Resurfacing

Well that bout of tonsillitis knocked me down for longer than expected. Even after my throat stopped hurting I still felt unbelievably tired, achy and nauseous. I was scared witless that I was either preggers or had the flu, both of which would be terrible options for me at this point in time, but thankfully it's all passed now and I'm back to normal. I think a year or two of greatly disturbed sleep just caught up with me in a big way, and I'd like to say I caught up on some sleep but with hurricane Anna still in the house that's just not gonna happen. Anna's teeth seem to have settled down as well, because she's back to waking only three times a night and sleeping only half the night in our bed (this is good for her, trust me!).

Anyway, I ventured back into my sewing room the other night and was hoping to do a big ta da! reveal of a new skirt in a colour other than grey but sadly it has turned out to be a big fat wadder. I did take a photo though to prove to you all that I did actually sew with fabric other than grey:

It's the Kasia skirt from Burda Style, one of their free download patterns. I was a bit dubious about it, being high waisted (which is totally not my style) and gathered at the hips (which is my widest part), but having seen so many great versions out there in bloggyland, and wanting to try something different for a change I ignored my inner voice. Well sadly, it's bad and I should have stuck with what I know. Even with doing an adjustment for a sway back, I found the skirt to overall be to large and badly fitted to my body, and I think red corduroy was probably a bad choice too. If I had enough fabric I would have cut out the back hip panels without the gathering to see if that improved it, but sadly I didn't have enough fabric to try. And then I noticed that I had cut some panels on a different nap to the others, so that the front looked matte whilst the back looked shiny. So it was beyond salvage.

I originally bought this fine wale corduroy with a slight amount of stretch to make Anna a pinafore so I had only bought a single metre, but I liked it too much so I decided to use if for me. Oh well, I'll rip it apart and could probably still eek out a dress or skirt for Anna from it so no great loss at the end of the day.

For anyone else contemplating this skirt, it has a bajillion pages that you need to sticky tape together, and there seem to be hundreds of pieces that need to cut, interfaced and sewn together (16 pieces for the waistband alone!). It's a fiddly but not difficult project and like I said, other people have achieved all sorts of awesomeness out of this. Just not me.

So now I'm in a strange place in terms of sewing. All the fabric I pull out and the patterns I'm drawn to are formal, work wear pieces which I definitely don't need since I only work three days a week and have a huge work wardrobe already. I really need smart casual pieces for my second job moonlighting as a yummy mummy half the week, but I'm crap at sewing with knits or making pants and pencil skirts don't really make sense at playgroup. Hmmmmm, maybe some more inspirational blog trawling is required.

But I am on with another task that I've left far too long: finishing sewing the curtains for my living and dining rooms. I meant to sew them before last summer, but now that winter has arrived and it's cold I need some heavy curtains to cover the expanse of glass. But they are so boring...........