcel containing some subtly festive fabric, so it had to be done!

Hattie dress - Christine Haynes Emery dress with skirt from Simplicity 1873, worn with Swedish hasbeens heart sandals

I'm still trying to get used to what I look like in photos with my glasses on - although I have finally been able to get used to the glasses themselves! Anyway - yes, the dress. It's festive and wintry without being too overtly Christmassy, so I think I will be able to wear it past the festive season. And it has reindeer on it!

I totally forgot to get a close-up of the print, but here's a photo I took when the parcel Hattie sent arrived.

The fabric is a cotton poplin and it doesn't have any details on the selvedge, I'm afraid, but Hattie bought it for me in Leeds market and I have since seen it in Coventry Indoor Market as well - in fact, the lady there also has it in bottle green! It is really nice quality and it handled really well, softening up a little bit after pre-washing.

As the fabric was 60 inches wide I thought it would be a good chance to try out the full pleated skirt from Simplicity 1873, and it paired up perfectly with the bodice from the Emery dress. This was a perfectly simple sew - just what I wanted for a Christmas dress!

I look like a dick here. But I'm a dick who can see things. So I'll take it!

So there's not much to say about the making of this dress anyway. I wore it for a massive Christmas dinner with Rick and Lauren on Monday and then again on Christmas Eve for a massive Business Lunch with our friend Char in Kayal. EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE, DRESS. It performed better in that regard than the beautiful dress I made to wear on Christmas day which, for pattern placement reasons, is cut on the cross grain and is correspondingly lacking in ease of any kind. No room for a roast dinner in there. This one, though - nut roast and then a white chocolate cherry bombe thing and no issues. It's good to have the odd dress like that in the wardrobe.

I think it looks good with my sandals, too, which were the one thing I bought in the Black Friday sales:

Yes, I know. But I also don't care.

The other thing that is very special about this dress is the kindness with which it came to me. I've never met Hattie - she's a Twitter friend that I have come to know through Nic (who has met her) and it was extremely kind of her to send me this fabric. From what I know of her through our chats on Twitter, this seems to be totally characteristically kind and awesome of her. It's also characteristic of many of the wonderful people I have met through Twitter and through blogging over the years - a good number of whom have gone on to become good off-screen friends too. I've shared some wonderful times in 2014 with people I have met on the internet and through sewing and I continue to be humbled and grateful by how lucky I have been to do this. These people reached out to me in the most incredible way at the beginning of the year with Sew Dolly Clackett, organised by Sarah. I still don't really know what to say about that - I mean, I still can't believe it actually happened! It was intense and pretty overwhelming, but it was incredibly touching. It was a lot of fun looking through the flickr pool to choose the winners, as well!

I guess 2014 has been kind of a shitty year globally, but it's been a wonderful year personally. I feel like both Nic and I have hit our stride in lots of areas of our lives. It's been a great year for me work-wise because I've continued to be challenged and stretched by my job and I have really enjoyed that. I worked hard to be promoted in September and although the increased responsibility and - forgive the business speak - accountability is a big deal for me, I was ready for it and am grateful for it.

Of course I've been sewing lots and I think that this year I have made progress in learning about fitting. It's still a challenge - and I guess it always will be - but that's fine. I had a bit of a falter recently about sewing and blogging but a bit of a break from both was all that was needed for me to get my enthusiasm back! I'm very proud of lots of the things I made this year, but of course the thing I love the most is my wedding dress:

Because, you know. Not only did I make it for the best possible reason and for a very wonderful day, but it feels like me in so many ways. It wasn't a technically challenging dress to make, it didn't take months, it's not couture and it's not perfect. But oh my word, I loved making it and I loved wearing it.

Getting married was also something that made 2014 pretty great.

Our wedding photos were taken by our friend Fiona Murray. She's moving away from Leamington soon and I'm going to miss her! I love all of the photos she took of our wedding but I think this one is especially great. I can't remember what it was that Nic was saying that was making me laugh, but this is us. He makes me laugh all the time and we've had another good year together. You can't ask for much more than that.

Well, it's getting late and it's time for bed. I'm getting my taste for blogging back so I hope to be back again soon - possibly before we say goodbye to 2014, but possibly not - so I will say goodnight and see you later.

This will be me in 2015. Just you wait.

Hey hey and Happy New Year everyone! I hope your holidays were everything you hoped they would be. The alcohol poisoning incident and a bout of insomnia (ugh) aside, mine really were. This year was the first time Nic and I have ever spent Christmas together and it was just wonderful. We stayed in Leamington and, while it was strange not to spend the festive season with my family, it was fantastic to finally start our own traditions. We did the Christmas food shopping and the last few bits of present shopping on the Monday and Tuesday before Christmas, went to the pub with friends on Christmas Eve and, rather than watching a festive film, watched A Perfect Murder. In fairness, we tried to watch Scrooged but it was just too much Bill Murray. I mean, I like Bill Murray, but there is just too much of him in that film. And there is no such thing as too much Michael Douglas, amirite?

He's so disgusting. I love him. Also, we have the same birthday. I'm slightly younger.

I think A Perfect Murder is an underrated classic. For one thing, Michael Douglas being evil is Peak Michael Douglas. He plots with his wife's lover to have her murdered, but it goes wrong. Then, Poirot comes in and solves the shit out of it. Well, kind of. Gwyneth Paltrow really does the solving, Poirot just gives her some line about putting the crime together in lots of ways and not being able to find the missing piece or some shit. I think the best thing about it though, is the "art" perpetrated by Paltrow's lover, Viggo Mortensen:

"art"

Viggo Mortensen made this art himself, you guys. In a studio owned by Dennis Hopper. I love that.

So anyway, that got our Christmas off to a cracking start. On Christmas morning Nic and I opened our presents, lazed around eating chocolate and went for a walk before cooking dinner together in the evening. It was just perfect.

A few days before Christmas, I sewed myself a dress to wear on Christmas Day. Now, real talk: I wore this for a few hours between taking off my pyjamas and putting my pyjamas back on. A pretty woven dress in a light-coloured fabric is not what you want to be wearing when you're eating a roast dinner that involves gravy. Well, maybe you do. I don't.

Nora dress - By Hand London Kim dress in Michael Miller flamingo fabric, worn with Vivienne Westwood for Melissa Lady Dragon bow shoes

Now, another reason why this dress didn't get worn for eating Christmas dinner is that it is pretty snug. This is partly down to the fact that, because this is a border print, I cut the whole thing on the crosswise grain and partly because it was Christmas and I have my winter coat on. I doubt very much that I will wear this dress a lot between now and the spring, by which time it will fit better because I won't be eating cheese three times a day. Still - I should also say that it looks tighter than it actually is. Although this fabric is gorgeous it is one of those that just always looks wrinkled.

It is gorgeous though, isn't it?!

flamingos!

I bought the fabric from The Village Haberdashery. I'm not sure if they have any in stock at the moment - I know the first bolt of this sold really quickly - but I believe that they're getting more in soon. I bought two metres and used most of it to make the dress. The flamingos run along one selvedge and I used the entire length of the selvedge for the skirt. I have a bit of the cloud print left, which I might make a cushion cover or something out of. I had to cut the bodice cross-wise as well to get the clouds running the right way up:

I haven't taken any photos of the inside but the bodice is lined with pale pink cotton and I finished my seams by turning and stitching. Luckily there was enough room between the bottom of the flamingo print and the edge of the fabric so that I could give the dress a reasonable hem without sacrificing any of the print. Bonus! I wore this dress with one of my lovely Christmas presents from my parents-in-law; a cherry-blossom print scarf:

Goofy. As. Fuck.

So, that's my Christmas dress. Not at all Christmassy, but that means I can wear it during the summer as well. Logic!

The in-between time between Christmas and New Year was very quiet. After a mild few weeks it became very cold so we just holed up in the flat with DVDs, books and chocolate, venturing out only to see friends and potter around the sales. I had the most middle-class Leamington Boxing Day ever by buying a pair of wellies in Joules (not even in the sale) and then having a coffee in Carluccio's.

Nic and I don't tend to make much of a fuss on New Year's Eve and this year was no exception - we went to Coventry with our friends Amy and Barney to go to Ikea and then have late lunch/early dinner in the (completely awesome) noodle bar in the Bull Yard. Nic's grandparents had very kindly given us some money for Christmas, which we decided to put towards buying a new sofa. We've lived in our flat for six and a half years and it's almost entirely furnished with Ikea furniture. Our sofa had been a Klippan. It was great for the budget we had when we moved in and it did good work, but it was definitely time for an upgrade to something we could both comfortably stretch our legs out on! We ended up buying a new sofa, rug, bedside cabinets and a coffee table and then, you know, mini Daim bars and plates and lamps and stuff. We came home and built the bedside cabinets and then saw in the New Year drinking a bottle of Moet - the last bottle of champagne from our wedding - and watching After The Thin Man.

My New Year's Resolutions are much the same as Nora's: Must scold, must nag, mustn't look too pretty in the mornings.

For two Ikea delivery men, 2015 started by nearly dying carrying a sofa up five flights of stairs. For us, it was building a sofa hungover and totally rearranging the living room. We went for the Karlstad sofa in 'husie orange' and it is AWESOME. It's bigger than the sofa we had and although it would have fit in the same place, we thought we'd give the configuration of the living room an overhaul while we were at it.

I now have a little knitting corner, lit by the orange anglepoise lamp that Nic bought me for Christmas. Also: bright green shag rug. I love it! And here's one of the sofa:

Apologies to those of you who follow me on instagram: you've already seen these.

Orange has kind of been an inadvertent theme - as well as the orange lamp Nic bought me for Christmas, we ended up buying orange lamps for the bedroom:

The lamps are called Skojig and they're from the children's section. Somewhat embarrassingly, on the Ikea website they're in the section along with accessories for children aged 3-7 but WHATEVER because they're excellent and the on/off switch glows in the dark. I love lamp.

So I've ended up spending the first few days of 2015 giving the flat a deep-clean and rearranging things. I also ended up rearranging the furniture in the bedroom and it's given the flat a new lease of life. We rent so there's not much we can do in terms of decorating but the new furniture has made the place feel fresh and new again. 2015, we're ready for you!

Right. I must be off as it's the last night of the holidays and I want to celebrate with a gin and tonic and a trashy DVD. I wonder if it's too soon to watch A Perfect Murder again. Probably not, right?

Here's to being totally fucking evil. Happy New Year!

YO! Hello everyone! Well, I hope we have all managed to get through the first full week back at work after Christmas (I know not all of us, but I think this describes this week for many people). I've had quite a strange week. For me personally, it's been fine, but for my family it's been a tough week for a few reasons. I was glad to get as far as the weekend and a much-needed rest. I worked at home on Friday, which was lovely. Not only did I get to spend the day working on our lovely new sofa (it's still a total novelty. I love it) but I wasn't spending the day either in a basement meeting room with no windows or in a 6th floor meeting room with no windows. January kind of sucks in my job, for the basement meeting room reasons.

Of course the weather is frightful, what with the high winds and all that. Leamington doesn't tend to suffer quite so badly on this score because the town is in a hollow, but it was still windy enough to make me call the wind a dick because my hair kept blowing into my glasses and getting caught in the hinges. I only have about 9 hairs so I can't afford to be losing them in my glasses, you know? Still, tenacious article that I am, I still ventured out to get photos of a recently completed dress for this blog. I know, I'm good, aren't I. Instead of accolades, I'll accept cash gifts or shoes.

Anyway, yeah. Photos! So, you might remember that before Christmas I said I had plans to make a shirt-dress in some Liberty 'Carline' poplin I had stashed. I did! I admit, I put it off and put it off - for a few days around Christmas it was really cold and the prospect of sitting at my sewing machine did not appeal. But, once I sat down to make it I really enjoyed it. The shirt-dress pattern in question is McCall's 6696, made famous by my girl Clare and made up in Liberty Carline by Dr Mary Danielson and the people's sweetheart, Heather B. This dress is kind of a sewing blogger bonanza, because the fabric came as the result of a blogpost by Katie, in which she linked to an ebay seller who has great deals on pre cut lengths of Liberty fabrics. Discovering this seller - Kat's Fabrics - is both great and terrible, because it has given me a bit of a Liberty habit. In any case, when I saw a 3.5 metre length of the red Carline in poplin, I bought it without hesitation and with a shirt-dress in mind. Winner.

The dress took me two days to make because there are quite a lot of steps, and I was really into slowing down. The pattern has you do a lot of hand-sewing, although you could omit a lot of it in favour of top-stitching. I love hand-sewing, though, so I found this super enjoyable. I even hand-sewed stuff I wasn't supposed to, like the hem. Enough yakking, though, here's the dress:

Montague Terrace dress - McCall's 6696 in red Liberty Carline poplin, worn with Irregular Choice No Place Like Home heels

YEAAAAAH I LOVE IT. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy sewing this dress - I found it so satisfying to sew - I just adore the print and the feel of the poplin. I made my wedding dress from the Carline tana lawn and it is beautiful, but the poplin is possibly a more suitable weight for a shirt-dress. It is crisp and holds the pleats well, and it made sewing the collar really easy (as did Andrea's tutorial, but I think we all know that). You can bet your bum I'll be keeping my eye out for more Liberty poplin.

The dress itself isn't perfect. I'm really happy with the finish but the fit could be better. There are a variety of options for the bodice because you can choose based on your cup size. Going by the finished measurements, I toiled the bodice in a size 10 with the smallest range of cup sizes. It's difficult to toile this dress without making the whole thing, though, because of the order of construction. That being the case, the toile didn't tell me the whole story. While I think I cut the correct size, I should have shortened the bodice. This isn't such an issue from the front, but you can see a fair bit of excess fabric through the back:

I have since sewed another one of these dresses with the bodice shortened and it has made a positive difference, but I think I could still also stand to take a little bit of width out of the back. I removed the gathers from the top of the back bodice piece, but left in some slight gathering at the small of the back. I like the effect. The excess fabric doesn't look so bad in these photos though and, to be honest, most of the time I'll be wearing this dress with a cardigan so I am really not at all fussed.

I really went all-out on the red accessories here! The wicker apple bag is from Ollie and Nic and the cardigan is by Hell Bunny

I omitted both the pockets and the belt-loops from this pattern because I can't be bothered with pockets and I don't wear belts. However, because I omitted the belt loops I did move one of the buttons so that it is in the centre of the waistband - the pattern calls for it to be placed above the middle, presumably so that there is room for a belt. Nic bought me the buttons from Pete's Sew Good in Birmingham Indoor Market, and they're red shell buttons. I love them!

You might be able to see the buttons better in this photo of the bodice. You can also see why I was calling the wind a dick. THANKS WIND. You can also see more clearly that the bodice is a smidge too long from the excess fabric under my bust.

I can certainly see why this pattern has been so popular with so many seamstresses. It has its flaws - for one thing, I think the instructions could have been better - but it was so enjoyable to sew. The pattern pieces all fit together perfectly and I really enjoyed the different order of construction. The dress has a cute retro feel without being costumey, and it is super comfortable to wear. I will wear the shit out of this dress, fitting issues notwithstanding. You know a pattern is a winner when, immediately after finishing one, you cut out another straightaway!

It's hard to get photos in town without people staring at you - like, what is wrong with people? Cameras are not new technology! But this was the first time I had an animal photo-bomber. Nic and I went to Jephson Gardens to take these photos and this little squirrel guy was very curious about the whole operation. He was shortly afterwards joined by a pigeon.

So, all in all, I'm really happy with this dress. It ticked off a few firsts for me - although it wasn't my first shirt-dress (I made a Pauline Alice Cami dress a few years ago) it was my first time making plackets, my first time sewing a McCall's pattern and my first full shirt-dress. I think that's not too bad!

I did the largest piece of hand-sewing while watching a DVD that Nic had bought me for Christmas: a film about Scott Walker called 30 Century Man. I discovered Scott Walker as a teenager - mainly because he was such an influence on Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy - and have loved his music ever since. It was a very thoughtful gift, and a really fascinating documentary. Unlike the execrable BBC4 programme about Kate Bush that I watched last year, this film actually had some interesting insights into the man and his art - mainly because the film is largely composed of interviews with Scott Walker himself, and with people who actually have intelligent things to say. And, you know, footage of the recording of The Drift, in which you see a man punching a side of pork to make a sound for one of the songs. Stuff like that. But anyway, yeah, that's where the name of the dress comes from!

So anyway. That's the craic there. I am going to dander on here. It's Saturday afternoon and we have friends coming round later: I have some very important nothing to get done in the meantime. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, boys and girls!

I know I have put eleventy pictures of me in this post, but this one is for Nic. He insisted on taking photos with my coat on because he liked the way the colours looked together. He's quite the stylist.

Heeeeeeey it's Friday! Has this week not lasted, like, a MONTH?! I mean, seriously? It may have felt this way because it was another week of all-day meetings, and another week with two days sequestered in a central London basement. I really struggled to get through this week - it was such a slog - so getting to Friday felt like a minor triumph. Of course I celebrated by buying shoes. This is me, after all. Tonight Nic and I are making potato and rosemary pizza (because: omg) and watching Fast And Furious. I'm all about Vin Diesel at the moment, it would seem.

Anyway, that's the craic there. It hasn't been a bad week, just an exhausting one. The very cold weather isn't helping much. I think the mild weather lulled me into a false sense of security because I am NOT enjoying the cold at all. We haven't even had snow in Leamington but I am more than ready for the spring. Those shoes I bought today were more sandals, obviously. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you'll know I don't really do sensible winter clothes, although mostly I get by with layering up and wearing tights. I made this dress back in November when it was still pretty mild, but didn't get around to photographing it today, when it was not.

Stone Flower dress - By Hand London Kim bodice and skirt from Deer and Doe Belladone dress, worn with Irregular Choice 'Abigail's Party' boots

If this fabric looks familiar, it's because it's the same as I made the Ankara dress from in July last year. I had around two metres of the fabric left and, pretty soon after making my second Belladone dress I hit on the idea of adding the skirt to a different bodice. This is mainly because, while I usually tend towards a fuller skirt, I really loved how the skirt of the Belladone looked and how quick it was to sew.

Here's a picture of me looking goofy as fuck with my hands in my pockets. SQUEE POCKETS etc etc

I have very little to say about this bodice/skirt combination. They work well together, I think, and I think this would work really well as a party dress with a fancier fabric than this cotton. It was really too cold to be wearing this dress today, but I was able to wear it when the weather was still mild and it'll keep now until spring.

In fairness, I'll probably wear it with a cardigan in warmer weather. I wear cardigans about 95% of the time. I'm wearing one now. Oh, and these are my other glasses. Again, I like how they look in real life - the frames are a really bright blue - but I just cannot get used to how I look in photographs with my glasses on. Still, you know, being able to see is pretty sweet.

Also, I can't believe I haven't worn these on the blog yet, but check out my sensible winter boots:

I tried to buy sensible flat boots, I really did. No, that's a lie, I totally didn't. I kept seeing how amazing Lucy Liu looked in ankle boots as Joan Watson in Elementary - which, if you haven't watched it, you totally should - so I bought these sequinned ones with ribbon laces. I have wellies too, though, for if the weather gets really bad. Stripy ones, because I couldn't find sparkly ones.

Right, look, it's Friday night. I need to go and make pizza. Happy weekend, everybody!

Yo yo yo! What's the haps, people? The craic here is limited. I've been working from home today, feeling ill, and spent most of the day on my own scowling at my work laptop, plotting what to buy to cheer myself up. I didn't buy anything though. Not yet, anyway. You know you're not having the best day at work when doing the washing up at lunchtime is a treat though, right?

I did have a lovely weekend, though. The potato and rosemary pizza Nic and I made on Friday night was a resounding success (I mean: potatoes on a pizza. What's not to like) and then on Saturday we went over to Birmingham for an afternoon out.

At the station, I got my favourite kind of train ticket:

I keep these tickets every time I get them because they're just so fantastically rude. I like to think I'll start handing them out to people who are behaving badly, but really I just use them as bookmarks.

Anyway, we had a great day out in Birmingham. We had a mooch around the shops, lunch at Cafe Soya (where we bumped into Helen and her husband) and then had waiter service to the Hepburn sofa in The Electric while we watched Whiplash. The day was only slightly marred by the football hooligans delaying our train home, but at least I was entertained by the man from Cork who was sitting opposite us on the train. He explained to us how narrow-minded women were before going on to tell the ~~hilarious~~ awful story of how, as a teenager, he shot his friend's dog. Oh, and another dog as well. I should have given him the VOID card, really, but I wanted to keep it.

I was supposed to go to Birmingham again on Sunday to see Whiplash again - Nic is writing about it - but I ended up feeling ill so spent the afternoon dozing on the sofa, watching NYPD Blue and sewing. Not a bad weekend, all in all, and I even managed to get photos of another dress I made back in November. I've worn this dress pretty much weekly since I made it, but for some reason never managed to get photos of it. Lame.

Androzani dress - By Hand London Anna bodice and skirt from Vogue V8998, worn with Irregular Choice Little Miss Oh shoes. You can't quite see them in this photo but my tights are gold lurex, and they're from Topshop.

The dress isn't lame: I am. I love this dress, which is evident by how many times I've worn it since I made it in November. The fabric is African wax cotton, which I bought in Fancy Fabrics on Goldhawk Road at some point in the summer. I think I bought it the day we went to the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibition at Barbican. Anyway, I bought a 5 metre length of it for £15 and I gave half of it to my friend Lauren. Then it sat in my stash for a while, during which time I wondered if I had bought a ridiculously loud fabric that I would never sew:

But then I remembered that I am me and I had a wax fabric sewing binge, sewing this and the Stone Flower dress on the same weekend.

There wasn't anything too wild involved in matching the Anna bodice up with the gored circle skirt of the V8998. They didn't fit together exactly and I ended up having to increase the side seams of the skirt a fair bit to get it to match to the bodice neatly but I tapered these back out to 5/8 where the skirt hits my hips, to keep as much fullness in the shape as possible.

We were caught in the act of taking these photos by one of our neighbours. He was very sweet and called across the street to me that I looked very pretty but he couldn't hide his understandable amusement at the whole endeavour.

The gored skirt of the V8998 works really well with the body of the wax fabric. I love the pairing, and the other dress I made using it - the Bedelia dress - is another one that sees weekly wear. I'm going to London on Saturday and am going to try to make it along to Goldhawk Road to replenish my stash with wax cotton because I love sewing with it and wearing it.

I do occasionally look at the camera. VOID.

That is the craic with this dress. I need to go back to the Anna bodice and make a few tweaks to it - I'd like to take a tiny bit of width out of the centre front and also to shorten it by a fraction. It's grand from the front but it feels a tiny bit long in the back. Then I'm thinking of revisiting this combination with some more Liberty Carline poplin that came through my letterbox last week.

As I sewed the dress, Nic was busy listening to a soundtrack record our friends Rick and Lauren gave him for his birthday last year:

Yes. That IS in fact a double album of the score to Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. And yes, it IS as weird as it sounds. Rick and Lauren give such good gifts - for my birthday they gave me an Inspector Morse record and a Star Trek: The Next Generation record. Anyway, it's a very strange and very atmospheric record and it was oddly fitting for the fabric I was sewing with, which reminded me of the bright primary colours of Androzani Major. And, you know, isn't the swirly pattern a bit like Sharaz Jek's monochrome gimp mask?

More like STYLIN' Jek, amirite?!

Right-o. I must take my tired self to bed. I know I'm feeling off-colour because I have had a new gin to try and some gin-based chocolates waiting to be sampled since Saturday. This is most unlike me! I must rest up so I can get back to my former powers.

I was going to leave you with a hilarious Caves of Androzani gif, but that serial is kind of serious. Here's a Dalek instead. Night all!

YO! Hello everyone! What's happening, boys and girls?! I'm having a very chilled out Sunday evening, drinking gin and watching NYPD Blue - which, it turns out, is still wonderful even after the death of my TV husband Bobby Simone. Ah, still though. Can we take a moment to think about Bobby Simone?

Awwwww yeah.

I was ill for most of the week, intensely busy at work and having trouble sleeping. It's not been the best. I had a stomach bug, which left me very depleted in energy, as did the long work days. But I've had a lovely weekend. Nic and I went to London yesterday afternoon to do some fabric shopping on Goldhawk Road and to have dinner with friends in Greenwich and today we've just been straight chilling and watching Nashville. Which, omg. I've loved season 2 even more than I loved season 1.

Juliette Barnes is my girlfriend. Obviously the character I identify with the most is the high-maintenance bitch.

I've been too tired to sew this week. Too tired to knit, even - I've been trying to cast on the sleeves of my Agatha cardigan but have actually lost count now of the number of times I've had to frog that shit. I'm really struggling to get the lace pattern right on the short rows - would appreciate tips on that - but last Sunday, I did sew a new dress. Here it is!

The Ceramic Hippo dress* - By Hand London Anna dress in Liberty 'Clara' poplin, worn with Irregular Choice 'Windsor' shoes

Another Anna dress. Yay! I've had this Liberty poplin in my stash since September, when Katie very kindly picked it up for me from the Ray Stitch sample and clearance sale. I think it was £25 for two metres, and after the Ray Stitch ladies tweeted a picture of it, I knew it had to be mine. It was so kind of Katie to go along and grab it for me! Anyway, it's been patiently waiting for the right pattern since then but I became more and more sure that it had to be an Anna dress. So Anna it was.

Very little indeed to say about this dress, which I made last Sunday afternoon. Just that it makes me happy.

It makes me so happy that I had to pull this silly face

One of the things about being known for having a large shoe collection is that you run the risk of being given shoe-themed gifts. Now this isn't always a bad thing - getting gifts is lovely and it would be churlish to suggest otherwise - but I'm not normally interested in shoe-related paraphernalia. I don't own books about shoes, or shoe-shaped earrings. There is a lot of nasty shoe-themed crap out there. Luckily, my friends have good taste so apart from one horrible shoe-themed calendar that I got in a secret santa thing years ago, I haven't had to worry about having to pretend to like things like shoe-shaped phones or wine holders or whatever.

I like this fabric, though. It's almost abstract enough not to be shoes, but then BAM. Shoes. As shoe-themed things go, it can stay.

The main thing this fabric has me wondering is whether I can pull off wearing blue tights with yellow sandals. NO NOT REALLY. It looks great in the print, though. I don't normally sew with or wear much black, but of course the great thing about this is that I can wear it with lots of colours. It's going to work well in the last weeks of winter but I think it will see some wear in the spring, too. And I have shoes of every colour to wear it with!

I'm often asked how many shoes I have and how I store them all. The truth is, I don't know how many pairs I have (just as I don't know how many dresses I have) because I am both very good at buying shoes, and fairly ruthless at getting rid of the ones I don't wear. But it's true to say that I could do with more storage in our little flat.

This is a small cross-section of my shoe collection.

I keep some in the wardrobe, although it's hard to keep them neat in here...

Some live on top of one of the bookcases in the living room, alongside the complete Laurel and Hardy and my beloved O'Donaill dictionary.

The eventual plan is to maybe get another Ikea Billy bookcase to house some more of my shoes, as well as some more books. A more sensible idea would be not to buy any more shoes but that seems unlikely.

Anyway - I had a far more articulate blog post planned than this one when I took those photos earlier today but a combination of gin and crying (not because of the gin, but because of NYPD Blue) has kind of chased the words away. Here's another picture of my dress instead:

I think I am becoming somewhat addicted to Liberty poplin. Yeah I like the tana lawn and everything, but the poplin is the boom ting to sew with. It's so crisp and well-behaved, and it is SO nice to wear. After years of kind of holding out on the Liberty love, I get it. Any more of it I see, I'm buying. In case you can't tell from the photos above: when I like something, I LIKE IT.

Now, I'd better mosey on. I have a long-ass day at work tomorrow and I need to go and get mentally ready for it. I'm going to do that by watching an episode of Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. Night!

Here's me.

*Bonus points to anyone who gets the reference. It's not that obscure, but bonus points anyway.

Helloooooooo! Long time no write, isn't it? I'm sure that 2015 is going to be a good year, but the first six weeks of it has been kind of kicking my ass. The last few weeks in particular have been a bit intense and I'm a little bit burned out, so I haven't had much time or energy for sewing or blogging. So, this post isn't going to be sewing related and it's going to be a little bit of a whine because, fuck it.

Well, it's not going to be a total whine. Good things have happened in the last few weeks too! Nic and I have spent lots of time having fun with friends. While I haven't had the energy to sew, I have been motivated to get back into knitting. With help from a few of you lovely readers who commented on my last post, I finally cracked where I was going wrong with the sleeve on the Agatha cardigan and now I have one and a half sleeves. Hurrah!

Yay! I had been getting tripped up on the distinction between knitting the lace repeat flat on the short row sections and knitting it in the round for the rest of the sleeve. To you non-knitters to whom that reads like a foreign language: I KNOW RIGHT. This sleeve is far from perfect - my stitches aren't as even as they could be - but I'm so happy to have cracked it. I'm hoping to get the rest of the second sleeve knitted this week and maybe the button and neckbands over the weekend. I might have this finished soon!

It's been good to have a small, manageable project on the go at home. As much as I am (still) enjoying my job, the last few weeks have been really overwhelming. This is a really crucial time of the year in my job and, although I have been through it over the last four years, this year is the first where I have had all the responsibility for my project. I've been working extremely long hours - I worked 27 hours over my contracted hours in January- so as well as having a lot to do, I've been exhausted.

Unlike in other areas of my life - notably in my sewing and housekeeping, where I am pretty relaxed - I've become a bit of a perfectionist at work and have been putting myself under pressure to get everything done to a very high standard, and to get everything right first time. That's not always possible with the deadlines we work to, and I have been struggling with a near-constant feeling of guilt for not - I don't know, bending the rules of time to get more done? It's stupid. It has seeped into other areas of my life as well and I spent Saturday night in floods of tears for no reason, because I feel like I'm not doing anything as well as I could be or should be at the moment.

Yesterday at work I realised that a mistake had not been picked up in a piece of my work - not even my mistake, just one I hadn't noticed - and, even though it was totally minor, easily changed and arguably not even a mistake - I ended up so upset that I cried. I fucking hate crying at work because it is lame, and this was a stupid thing to be crying about. I don't think anyone else would have cried about it because it was so easily sorted out, but I was unreasonably upset by it.

So all of this is totally irrelevant to sewing but it explains why I haven't been around much. I'm hoping to see some improvement in the next while - I think that understanding why I have been feeling so inadequate will help me to feel less so, and that will make me feel more excited about sewing and blogging again.

While it's still cold, the fact that it's starting to feel like spring is going to be on its way eventually is bound to help. I've been doing a little springtime shopping and I bought a new coat and a new satchel (and, you know, my clog collection is growing all the time) which I took out for a spin on Saturday:

Collectif 'Marlene' raincoat, Vivienne Westwood for Melissa Lady Dragon shoes and pastel pink Zatchels satchel

I used to have a lovely trench coat. It was just from Tesco, but it was a great fit and a lovely shape. I stupidly lent it to someone who never gave it back, and I have been looking for a good replacement ever since. I'm not sure this Collectif raincoat is it, but it'll do for running about in. I've liked the look of their 'Dietrich' trench coat for a while, and this is the companion coat. It's the same cut, but waterproofed, and it was £29 in the sale so I thought it was worth a punt. It's too long in the bodice and probably a bit too long in the skirt for me, but that's fine. The buckle broke the first time I did it up, which I'm not thrilled out, but I can live with. It's grand, and I'm sure it will come in handy. I'm going to keep looking for a replacement for my Tesco coat, though.

I really love the pink satchel, however. It's awesome! I have quite a collection of Zatchels satchels now - I have the 14.5" satchel in cornflower blue, yellow and red, the 11.5" in green and neon yellow floral and a metallic purple saddle bag. Every time I see someone with a different colour, it makes me want another one! I saw a girl on the tube a few weeks ago with a pink one, so when I saw this pale pink one in the sale I bought it. It's a 13.5", which is the perfect in-between size. I use the 14.5" satchels for work, and the 11.5" is basically just big enough for my purse and my phone, but this size is a good weekend size. But mainly I just wanted a pink one. Practicality wasn't my first concern, to be quite honest.

So, that's an update from me. Sewing hasn't totally ground to a halt, however. I was sewing at the weekend - pattern testing the new By Hand London pattern, Sophia. It's pretty damn cute, and the whole thing has got me pining for warmer weather...

The shoes! I will write more about those shoes in a future post but, for now, see my comment above about practicality not being my first concern.

Okay boys and girls. If you've made it to the end of this post: well done! Go and have some gin! I will be back soon with more cheerful news and possibly even a new dress. Goodnight!

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYY you guys! I'm back! Back and badder than ever! Or, you know, back at any rate, and feeling a good deal better than the last time I wrote.

Thank you to everyone who got in touch with words of reassurance! After crying at work last Monday things picked up somewhat, and then took a dramatic nosedive on Thursday. I was working in London, attending another all-day meeting in a basement meeting room of our biggest supplier. Anyway, without getting too much into it, I had to make a (small) change to my big project and it just tipped me over the edge. Crying at your own office is one thing, but crying uncontrollably in the lunchroom of someone else's work is actually the pits. It was so fucking embarrassing. Thankfully, my completely wonderful colleague R was there to sort my head out and I managed to dry my tears and wash my face so I could get on with the rest of the meeting, but it really was evidence that I am a little bit burned out.

It turned out to be fine, though. The change was easy to make and was signed off that afternoon. I got to Marylebone on time to go to Marks and Spencer before getting on my train, and this is a thing that exists in the world:

Look, I'm not advocating drinking your way through your problems. At least, not all of them. But this acted as an anaesthetic to the embarrassment of having cried at work twice in one week. And, just so you know, it wasn't too bad. A bit bitter, even for a gin and tonic, but it really did the job.

I had the day off on Friday and spent it having fun with Nic and our friends Rick and Lauren, which was very much what I needed. It took until Sunday for me to stop worrying about work, though, so I'm still not completely back on form. Things are looking up, though - the Deputy Director gave my big project the final sign-off on Tuesday, so I can stop worrying about that until at least May, when it goes live. The mornings are brighter, the evenings are longer and I can start to look forward to work not being quite so hectic. And I even managed to get some sewing done at the weekend as well as finishing my Agatha cardigan. GO ME!

I did a bit of pattern testing for By Hand London a couple of weeks ago and, as of today, you can pre-order the pattern. The Sophia dress is going to drop (lol) in the middle of March, but as you can order it now I can share the test version I made. I wasn't asked to blog about this or to link to the pre-sale or anything, but I'm pretty happy with how the dress turned out. I had only very minor comments to make on the test version as well, so this should be very close to the finished pattern.

Margarita dress - By Hand London 'Sophia' dress in watermelon print cotton poplin, worn with Kurt Geiger 'Dolly' shoes

Here's me pretending it's not February. DISCLOSURE: It's February.

So, there are two variations available in the Sophia pattern. One has a collar and a full skirt with godets, and the other has a straight skirt with a split in the centre front. The full-skirted version is the more obvious Roisin choice but I had this watermelon fabric in my stash and it immediately came to mind as being a good pairing for the straight skirt. In fairness, it's probably not the best choice to showcase what is unusual about the pattern - the angled darts on the bodice and skirt - because the print is so busy. In fairness, though, that is going to be true of almost any fabric I choose because I am all about the fun print.

This dress was super straightforward to sew. I did a toile of the bodice using some pink cotton that I had in my stash. This was to check that I had chosen the right size - depending on style I vary between an 8 and a 10 in By Hand London - and to check that the unusual darts were going to be in roughly the right case. As you can probably see from the slight wrinkling under the bust, the fit isn't totally perfect but it's not too bad out of the packet. I took the shoulder seams up a bit but have since realised that I need to do a sway-back adjustment to this pattern as the bodice is still slightly too long in the back.

Here's an awkward-as-fuck photo of my back! You can't really see the wrinkling at my lower back because of the goofy way I'm standing but it is there when I am standing straight!

This dress is really not an everyday dress for me but I kind of surprised myself with how much I like it. It's not totally me and I think that the watermelon print gives it a real 90s feel, as does the very straight skirt. But those are also the things I like about it and it's good to try new things once in a while. It's a fun party dress though, and what woman doesn't need one of those?! (Yeah I know, loads of women. But it doesn't hurt to have one, is my point.)

And we need to take a moment to talk about what might be the best shoes ever...

I KNOW RIGHT.

These Kurt Geiger shoes are from 2009 and were my first choice for wedding shoes. I saw a pair for sale in a random second-hand shoe shop in Warwick about six months before our wedding, but they weren't in my size. I thought the bright green would look gorgeous with the pink of the Carline print. I immediately started searching for them on ebay and a pair finally came up in my size about a month ago. I got them for £16! They were in basically perfect condition apart from the fact that they were muddy. The seller had kept the original box and tissue paper and everything, but couldn't be bothered cleaning the mud off them before posting them. WTF. But they were worth cleaning because although they are ridiculous, they are ridiculous. I need more sequinned shoes in my life.

Between the sequin shoes and the watermelons, this outfit made me think of Carmen Miranda (Carmen Miranda if she went on the game) but, in truth, it's made me think more of Margarita Pracatan. Both of those ladies were pretty awesome, in fairness.

I have plans for a second Sophia dress soon - I want to give the full-skirted variation a try and I have some beautiful fabric lined up for it - this red telephone print that was a gift from Amy:

I have some red lawn for the godets and the contrast collar. I think it has the potential to be kind of awesome: I just need to make some time to sew it!

I also need some time to go out dancing. Possibly in some sort of head-dress. I do regret not getting married in a hat, veil or head-dress of some kind.

Fucks given: None. Literally none.

Right now, I had to get up at 5:30 this morning to go to London for a meeting so I'm going to go to bed now. I'm tired and I need to build up my strength. Plastic fruit is heavy, you know. I will be back soon though with pictures of my finished cardigan. Until then, take it easy. Goodnight!

Hello! What's happening, folks? It's Sunday and I'm sitting on the sofa, under my favourite blanket with my head wrapped in clingfilm. Applying henna to my rapidly greying hair is one of those things that I always put off until it can be put off no longer, not least because for the first day or two after I've done it, it's so orange that I look like (you can choose your favourite here) Chuckie from Rugrats, Pennywise the clown from IT, Ronald McDonald or Rainbow Brite.

Actually, Rainbow Brite had a pretty strong look. I quite like it.

It's been a tough old week. No tears this time, but I've found the endless grey skies and cold winds to be really hard. It was sunny on Wednesday but I spent the day in another meeting in a basement, then on the tube, a train and a rail replacement bus that smelled almost comically bad. By the time I got back to Leamington any good mood the sunshine had given me had disappeared and I went straight home and put my pyjamas on. In fairness, I did have a better week this week than last week but OH MAN am I ever ready for the spring.

That whine aside, I am feeling better. A few irritating things happened this week and, rather than dissolving into a pool of tears, I channeled my inner Rizzo. Sometimes, that's the best thing a girl can do.

So anyway, that's what's happening there.

As I said in my last post, I have a finished knitted project to show you today - an Andi Satterlund Agatha cardigan. I'm so happy to have finished this cardigan because it has taken me months to complete and everything about it was a challenge. I don't mean that in a bad way at all - knitting Agatha really stretched me and, while the finished article is far (very far) from what I would like it to be, I'm still tickled to death to have got this far with it.

I first attempted to knit an Agatha cardigan about a year ago but was totally foxed by the instructions. I gave the pattern to my friend Char to look at, and she knitted one up as a sample so she could talk me through the instructions. She's pretty awesome like that (and in other ways too, actually) At around the same time, through a combination of blog comments and a couple of emails from knitters, I realised that I had been wrapping my purl stitches wrong. Well, not wrong, but wrapping them in such a way that I was getting a twisted stockinette stitch. That is totally a thing, but as it was unintentional, it was good to get the heads up on where I was going wrong. Char showed me a better way to wrap my purl stitches, talked me through how to read the charting on the pattern and lent me her umbrella swift so that I could wind my skeins of Cascade 220 yarn into balls that I could use. See, I told you she was awesome.

I got going on the cardigan in October but only made serious headway on it at Christmas, when I was suffering very badly with insomnia. Most of the body of this cardigan was knitted on the nights when I didn't sleep at all and instead stayed up knitting and watching Mad Men. Then, I took a break from it when I ran into difficulty with the sleeves - which again, I was helped with by you excellent readers - and I finished it last week. Here it is!

Andi Satterlund Agatha cardigan, worn with Bernie Dexter 'Fall Leaves' Paris dress and Swedish hasbeens peep toe sandals

YAAAAAAAAY! As I said above, this is nowhere near perfect, but I am super proud of it all the same. The yarn is Cascade 220 and the colour is Aqua - actually the very bright peacock blue of it is sort of hard to capture in a photograph. It's so bright and jolly. The Cascade yarn was really lovely to work with. It didn't split at all or go all fluffy - I had been knitting with a Rowan yarn last year that I eventually had to put in the bin because my throat filled with fluff every time I got it out of the knitting bag. I'm already trying to decide which colour to go for next because I'd like to knit another Agatha at some point, to put into practice all the things I learned (and hopefully some of things I will learn when you guys tell me!) I'm thinking maybe Goldenrod will be the next colour...

Here it is buttoned up! And here are my criticisms of it. I'm still trying to get to grips with knitting button bands neatly - the bottom of the button bands just haven't lined up with the ribbing at the waist at all, so that's an area that I need to take a bit more time over on my next cardigan. It's not a massive problem, but it does make the cardigan look more home-made than I would like. I think that stabilising the button bands with petersham ribbon will help with this - Lauren Lladybird has a great tutorial on this that I'll have to use the next time I knit.

You can see what I mean a bit more clearly in this photo. It's not a massive problem because the cardigan is still very cute and totally wearable, but I think it would look a LOT better if that weren't the case. I had been feeling a bit bad about the fact that you can see both bands when the cardigan is buttoned up, but actually that's the case in Andi's Agatha as well, so I feel a bit less bad about it now.

The other thing that I'd like to be better at is blocking. I did block this cardigan and it helped even out my stitches - not completely, but that's fine because my stitches will get more even as I get more practiced at knitting - and it also helped me with shaping the cardigan. BUT, I know that my blocking techniques could be better. For instance, I think I stretched this out a bit too much at the waist, and not enough in the back body. It could just be the case that I need more experience in doing this but, my readers who are knitters, do you have any favoured methods of blocking? I wet-blocked this, but would steam-blocking work better, do you think?

I'm also not totally certain that I knitted the correct size! I knitted a size medium. Now, I have lost weight since I started knitting this cardigan (stress and insomnia will do that to a girl) and, as I said above, I think I was a bit too vigorous in stretching the waistband when I blocked it. It is supposed to have negative ease - should I knit a bit smaller than my measurements and then get closer to those in blocking? Fit is very personal, but when it comes to knitwear I like it very fitted.

STILL THOUGH. I finished this cardigan! It was complicated and it took me ages, but I finished it! The lace pattern on the back is lovely but I'm not going to post a picture of it, because the photo is so, so goofy. To give you an idea of how much, it is about seven times goofier than THIS picture:

Ha ha, WORST PHOTO EVER. But look at how happy I am with my sleeves! I knitted the sleeves a size smaller than the rest of the body and I could have possibly even gone a bit smaller with them. As I said, I like my knitwear to be fitted. You can also see in this photo that I needed to stretch the back body a bit more in the blocking, as it rides up a bit. This is something I might yet go back and do - especially if you all give me your best blocking tips!

So. Not a total success in terms of the finished item, but a total success insofar as I finished it and it's wearable, and I'm getting better at knitting. I call that a win, really!

Persevering with knitting this cardigan has made me feel good about myself when other things in life have made me doubt myself. There's something a bit magical about knitting in that respect. Also, I think I find it easier to go easy on myself with knitting than I am when it comes to sewing. It's because I am still learning, but of course when it comes to sewing, I am still learning as well. Knitting this cardigan has been good for my mental health, so even though there are things about it that could be better, I am really happy with it. The only one of my hand-knitted cardigans that currently sees much wear is my nautical Miette - partly because I still really hate the feel of the cotton yarn that I made the pink Miette from, and the others just look a bit crap. I'm hoping that the happiness I feel at having finished this cardigan will mean I am more inclined to wear it. I think I will be.

Right-o, I must finish up and crack on with the rest of my day. At some point I'm going to have to let this bright orange hair out of its clingfilm prison so that I can go to Poundland and buy a multipack of pickled onion monster munch. I'm going to keep hold of my inner Rizzo this week, so that any shit can be dealt with in a constructive way:

My twitter friend Lucy and I came up with an outstanding idea for a TV show last week. The basic premise is that it is Stockard Channing and Kim Cattrall just swanning around being sassy as fuck and taking down the patriarchy while drinking and cracking wise in beehive hairdos. It would be like Absolutely Fabulous, only they'd both get to be Patsy. Tell me you wouldn't watch the shit clean out of that show. It needs to happen. Special guest stars Allison Janney and Hayden Pannettiere. Working title is Sassy-ass Bitches.

Hello hello! Happy weekend, everyone, and happy end of February! I am so ridiculously pleased to have reached the end of what is always a very difficult month for me that I celebrated last night with gin and I am going to celebrate tonight with champagne. That sounds more wild and exciting than it will be - one of the reasons that February has been so difficult is that I have been ill for quite a lot of it - so I'll probably be having a glass of champagne in my pyjamas before going to bed at 9 o'clock! Oh well!

I am honestly glad to get to the end of this shitty little month. It's probably the busiest and most stressful month in my job. Still though, I got my 2015 Big Project signed off, came to the end of a long series of meetings (no more basement meetings for a few months now.) Getting to the end of this period means that, while work probably won't be significantly less busy, it should be less stressful. I have a bit of leave coming up at the end of this week and I hope the rest and the time away from work will help me see off this virus that has been sapping my energy for the last few weeks.

That's mainly the craic with me. I'm a bit tired of not being myself, to be honest, but I'm getting there. In the meantime I'm trying to do lots of restful things like watching trashy TV and knitting, as well as a bit of sewing when I feel like it. I made another McCall's 6696 shirt-dress a few weeks ago and, last Saturday, took my chance in some early spring sunshine to get some pictures of it:

Joy Parade dress - McCall's 6696 in Liberty 'Carline Minor' poplin, worn with Kurt Geiger Dolly shoes

Another Carline shirt-dress! Well, when you find a formula that works there's no shame in sticking with it. That's what I tell myself, anyway. This Carline print is the same colourway as my wedding dress, but the roses themselves are in a smaller scale. I bought it from Kat's Fabrics on ebay, because obviously. She is awesome. I wasn't actually that sure of this print when it arrived - one of the things I like so much about the Carline print is the scale - but it looks so much better as a garment than it did as a piece of fabric. Well, I think so anyway.

I'm still working on the fit of this dress. After I made the Montague Terrace dress at the end of last year, I made another version of this in which I shortened the bodice. It wasn't quite the right adjustment to make and, while there's nothing really wrong with the finished dress, there's something about it that I don't like so it's kind of a wadder. It's been too cold to wear it, so maybe I will re-evaluate it when the weather is warmer. I don't know. Anyway, what I needed to do to this pattern was a sway-back adjustment, so that's what I did this time round. The bodice still needs some work - in addition to the sway-back adjustment I need to take some width out of the back. I possibly also need to curve the waist darts slightly but I won't really know by how much until I take the width out of the back. But hey, it's all fun and I'm nitpicking. I'm very happy with how this dress fits!

It was a chilly and windy day last Saturday when we took these photos, so I suggested taking them in the arboretum. Sadly this wasn't practical. For one thing, it was full to bursting with sloaney Leamington families so it was hard to find a quiet corner (I mean, fair enough, it's a public place. I'm not genuinely hating on families for enjoying the park, like) but also it was so warm and damp that the camera lens kept misting up!

I have to admit, I was at the end of my tether last weekend with feeling exhausted and over-committed, so I was in a super shitty mood when we were taking these photos. Poor old Nic is such a patient man, and he took very lovely photos even though I was basically non-stop bitching and moaning. I really did find a good one there, so I decided to thank him by taking him to The Larder in the Park for coffee and cake. It turned out to be a lovely place for a few photos also.

The coffee also helped to stop my whining, so there's that as well.

You can see that there's a bit of wrinkling across the top of my chest and also under the bust. I wonder to what extent this will be affected by taking width out of the back. It's hard to tell, and this dress is kind of hard to toile without making the whole thing. Anyway, I'm going to treat it as iterative, and see what happens the next time I make this pattern. Because there will definitely be more of these - I love wearing this shape of dress and I have thoroughly enjoyed sewing with this particular pattern.

Here's the back view. So I think that I need to take probably about half an inch or maybe even an inch of width out of the centre back. I'm not sure if I need to do the same with the yoke, because it looks and feels fine - it's really in the lower back that there is a lot of excess.

Mind you, I still think the dress looks good and it's comfortable to wear, so I'm not about to lose any sleep over it. As we got up to leave our table, a woman who was waiting for it complimented the dress and told me how much the colour suited me, so I'm calling it a win.

Here's one more photo - it doesn't add to much to everything I've already said, but fuck it. Poor Nic laboured hard with an unwilling model to get these photos: it seems a shame not to use them!

This is me, pure RAGING at the cold wind blowing my hair in my face and at being surrounded by other people, trying to smile naturally. Those hands are almost fists!

So anyway, that is the craic with this dress. Despite my awful mood the day these photos were taken (at one point I swore blind that I was going to go straight home and put this dress in the bin) I am really happy with how it has turned out. And yeah, I know that it's getting to be a bit All Liberty All The Time up in here, but seriously, the poplin is just the tightest shit. I love it. Earlier in the week when I wanted to do a bit of easy sewing, I busted out the pink Carline poplin I bought last month on Goldhawk Road and made myself an Anna dress with a circle skirt. I really take this whole concept of a signature look and run with it, eh?!

And I guess that's it. My head is fuzzy and my eyes are tired so I'm away to lie down. I need to build up enough strength to lift that glass of champagne, you know!

YOOOOOOOOO! Hello everyone! What's up?! It's been another busy few weeks here at Clackett Towers. I was wrong when I said work was getting less busy, it turns out, but at least the daylight hours are longer, you know? Also, and I had a few days off and then Nic and I had a few days away last weekend and it was very refreshing. So, hurrah!

I did a little bit of sewing on one of my days off, but I mainly spent that time knitting and watching Law & Order. Knitting is so much less physically demanding than sewing, and a day of just lounging on the sofa was just what I needed. I've been really getting into knitting since finishing my blue Agatha cardigan, and since then I have finished one cardigan and am almost finished another one. Whoop! Sewing will re-commence when I have a bit more energy - I have some purple Liberty Carline poplin calling my name - but my focus has definitely shifted somewhat. For now, anyway.

So that's the craic with me. Nic and I had a lovely few days in Bristol. We were there for the Bristol Jazz and Blues Festival. I had bought Nic tickets to see Doctor John, who was closing the festival on the Sunday night but, as we were going to be there on the Saturday night as well I decided to get us tickets to see Clarke Peters, who was also performing. The whole festival had a New Orleans theme and, as Nic and I are big fans of both The Wire and Treme, it seemed like it was too good to miss. His gig was AMAZING and possibly one of the best gigs I've ever been to. We had seats in the second row, so this was our view:

Nice burgundy socks there, boss. Sadly this photo doesn't capture the fact that this dude was wearing SPARKLY LOAFERS.

The gig was eccentric and funny - he opened with Way Down In The Hole and, towards the end, sang Treme Song. This delighted me because, as you might know, I'm all about the TV theme tunes. He also did an adorable duet with his son Max and one with Lillian Boutté, who we got to meet after the show. It was kind of mind-blowing to be in the same room as Lester Freamon, to be totally honest, but the gig would have been good even if he hadn't played such a well-loved TV character. STILL THOUGH.

Neither of us had ever been to Bristol before, and it's such a fun city. The whole experienced was helped by the fact that the sun was shining and it was actually warm when we arrived at lunchtime on Saturday. I'm talking about coats-off warm. We were staying in the oldest part of the city, which was convenient for the festival and a great location for exploring. The pedometer on my phone told me that we walked 13 miles on Saturday, which was easy to do in the sunshine in a beautiful city. I was doing it in new shoes, too! I also took my newly finished cardigan out for a spin:

'Dilly' cardigan - Miette by Andi Satterlund - worn with my wedding dress and Swedish hasbeens Flora wedges

I know, another Miette cardigan! After finishing the Agatha cardigan and the revelation that I had been wrapping my purl stitches in the wrong way, I thought it would be good to practise my stockinette stitches with a cardigan that is mainly knit in stockinette. The yarn is Sublime Yarns aran, and it's just what happened to be available in a colour I liked in Hobbycraft. This cardigan took me around two weeks to knit, and I knit most of it on various trains and rail replacement buses! I seem to have mastered the art of not allowing my knitting to slide off my knee and underneath the seat behind me.

I did two things differently on this cardigan from the other Miettes I have knitted. I knit the size small, rather than medium. I'm really really happy with how it fits, especially around the back and through the shoulders (although I forgot to get photos of this) and I used petersham ribbon to stabilise the button bands. Now, this was a qualified success. I stabilised both the button band and the buttonhole band, into which I stitched buttonholes using my machine. The ribbon I used wasn't really stable enough to take the buttonholes and they don't look great. That's an understatement. They look like they were drawn by John Wayne Gacy. But I think the ribbon has made a positive difference to the button-bands so I think on my next cardigan, I will sew the ribbon on the button side only. Or, I'll find a better way to do the buttonholes and stop asking serial killers to help me with my craft projects.

This picture really adds nothing to the post, but I loved this outfit. The fact that the colour of the cardigan so perfectly matches the roses on my dress was accidental, and it makes me really happy. And I LOVE these shoes, too.

I steam blocked this cardigan, just to try that method out. I think wet blocking is probably better, and I'm going to get some pins so that I can make the lace pattern open out a bit more. The other thing I decided after finishing and wearing this is to use a more flexible cast-off for the waistband and the sleeves, as the sleeves in particular are a bit restrictive. I followed this tutorial to bind off the body of the cardigan I'm knitting at the moment and it's much more suitable. I also bought some Knitpro needles, which are MUCH nicer to knit with than the cheap metal ones I had been using up until now.

So, yay knitting! Sewing is still my main squeeze but I am so enjoying having the ability to knit my own colourful cardigans as well. The next step will be to master cables so that I can knit a Marion cardigan and then it will be time to branch out into other knitwear designers, I think!

Anyway, back to Bristol. After a day of wandering in the sunshine and eating tasty food, Nic and I went for cocktails at a bar called The Milk Thistle. Bristol seems to have cornered the market in those bars where you have to find them and then ring a doorbell to be admitted, and this is one. We got there early and were seated at the bar in one of the rooms - which seemed to have some sort of bizarre taxidermy theme - and had a few cocktails before going to the gig. If you're ever that way, I very much recommend it. It was eccentric and friendly and fun. I wish Leamington had somewhere similar.

Nic and I had tickets to two gigs on the Sunday and there was another, free gig that we wanted to go to. Also it was rainy in the morning, so we didn't do nearly as much roaming. We still had a wonderful day, and Nic found where Fabricland was so I could check out the shop of my favourite website. And look - that link isn't an affiliate link, but if you've never visited the Fabricland website and you're in need of cheering up, I strongly recommend that you click that link. Very pleasingly, the shop is very much like the website.

lol okay then

We also walked down to the harbour, partly because Nic wanted to see the statue of Cary Grant. It's sort of a sad statue, to be honest, because it's in a horrible newly developed shopping centre area. It was perfect for taking twatty tourist photos with though...

The Doctor John gig was pretty awesome. The man is 74 years old and he had to be helped onto the stage, but he played until they had to basically drag him off. He was joined for a few numbers by saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, who is 73, and was playing his third gig of the day. The band leader was the incredible Sarah Morrow, who plays the trombone. I've never really thought of the trombone as a sexy instrument, but she was fucking awesome.

Aw, who am I kidding. The trombone has ALWAYS been a sexy instrument...

(That one's for lols, but I'm not going to lie. I have a major crush on Wendell Pierce that his role as trombone-playing Antoine Batiste in Treme has only escalated.)

After the gig we had a late drink at Small Bar and went back to our hotel. I had a bath and read a trashy book, and it felt very holidayish indeed. We'd only been away for two days but it was a truly lovely holiday.

It got better, though. When we got to the railway station the following morning to catch our train back to Leamington, Clarke Peters was there with his wife, catching his train back to London. I didn't want to bother him by asking for a photo or autograph or anything, but I did want to thank him for both amazing gigs (we saw him a second time on Sunday, taking part in a big band celebration of Louis Armstrong) and he was SO sweet and charming. He even shook Nic's hand and wished him happy birthday. Lester Freamon!

It was back to real life with a bit of a bump on Tuesday, when I had to go to Slough for work. That's not a sentence anyone should have to say, but I did get a lot of knitting and reading done on the journey to and from that charming town.

Right, anyway. It's Friday night and there's wine to be drunk. It's been a short work week but at the same time, it's been long as fuck. I need to go and do some relaxing because I have a fun-filled weekend ahead. Happy Friday night, everyone!

Hello hello! What's the haps, boys and girls? I am having a very restful and fun weekend after an unexpectedly stressful and annoying week. Work has been busy and a little bit irritating - well, it could have been worse on both scores, but my patience was limited this week - and, on Tuesday, Nic spilled beer on our lovely Macbook Air and...well, if that's ever happened to you, you'll know that beer and expensive electronic equipment do not mix. It's been sent to be looked at, and it's probably going to be reasonably expensive to fix. We bought a chromebook thing so that Nic can continue to work until the Mac is fixed or replaced, and it's fine. Actually, it's kind of a hilarious knock-off of a Mac except that it's turquoise, but it's doing the job for now.

So, it hasn't been a red letter week, all things considered. But it took an upswing towards the end of the week - we had dinner in the pub with friends on Thursday night and I was working from home on Friday and the sun came out! I had quite a lot to do, but it was much easier to get it done with sun streaming in through the (open) windows. Nic and I went out for a walk at lunchtime, had lunch in The Larder in The Park and got some photos of a dress I recently made. I haven't been sewing much at all recently. Work has really taken its toll on me in the last few months and it's left me with very little mental (or physical) energy for much else. I do have some projects backed up to blog about, and I haven't completely stopped sewing or anything - it just sort of feels that way because my output is so much lower than it was this time last year!

Anyway, I had a few days off a few weeks ago (just before we went to Bristol) and on the Friday morning, I got some beautiful fabric in the post:

Nature Garden by Timeless Treasures

Awww yeah, am I right?! I put it straight in the washing machine so I could wash and dry it and sew it in one day. That's how excited I was to sew it, and I wanted to be able to wear it in Bristol that weekend. I've been after a fabric like this basically ever since I've been able to sew, so I could make a dress inspired by this lovely cherry blossom Bernie Dexter dress. To show off the pretty print, I wanted to keep it simple, so I reached for the Emery dress by Christine Haynes. As far as I'm concerned, it's the perfect canvas for a pretty print. Also, I can knock one up pretty quickly because I know it fits me and I have worked out my own construction order. By bedtime Friday night, I had a whole outfit planned out...

Flatlays FTW

I didn't recreate this outfit exactly when I was in Bristol - those purple clogs need a bit more breaking in - but I did yesterday, when it was finally officially spring!

The Rural Juror dress - Christine Haynes Emery dress, worn with purple Swedish hasbeens peep toe sandals, pink Zatchels satchel and pink Hell Bunny 'Paloma' cardigan

So, one of the challenges of working with a border print fabric for a garment is that either you cut the bodice on the straight grain, but with the print running the wrong way, or you cut it on the cross grain and have the print running the right way. Yeah, that sounds like a no-brainer, but with a quilting cotton it can be a bit of a risk. It wasn't too bad in this case, although I can really feel the stretch in the skirt! I cut my usual size in the bodice but I gave myself a tiny bit more ease by leaving a bit more room at the side seams. You can probably see a bit of wrinkling under the bust and, although the bodice isn't tight, I am much more aware of the waist seam than I am in other dresses!

Totally worth it though, because I really love this dress. I bought two metres of the fabric (I bought it from Modes4U, if you want to get some yourself) and, as a result, the skirt isn't as full as most of my other Emery dresses. I think it's more than full enough, however! I didn't try to pattern match the side seams but all you constables in the pattern matching police can sit the fuck down, because I *did* make an effort to pattern match across the back...

Yes, I wouldn't win the sewing bee. But as I have no interest in going on the sewing bee, I can deal. The cherry blossoms on the back bodice don't look matched, but they are matched as close as they can be.

And here it is from the front...

So that is the craic with the dress. I really do love it and I'm glad that it's finally spring, and not too cold to wear it. I was also very happy to pair it with my purple hasbeens, which I bought in the depths of winter. Well, not depths, as this past winter has been extremely mild. But anyway, I bought them on one of those days when I was feeling cold and hadn't quite pieced it together that buying summer shoes doesn't actually make summer come any more quickly.

It also means I can legitimately use this gif to describe what I did on Friday:

I did a whole bunch of other things on Friday, including eating cake for breakfast; writing a lot of very long emails about work stuff; scoring application forms; evicting the actual swarm of ladybirds that were covering the sash window in the bedroom, cleaning the window and then putting vapo-rub on it, because apparently ladybirds don't like the smell of menthol; going to the pub to drink wine and then eating chips and watching NYPD Blue.

Anyway, on the agenda tonight is making pizza and introducing Nic to the only one of my top 5 favourite films* that he hasn't seen: 10 Rillington Place (1971) I think pizza and wine will be helpful to get through what is a beautifully grimy and depressing film. I'm not going to lie, I'm looking forward to it. Richard Attenborough, though!

So, I'm off to make pizza. But yes, the dress is named after the film of the Kevin Grisham classic. Did you know that before he was a novelist, Kevin worked at a recycling centre?

*The Silence of The Lambs, Jaws, Clueless, Short Circuit 2 and 10 Rillington Place

OH HELLO! Happy Friday evening! I hope things are good with you all. I've had kind of an annoying week. Well, annoying with a few high points. Nic and I went out for burritos with Rick and Lauren on Monday night, which was great. I finished my yellow cardigan, which I will blog about soon, and I got some frankly fucking OUTSTANDING shoes in the post on Tuesday...

SHUT THE DOOR. How good are these?! They're from Miss L Fire, and I pre-ordered them last month. Yes, I plan to wear them with my Lobsterlex dress because duh.

These bright spots aside, work has been exhausting and a bit stressful. I had to organise an event for next week at very short notice, and it was one of those things where it came together really quickly and then, bit by bit, it started to fall apart. Anyway, I got it sorted out in the end and it's going to go ahead on Monday but, man. These last two days have been kind of a pisser.

Also, the man who was looking at our Macbook came back to me on Wednesday to say that it was going to cost a minimum of £570 to fix it, as the logic board and keyboard were damaged beyond repair. He thought that the other things could possibly be cleaned, but couldn't guarantee that more parts wouldn't be needed. But, we agreed to do a part-exchange on a brand new, sealed in box Macbook of the same spec with a years' warranty with Apple for a really reasonable price, so it's all good. After using this little Chromebook laptop for a day, Nic was all, "I don't care how much it costs! I want our Macbook back!" Fair enough. I know though, talk about first world problems. My wallet is too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are too tight!

Me, from now on.

That has been the craic this week anyway. And now it is Friday! The sun has been shining and we have a fun weekend lined up, starting with the bottle of the prosecco that is currently chilling away in the fridge. And, I have a new dress to blog about!

So, okay, the story with this dress is that I went fabric shopping in Birmingham with Amy, Helen and Marie a couple of weeks ago. Because I haven't been sewing all that much recently, I wasn't really in the market for much shopping but, you know, it would have been just rude not to buy anything. I bought a few bits from the market, and we went to Barry's last of all. I was mooching around when I spotted some familiar-looking stretch cotton sateen...

Bottom right is the sateen in question

Any of y'all with long memories might remember that I made a dress out of this fabric before...

Rachel dress - made in September 2013

I made that dress - a combination of the By Hand London Anna bodice and Charlotte skirt - in September 2013, and I wore the shit out of it over the next few months. I loved everything about it, but as it doesn't fit I haven't worn it in over a year and, a few months ago, I gave it to a friend. So when I saw the very same fabric in a different colour I thought the time was right to make myself a new one. And here it is!

Blossom Time dress, worn with Mel 'Raspberry' heart shoes

I feel like there's not a great deal to say about this dress! The only difference from the first one I made, apart from the size and the colour, is that I used a concealed zip rather than a lapped zip in this dress. Over the last year or so I have come to prefer them, although I think style-wise, they work equally well in this sort of dress:

Here's my bum. No pattern matching. No fucks given.

I used the size 8 Anna bodice and the size 10 Charlotte skirt pieces. I didn't move the darts on the skirt to meet the pleats/darts on the bodice as the print is so busy that the darts kind of disappear into one another! The bodice and the skirt fit nicely together, despite being different sizes, although I did have to increase the seam allowance at the top of the skirt so that it would match up with the bodice. I could have sized down on the skirt to get more of a wiggle shape, but I wanted something I could move around in and that I would feel comfortable in at work.

It was good to sew something that's out of my usual fitted bodice-full skirt silhouette. I've been wanting to add a few pencil-style dresses to my wardrobe, having given away nearly all of the shop-bought pencil dresses I own! The nice thing about that is I gave them to a colleague, who often wears them to work, so I still get to see them.

The cotton sateen is very enjoyable to work with. It has a bit of stretch and a good bit of body, and it doesn't need to be treated much differently to 100% cotton. I used a slightly cooler iron on it, but that's about it. I pinked all of the seams - I had done that on the original dress and it held up really well. It seemed like the best finish for this fabric so as not to add any additional bulk.

I have been heavily into florals this year. I've only made one novelty-print dress so far in 2015! (which I haven't blogged yet, but I will eventually) I think you can see why I couldn't resist this print, though. I'll have to get back to my crazy prints eventually though, right?

Anyway, it's Friday night here and I need to crack open the prosecco and start my weekend. Have a good one, everybody!

Yo yo! Hello pups, happy Easter! After an exhausting, if short, week at work, I have a lovely long weekend stretching out ahead of me. Sleeping, sewing, knitting and eating chocolate beckons, as does a trip to the cinema on Monday to see the new Fast and Furious film. Seven times the fastness, seven times the furiousness. What's not to like?!

As I said, work was pretty exhausting this week and I've been feeling a bit stressed. UPS put me through the wringer a bit as well this week by managing to lose the parcel containing my replacement Macbook. Man, their customer service is BAD. Really bad. After five phone calls to them to see where my parcel was, in which I was told that it was (variously) in the local drop-off point, with the driver, in my flat, in Tamworth and also in an 'unknown location' it eventually turned up. Hurrah!

So anyway, that's the craic there. I have some bad films to watch this afternoon, including one with Gene Hackman AND Dennis Franz, so that's good. Before I do though, do you want to see another hand-knitted cardigan? And a dress that I made last year but never blogged because I hated my face in all of the photos of it? OH, GO ON THEN.

I knitted another Agatha cardigan! I know that one of these days I should branch out into knitting something from a designer that is not Andi Satterlund. However, there are still a few of her designs that I'm keen to make so, not sorry. There will be more Andi Satterlund designs here in the near future. I'm knitting a purple Hetty cardigan and have an orange Myrna planned too. I thought it would be good to knit another Agatha cardigan while all the things I learned from the first one were still fresh in my mind. So one day a few weeks ago, Nic and I walked up to Wool Warehouse and I bought a few skeins of Cascade 220 in 'Goldenrod', some buttons and a pair of Knitpro circular needles. And then, boom! I knitted another cardigan!

Andi Satterlund 'Agatha' cardigan. I haven't thought of a name for it, though!

I'm so ridiculously happy with this cardigan, I can't even tell you. I mean, there are a few mistakes in it and I think I made the sleeves a bit too long. Also, maybe it's not the most flattering - the weight of the yarn means it's pretty bulky and I think it makes me look a bit like a yellow chubby chubster. BUT it's bright yellow and it's warm and cute and I'm still really jazzed that I can knit my own cardigans. FUCK YEAH KNITTING.

A different door! Cardigan worn with A Forest dress and Swedish hasbeens peep toe sandals

After wearing my blue one a fair bit, I realised that I had made a mistake in knitting the body and had made it too short. So I knitted this one to the right length and it made all the difference. It still rides up a bit in the back but it hits my waist at the spot that I like. I'm super proud of it and I don't even care.

Here's my bread back. But the cardigan fits well there too.

I added yellow grosgrain ribbon to the button band, but this time around I didn't add it to the buttonhole side. Basically I couldn't face putting it through my sewing machine for buttonholes. So, when the cardigan is buttoned up the button bands are a wee bit on the wavy side but, do you know what? Fuck it. AH LOVE MAH CARDIGAN. GIMMEH CANDEH.

This might actually be my favourite ever photo of me. Every day is for derps, Heather B!

Sadly, I don't feel anywhere near as thrilled with the dress. This is a By Hand London Kim dress that I made in November, and which was destined for the charity shop. It was in a charity shop bag until Nic vetoed it - he's not bossy usually but he hates me giving away any of my dresses - but, I've got to be honest. I might have to sneak it to the charity shop when his back is turned because it's just not working for me.

The dress did fit when I made it, but it's too big for me now. I really like the Kim dress - I'm planning to make one this weekend, in fact - but I need to make a few alterations to the pattern. I need to shorten both the bodice and the straps. I could go back and alter this dress, I guess, but I probably won't. Alterations are the worst. It's a shame, too because look how cute the fabric is:

Fantasy Forest by Michael Miller

Maybe I will alter it. I guess Nic was right. YOU WIN, PILLAI.

So anyway, that's all the craic with me. I have a highly intellectual film to watch and some chocolate to eat so I'm going to toddle on here. A very happy Easter to everyone. Mind yourselves!

Lol.

Morning, boys and girls! Well, okay, afternoon. But hello anyway. Right now the spring sunshine is competing with the spring wind outside, someone nearby is happily grinding away (I think it might be the neighbour that we less-than-affectionately call Part Time Grinder but it's hard to tell. As soon as the sun comes out, grinding starts) and I'm lying on the sofa under lots of blankets, scowling a bit because I woke up this morning with a cold. Boo! I was going to spend today sewing but instead I'm going to drink tea, knit and watch Law & Order S4 or The X-Files S6, depending on which one of those boxed sets Nic is able to find in town. I've had kind of a stressful week, so this feels like an irritatingly fitting end to that. Ah well, onwards and upwards. Nic is also bringing cake back from town, so that's sure to make me feel a bit better as well.

I had planned to do a bit of sewing today, but that can wait. As it is, I have a backlog of finished projects to photograph and blog about! Here's one of them: the first dress I made in 2015, finally blogged four months later. EFFICIENT.

Immediately after I finished making the Montague Terrace dress, I cut out another McCall's 6696 dress, on which I shortened the bodice by an inch and a half. I finished it, and it was too cold to wear it, and I wasn't sure if I had made the right adjustment (I went on to make another one - the Joy Parade dress - with only the bodice back shortened) so I decided to pack it away until spring and then decide what I thought of it. As the sun made an appearance last week, I unpacked more of my spring clothes and tried this dress on again and, as often happens, I went from feeling a bit disappointed with it to really liking it. Fickle girl!

Inbetween Days dress - McCalls 6696 in heart-print cotton poplin, worn with Vivienne Westwood for Melissa Lady Dragon bow shoes

I'm pulling a stupid face in this photo - I am in all of the photos of this dress - but, ah well! So, I think that part of the reason why I wasn't sure about this dress at the time is that it was cold and dark when I tried it on. Also, I had a few extra pounds of Christmas chub, which made the fit of the dress less pleasing. Now I've shed that winter coat, I think it fits better and I like it a lot more.

I bought the fabric when we were on honeymoon in Paris. It was a 3m coupon and I bought it in Les Coupons de Saint Pierre - I think it was something ridiculous like 10€ for 3 metres. It doesn't have any manufacturer information on the selvedge but an instagram conversation with Christine Haynes made me realise that it's probably a copy of a print by Umbrella Prints. This isn't one of their prints - Umbrella Prints tell me that they never released this design in this colour - and although it's lovely, I wouldn't have bought it if I had known. Anyway, the deed is done now and the whole thing alerted me to the existence of Umbrella Prints, so that's the craic there.

Looking at it now, and being able to make a comparison across the three dresses I have made from this pattern, I think that shortening the front and the back of the bodice is possibly the way to go with this dress. It's maybe hard to make a definitive judgement though as obviously this dress is sleeveless. Also, the fit is clearly still not 100%. But anyway, I'm going to wear this a bit more and think about it before making another one. I will go back and move the bodice buttons slightly though - moving them a little bit off-centre will stop some of the pulling that you can see across my bust.

Those are very minor niggles though - I really like this dress and it's a lovely, light and breezy spring shirt-dress. I wore this on Easter Day for a stroll around town with Nic and I even heard one girl in the park whisper to her friend that she liked my dress. Compliments for the win!

Here's the back! No, I don't know why I'm leaning in that awkward, stupid way. I was hungry and thinking about my lunch so maybe that's why.

I am already looking forward to finding some time to make a fourth one of these dresses, and possibly a fifth! I have an idea of making one in wax cotton and, to that end, I bought some more of the fabric that I used to make my Bedelia dress (which is sadly becoming too big) and it might be the right candidate for the job. I'm also considering making some out of the Liberty Queue for the Zoo fabric that's been sitting in my stash since January, waiting for its assignment. So, we'll see. At the moment I have more plans than I have time or energy, but summer is usually a little bit quieter at work, so I hope that I can make some of these plans a reality!

Cardigan girl! I wore this dress with my pale pink Hell Bunny cardigan - and then I got Easter chocolate on the sleeve, like a dick.

Actually, right now what I really want to be sewing is something very retro-themed. Yesterday, Nic and I met up with a friend who gave us the first two issues of a comic called Lady Killer. Nic already had issues 3 and 4, but once we had the start of the story I had to read them all, because:

The outfit Josie is wearing on the cover of the bottom-right issue (issue 4) is pretty atypical of the rest of her clothes in this comic. She's an assassin, and she does most of her jobs in great big fluffy petticoats and circle skirts. So, it's made me want to put on a great big fluffy petticoat and a circle skirt dress, and maybe try to recreate this look. But not in a solid colour because I'm not an assassin. Honest.

I actually made a dress with a circle skirt a couple of weeks ago and it's waiting to be blogged, so maybe I'll try to style it up like Josie here with a cropped jacket and an umbrella. Nic is thrilled that I have found a comic that I like so much. It's not just because of the clothes, either. The story is pretty terrific. Being that it's about a badass female assassin in beautiful clothes, it's hitting a lot of my areas of interest! Maybe it's because I've been sick and stressed this week, but Lady Killer cheered me right up, as did going back to the first season of Luther. BECAUSE ALICE MORGAN.

Anyway, that's the craic there. I'm going to leave you with one more (totally unnecessary) photo of my dress and say goodbye. Nic has just come back from town with lemon cake and S1 of Law & Order UK (a compromise, as the shop didn't have either of the boxed sets I wanted) so I have a busy afternoon ahead of me. Laterz.

I'm goofy. But I like my dress. Since unpacking it last week I've bought some mint-green clogs that will look lovely with it too. Getting new shoes was one of the better moments of this past week.

AHOOOYYY THERE MATEYS! It's Friday! It's Friday and, for the first time this week, I woke up feeling well. It's only been a cold, and I've been able to work through it, but MAN, it has made this week a massive drag. I had a few pressing deadlines at work, and then a few arbitrary and annoying last-minute deadlines were thrown into the mix - I've basically spent this week on the sofa, cussing out the world.

I'm still not 100% better - I'm sniffling like nobody's business and I can feel a tension in my neck that is partly due to the fact that I have been writing all week and partly, you know, having a sore throat and that, but I am feeling chirpy enough to do something other than knit and watch eleven thousand episodes of Law & Order UK. So I'm calling it an improvement. Just in time, too, as I'm away to London tomorrow for a museum visit, afternoon tea, fabric shopping and cocktails with some sewing friends. As Peggy Hill would say, HO YEAH!

That's the craic with me. No sewing this week - seriously, I have basically only been on either the sofa or in bed (working from home for the win) but, maybe this afternoon. My sewing machine is winking at me from the corner and I have some mad fabric that's waiting to be made into some sort of impractical party frock. You know, standard. But, like I said in my last post, I do have a queue of stuff to blog about. Rachel commented on my last post to say that when I blog a dress, her five-year-old daughter shouts, "Dolly Clackett's got a new dress!" Well, Rachel's daughter:

DOLLY CLACKETT'S GOT A NEW DRESS.
(Seriously though, is that not the cutest damn thing you've ever heard? That really made me smile.)

Here's the dress, anyway:

Amity dress - By Hand London Kim dress, worn with Miss L Fire Lovebird sandals

Dolly Clackett has a new dress and a fat face, apparently. And she also has prescription sunglasses now, which look a lot less goofy in real life. Maybe.

So. The story of this dress is that I used to have a different dress made out of the same fabric. It was a By Hand London Anna dress with a gathered skirt and you can see it here. I loved that dress but it became too big, and it didn't survive one of my many wardrobe culls. I can be pretty brutal, even with handmade dresses that I love. Anyway, a few weeks ago Sharne spotted some of the fabric (which is 'My Favourite Ship' by Sarah Jane for Michael Miller) at a ridonkulous price in Abakhan (like, £5.95 a metre) and she very kindly bought a couple of metres for me and popped them in the post. Sewing people are the bomb dot com, and that's the truth.

The other truth is that, despite the following facts, I never seem to have enough nautical-themed dresses:

I can't swim and have no intention of learning (don't lecture me, I don't care)
Leamington is pretty far from the sea. It's a matter of dispute, but we do have a tree that people claim is the tree that is furthest away from the sea in England. It's called the Midland Oak, and it has a plaque on it and everything

So, you know, another dress with nautical shit on it maybe isn't that necessary. But who cares, right?

Seriously don't lecture me about learning to swim, because I don't want to hear it.

I still have a little bit of work to do on the Kim bodice to get the fit just right. I've re-drawn the straps to make them substantially shorter, which I thought might make shortening the bodice unnecessary. I think I could still stand to shorten the bodice a bit. I could go all-out and do a slight FBA as well but to be honest, what's stopping me from doing that is that I don't really mind my bust being a bit downplayed, here. I don't know. I still feel pretty exposed in anything other than a high neckline. Those are minor things though and I'm mainly pointing them out because I feel like I should. I'm super happy with this dress. So happy, I'm even going to show you my Derpy Back. Prepare yourselves:

BLAMMO

Just looking all casually here at the pedalos. Yeah - Leamington might not have the sea, but we do have a place where you can hire pedalos shaped like cars and swans and stuff. You can hire actual boats, too, but that's not as funny. I'm standing on a little bridge here, which seemed like a good place to take photos, but we kept being interrupted by this couple who... I don't know what they were at, to be honest. They were either powerfully curious at the act of someone having photos taken or they just really enjoyed crossing the same bridge OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

In all seriousness, I was shaking my head here. Why does the public have to ruin public places?!

In honesty, the bridge was already kind of my back-up photo location. Right by this bridge is a little children's play area that has a pretty boss pirate ship climbing frame/slide deal, only when we walked past it initially there was a really sketchy guy sitting on the merry-go-round thing. Like, you couldn't make it up - it was some sketchy looking dude in his 40s, sitting on his own in a children's play area, with his hands in his pockets. It was like something out of Brass Eye. Or the Daily Mail. There weren't any children around, so it could have been worse, but I didn't especially want to engage with him. However, the couple on the bridge were such an irritant, we decided to go to the little play area anyway. The sketchy guy had moved on, but that damn couple followed us! I'm totally serious. Anyway, who cares, because:

oh yeah

The fake pirate ship has a steering wheel, which I desperately wanted to have photos taken on. I wasn't sure I'd be up to climbing up the rigging and, foolishly, thought the best way up was by going up the slide. "How hard can it be?" I thought, "It's only for small children!" WRONG.

Idiot

Nic did take some photos of me at the steering wheel thing, but to be honest I look like a complete dick in all of them. So here's me looking out to sea. I mean, looking out over the park, and thinking about my lunch:

I bet you're wondering how I could look more like a dick in the photos that I deleted than I do here. Ha ha!

The only way down was to take the slide.

Honestly, you guys. The things I do for this blog. But also this was the best lunchtime I've had in months. After we played on the slide, Nic and I went and bought sandwiches and had a little stroll in town, and then I came home and finished up my work for the week. Hurrah! We're going to head out shortly for a walk and to do some grocery shopping (translation: buy some wine) and I might even get some sewing done when we get home.

The name of the dress is a reference to two things. One is that I was listening to Elliott Smith while I was sewing it - I started with Figure 8 and moved on to XO - but also, you know, it has boats on it. They're pretty big boats, but Jaws is one of my Top 5 Favourite films. It's a film that I never don't feel like watching, if that makes sense? Like, I'm always happy to watch it. I'd be happy to watch it even if I had already watched it that day. Jaws is another reason why I'm in no massive hurry to learn to swim. No, that's a joke, mostly.

I love everything - seriously everything - about Jaws. I think it's pretty much the perfect film. But, and think me shallow if you like, but seriously one of my favourite things about the film is Murray Hamilton as the Mayor of Amity, Larry Vaughn. I mean, come on:

LINEN BLAZER WITH ANCHORS ON IT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. That's also a nice tie there, boss. Maybe it's weird, but I am totally inspired by this. Maybe I should make a blazer out of that Robert Kaufman anchor-print chambray that was everywhere a few months ago. I reckon I could wear that. I wouldn't look as totally rad as this guy though, sadly.

You know what I'm saying, right? I just don't have that kind of panache.

Anyway, that's my nautical Kim dress. You'd better believe I'll be packing this when we next go to visit Nic's mum and dad at the seaside. Hopefully I'll have some kind of nautical blazer to wear with it by then too. Watch this space.

Right lads, I'm going to head off here and go out and buy some wine. Farewell and adieu, you fair Spanish ladies.

Hello! It's Thursday afternoon, which is my Friday this week as I have taken tomorrow off. Dudes, I have needed it. This week has been pretty tough. I know you're probably all pretty much over me crabbing about work, but I have had a stressful week. I ended up crying on my walk from work to the train station yesterday afternoon - not because anything particularly bad happened but because I had just hit a wall of feeling totally fed up. I have an extra project on top of my usual workload and it is just doing my head in. Nothing seems to be going right, it's a huge time-suck and it's been making work really hard. I've also been ill - the cold I had last week turned into a chest infection, so that was fun.

Anyway, last night I came home from work early to have my hair cut - I was never more grateful that my salon offers its customers wine - and then Nic and I went out for dinner with friends. I was working from home today and I was a bit kinder to myself, and I'm feeling a lot better now. I'm not going to lie though lads, alcohol helped. So did getting something pretty in the post this morning. What can I say? I'm shallow.

I bought an orange satchel from Zatchels last payday and it FINALLY arrived today. They do say that their bags can take up to 30 days to be dispatched which, fair enough, but each time I have bought something from them it's taken ages and only eventually been posted when I contacted them to remind them about it. Sigh. That's how it happened with this bag too, which is very annoying, but the bag is pretty awesome so it could be worse.

Two things made me want to buy the bag. One is that I have quite a few satchels now and, you know me, when I find something I like I essentially want it in ALL THE COLOURS. The other is that, at some point at the end of last year, Heather B posted a picture of Miss L-Fire's lobster sandals on Instagram and a whole outfit based around it popped into my head. I pre-ordered the sandals as soon as they were available and... you know where this is going, right?

Lobsterlex dress worn with Andi Satterlund Myrna cardigan, Miss L-Fire Rock Lobster sandals and orange satchel

I knitted an orange cardigan to wear with my Lobsterlex/Lobster sandal combination. YEAH! This is an Andi Satterlund 'Myrna' cardigan and I did knit one of these before which is, quite frankly, kind of embarrassing now. I hated the yarn (it was that shitty Rico cotton yarn) and also, I misunderstood the pattern and knitted it too short. So this one - while not perfect - is a massive improvement. It's gratifying to know that I am getting better at this.

I nearly always end up pulling this face when Nic takes photos of me because it makes him laugh

So. Myrna details, right? I knitted this using Cascade 220, but the superwash rather than the...erm, normal? Sorry, still don't get yarn weights. Anyway, I bought this because it already comes in a ball rather than in a skein and so I wouldn't have to wind that shit into a ball. Eh. That didn't really work but the yarn itself is super to work with - it's soft and springy and not too fluffy. And it comes in basically EVERY colour so it might be a while before I knit with anything else. This colour is called Pumpkin and it's not aggressively orange but I do kind of wish I had bought the brighter orange, which is called Blaze. It's not even that I like the colour better, it's just that the name is awesome.

Does anyone else remember Streets of Rage 2?

I knitted this cardigan up really quickly. I had to go to Slough for work the Friday before last and, although I have a Hetty cardigan on the go, I didn't think I'd be able to concentrate on the sleeves on a train journey so I cast on Myrna. By last Sunday it was ready to be blocked, so it took me just over a week! Granted, I was ill and spent more of that week knitting on the sofa than I usually would, but still. This was a lovely mindless project because it's knitted mainly in stockinette. There's a little bit of lace detailing around the neckline and waist, and I really enjoyed knitting the v-neck. The sleeves are fun too, with the sleeve cap done with short rows. I loved knitting the sleeves but they're part of the reason why I'm not sure how much I like this cardigan. Anne Shirley would be ALL over these puff sleeves but I'm not certain I like them on me.

ANNE SHIRLEY DOES NOT APPROVE

Okay I am going to say one more negative thing about this and then I'll say nice things. I knitted this, like, two rows too long. I don't know if anyone else will care, but I would have liked it to be a fraction shorter. Also something weird happened to my cast-off at the corner of the waist ribbing where the button-band begins and I had to re-do it and now I think it looks a bit weird. Can you see it?

Overall though, I'm pretty happy with this and I think I will knit another Myrna pretty soon. Maybe in the Blaze colourway... LOL JUST KIDDING. I didn't love this when I finished it, but actually I think I'll wear it a fair bit. I didn't have an orange cardigan and I think this will work well with quite a few of my dresses. But mainly I'm still totally buzzing that I can knit stuff that I actually want to wear and the things I'm being critical about are still pretty minor. I know I can and will get better at this with practice.

Here's the back view - I think you can see from this that it could stand to be slightly shorter. The pattern is designed to have a cute little keyhole feature in the upper back but I am just not good enough yet at casting off in the round to not make a mess of it. Also, I know that a short-sleeved cardigan is not terribly practical in general but I thought I would wear it less if it had a hole in the back - even one that was meant to be there.

I think it looks pretty cute unbuttoned as well...

And... as for the sandals. Well, much like the bag, these were kind of worth the wait:

They are totally and utterly ridiculous and I don't even care. I love them, and I promise I won't only wear them with this dress. It might be difficult to want to wear this dress with any other shoes, though!

Anyway, I'm going to leave you here. I have stuff to do this evening... housework stuff that I haven't had the time to do this week but also drinking wine and eating dinner and hanging out with Nic. Remembering that life is good even when work is hard.

Earlier today. Hashtag classy as fuck.

I hope there was enough shark meat in the refrigerator for one of your sandwiches.

Now's not the time to discuss this, but I will need to eat your umbilical cord.

He was one of the good ones. Like Clint Eastwood in a beard, but fatter.

Aaaaah BRILLIANT! A load of people in a stable, Ted. It's the one thing I didn't expect.

The important thing is the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now, a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.

I'm so gorgeous, there's a six month waiting list for birds to suddenly appear every time I am near!

This online slang dictionary says it's short for "amazing." Or it's a club drug made from a tooth whitener. Either way you win.

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.

Are you insane? Do you seriously expect me to wear grey out of season? I'd rather hang.

I may have just burnt the house down, but I made damn sure you were in it when I lit the match.

Jealousy is a very ugly thing, Dorothy. And so are you in anything backless.

Peachy keen, jellybean.

When you think about it, thinking about thinking is the hardest sort of thinking there is, which makes you think.

We're building something here, detective. We're building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.

I've always said humans need more animal blood. It keeps the spine straight.

Do you know how hard it is to fake your own death? Only one man has pulled it off: Elvis.

If I worried about what every bitch in New York was saying about me, I'd never leave the house.

Often, the good suffer and the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies. Farewell and adieu, you ladies of Spain.

It's a beautiful, sunny day and we're in an opticians. It doesn't get any better than this.