2017 Sewing Review!

Hello! Another year has done by! This year marked my 10th year of starting to sew clothing for myself, so its fun to look at what I have done!

You cant tell from the blog, but I’ve been using instagram as a quick record of what I have sewn. If I count up everything, I have made 30 items total this year, but actually lots of them are small toys….

• Blanket: 3
• Toys: 6
• Kids clothing: 7
• Women dress: 7
• Women top: 1
• Women coats: 4
• Women’s pants: 2

So If i just think about clothing, I’ve made only 21 items… If I count only clothing for myself – 14 items! This is all much higher productivity than last year though. Seeing that I am getting slightly less selfish with my sewing, I’ll add another metrics:

Selfish sewing : non-selfishsewing (clothing only!) –  14:7; plus 9 non-clothing non-selfish sewing!

Sewn:kept:worn often (excluding toys & blankets): 21:20:17

On the selfish sewing side – what I have done this year is to just spend my precious sewing time on items that I enjoy sewing and is tough to buy for in RTW stores. This means dresses and coats. For pants/tops/sweaters there are often decent-fitting, good fabric, and cheap options in the stores. However, it is much harder to find dresses & almost impossible to find coats that fits. I do enjoy sewing dresses and coats so much more – and I’ve allowed myself to buy more clothing from the stores. It’s a bit of a departure from the usual RTW-fast/sewing-the-basics on the sewing scene, but with a full time job and two young kids that is just not possible.

Item sewn but not kept: I made this black pair of high waist, pleated pants that immediately went into recycles without a picture. It’s hard to make “relaxed” pants that also look good with my bum, esp if the fabric has no stretch. I ended up just buying a pair from gap >_<

Items kept but not worn often:

I didnt blog about this because I didnt wear this much. I was somehow in love with the idea of making more non-stretch jeans (See a theme here?). Well I made this, and i can tell you, non-stretch materials works well/okay for flared jeans, but NOT a good idea for skinny jeans – the knee area becomes baggy quickly unless you intend to never sit down. And I ended up not wearing it much (it does well for my booties so I might cut it off for jean shorts though).

I didnt blog about this, but had plenty of picture up in instagram. It’s a reversible fur coat! It was a good marriage of two very unique fabric that otherwise I had no idea what to do with. And for how crazy it is (fur coat seems to be all the rage this season though, I feel ahead of the curve!), I liked how it turned out. The fur is soft and nice so I like wearing it with fur inside, but it is also a very heavy coat (~ 7 lbs?), so I don’t feel all that comfortable wearing it. So I don’t wear it often.

The nature of making a dress for an event that celebrates things 100 years ago – I cant find too many other occasion to wear this to!

Items worn often:

Sleep pajamas for the girls – they like them!

Rayon pants for the girls – they LOVE them! (I had to hide them for the winter because they keep picking those and rayon is too light weight for winter).

The “party” dresses for the girls at their request. They are very loved and most importantly, they make them feel extraordinary. I need to blog about the black and the cat dress! Oh – all the dresses for the girls are made from Tadah Pattern’s tea party dress pattern!

This robe I never blogged about. It’s made from a wonderful rayon velvet, lovelist thing to wrap around on a not-so-chill day. Because its pink and covers a lot, Ive provably worn it more often than hubby would have liked.

 

My dresses – I love all of them and worn them often. I really need to blog about the red one sometimes though!

The only top I made – but loved!! Work very often in the fall.

Of course, most importantly and my true love in sewing – da coats!! I’ve worn all those very often and couldn’t image how I managed the wardrobe without them before! (Jk, kind of!!) I have been working the neutrals the last two years though – so I am looking forward to making more fun colored coats next!

That’s all!! I’ve had a productive year and surprisingly – most of the stuff had been blogged despite that I try to not pester my hubby too often for photo sessions.

This year I’ve also picked up a few more hobbies – fashion drawing, standup paddle boarding, and dance classes. Ive enjoyed them and didnt mind less sewing time especially for the more physical hobbies. I’ve realize I need to keep in shape in order to keep wearing my creations! (ESP the coats as they last for years!).

For 2018 – I am planning to sew from my stash, do some more instagram sewing related challenges (#2018makenine, #burdachallenge2018), and make some more coats, dresses, and kids clothing! Thank you lovely readers for reading and commenting – I’ve enjoyed you accompanying me on my 10th year of sewing!