Art Nouveau Ladies and Vintage Sugar and Lace

  Sewing is progressing slowly in this house: occasionally stuff happens, it just does not get photographed.  Some fabric for The Daughter's Sudoko Grid for her winter school wardrobe got "re-deployed" elsewhere.  In the process I started ANOTHER Sudoku grid for a "Performance Wardrobe" for her Jazz gigs.  More about that later. This jacket/coat is …

Sudoku Busted!

The contest gallery for the Pattern Review Sudoku Contest is filling up.  The wardrobes the ladies are creating are wonderful.  This is one of the highest-standard challenges I have seen taking shape yet, and still: it does not feel like a competition at all...on the discussion board everyone is helping each other out with advice, …

Fail February: Reversible Recall

Red of Sew Red-y is helping a lot of us to 'get closure' on our less successful projects this month, with her Fail February initiative. I got stuck on the third item for my Sudoku grid, and with stuck I mean properly stranded, taking three weeks to produce an unlined unfitted cape-like jacket with unfinished seams. Thing …

Musical Numbers and Multicoloured Coats

So I vowed I would not be side-tracked into sewing anything but The Dress. So I lied. I sewed another coat - or actually: a poncho. Because  4 days before The Daughter had her big gig which she had been looking forward to for months, calamity struck. We do not own an electric piano.  We have an …

Toasted chocolate and the quest for the perfect winter top

I baked choc chip cookies this weekend. And because I wandered off into the sewing nook while the last batch was in the oven, they got a bit overdone. But that was in line with the theme  I had going on this weekend: Chocolate-charcoal.  I hated the colour of this fabric while I was working …

Not so elementary, my dear Watson

(Edited with final pictures on 7/24....) "You Look Like A Female Sherlock Holmes!" That was the honest compliment from her little brother as she twirled through the house in her half-finished Mc Calls 6800, and he certainly could NOT have given her a more pleasing comment! She did about half the work.  Which is fair, …

About trees and apples and who the *** has my good scissors now?

Sunday afternoon.  I am in my sewing nook, staring dejectedly at the next muslin version of That Dress.  I need to pin something back...but there is not a pin to be found around my workspace. Because on the dining room table and on the ping-pong table in the family room, my two teenagers are busy …

Not the Jasper Sweater

I absolutely DESIRE  a Jasper Sweater from Paprika Patterns with all my heart.  But this blog is called "Kloonpatrone", right?  Partly because I am CHEAP, right? So I HAD to try and clone it . I failed. Miserably. Let me just talk about pattern prices for a moment. Here in South Africa, buying patterns actually appears to be more …