And moving swiftly on...

My last post was full of ambitious plans for spring/March and here we are on the 19th April and, as the recent radio silence might suggest, I have to tell you that I accomplished pretty much none of them. The last six or seven weeks have gone something like this:

- Minor illness (just a cold, but ugh, it seemed to go on forever)
- Apathy about sewing anything for warmer weather because it was so. damn. cold. and wintery for most of March, which turned into:
- Apathy about sewing anything at all for any reason, or really doing anything other than sitting around in a miserable heap. (I don't know why, I just had a serious case of the Idon'twannas for a couple of weeks about literally everything that wasn't essential to survival.)
- The Return Of The Major Withdrawal Symptoms, and all the fun times that go with them, which I am just now bouncing back from.

In the midst of all that, I feel like I've pretty much missed the window for sewing for Spring! Over the last couple of weeks, I have managed a few easy, essential projects for my wardrobe:

PJs in pink gingham

I made a couple of pairs of PJs (one capri length pair for spring/autumn, one pair of shorts for summer) in pink gingham using my trusty PJ TNTs (capris: Burda 8721, shorts: Ottobre 05-2011-02).

Navy cardigan and curved hem jumper

I also made two quick and easy repeats from a 3m piece of textured navy knit, using Simplicity 1733 to make a cardigan and Ottobre 02-2016-05 to make a lightweight sweater with a curved/hi-lo hem. I've made exactly this combination of patterns from a single piece of fabric before, and it worked out so well and I've worn those garments so often that I barely even thought about it before I slapped the patterns down on my fabric. The more I sew, the more I love having a library of reliable, repeatable patterns as well as having the constant novelty from my pattern magazines etc.

Although it barely merits a mention on the creativity scale, in the midst of all my misery I did also manage to work through a basketful of tiny, annoying sewing jobs: hemming trousers that I bought unhemmed, fixing seams and hems in garments that had come apart in the wash (and, I must tell you, of the half a dozen things that needed repair, only one of them was hand-made -- it's the RTW stuff that falls apart!) and cutting down/hemming a pair of RTW trousers into shorts.


Even though I didn't get around to the larger, more ambitious projects on my sewing plan, wardrobe-wise I do have almost everything I need for Spring. Everything else -- and in particular my plans for a raincoat -- will just have to wait until I start thinking about cooler weather sewing again after the summer.

For now though, I'm starting to think ahead to summer sewing. I've only two absolute essential garments that I absolutely must make this year: a lightweight cardigan, which should be straightforward and quick, and a pair of shorts, which requires me to re-open the whole question of making trousers that fit and is therefore not straightforward at all. D:

My list of wants (rather than needs), is much longer and potentially more interesting, and covers a little bit of everything from outerwear (I have a slightly odd cotton fabric to turn into a lightweight blazer), to summer skirts and dresses, to woven tops. First up, though, I still need to choose and make a project for my April magazine challenge, and most likely that is what I'll be back with next. :D