The Late Night Sewist

Hello everyone!

I am Mari-Liis, an Estonian currently living in Athens, Greece.

This blog will mainly be about sewing (especially dresses!) and maybe some shoes that I just can´t get enough of.

This blog will most probably NOT be about tutorials, neither can I help you with good hints on online fabric shopping as some really awesome sewing bloggers do.

I have so much yet to learn about sewing and turn to various sources for help myself, that I don´t see any tutorial on anything coming up any time soon. Fabric shopping online is something I have tried, but never managed, because it seems I need to touch and “feel” the fabric before getting an inspiration what to use it for (which DRESS pattern, that is). Which is weird, because I shop nearly everything, from ceiling lamps to shoes and underwear online.

I mainly shop for fabrics in Athens and Tartu, my hometown in Estonia. I never buy expensive fabrics in the fear that the garment might not turn out as I wanted and I don´t mind wearing polyester. If the fabric itself costs as mush as a decent RTW dress, I don´t see the point for me to get anxious while cutting into it. So I mainly go for fabrics that come at 10 EUR/m max. I have made some exceptions, of course, but never paid more than 20.

The patterns I use are mainly Burda, Burda Easy Fashion, Simplicity and occasionally New Look and McCalls. And I discovered the Russian Diana Moden the other day at my local fabric store here in Tartu where I came to spend my summer holidays. Every once in a while they come up with an issue that contains many Simplicity patterns and for the EUR 3.50 price tag is a very good investment, I think. I took Russian at school, but since I never really needed to use it and honestly, the level of my skills was never anything to to be proud of, I cannot actually make sense of the instructions, but as they come with detailed drawings, I believe I will be able to use these patterns. Diana Moden has their own patterns as well, but because of the language problem, I am a bit scared to give them a try. After some research online I also discovered that some people have had troubles with Diana Moden patterns due to many mistakes on their patterns sheets, but their Simplicity issues are fine.

So, here are the two issues I got my greedy hands on yesterday:

I was especially lucky, because I normally have to order the Simplicity, McCalls, New Look etc patterns from the States and it either takes a lot of time for them to arrive or a lot of time and patience to cut and tape the printable versions. Not to mention that the last pattern I printed consisted of 81 (!!!) pages! I am happy I did not try it at home!

Anyway, the purple dress on the cover of the magazine in front is Simplicity 1876, that I have been wanting to order ever since I saw it!

The only problem that I have is that I am not really sure if the view B also requires boning or not. The instruction sketches in the magazine seem to suggest that version B is without, but I have doubts because if any of those two versions, the B looks like a design that requires boning.

I also got some really nice fabrics:

For all three I already have ideas, what to make of them, but I will share this with you in another post, it is getting too late right now! Just that the first in row, is a lightweight polyester, not shiny as the photo might suggest. Next to it there is a fantastic pink polyester (something like tafetta, but softer) that has a very nice contrast shade on the wrong side, that actually can be seen in the header photo of this blog – it is not two different fabrics, but the same pink with its contrast wrong side! The third is polyester jersey, I love the colours of it! I am just not sure if I will be able to make anything out if it before I get back to Athens, because my mother´s faithful Singer (from 1989) refuses to sew elastic fabrics, no matter what needles I use.