Something for the weekend

One Friday morning a few weeks back I woke up wanting to wear my rockbuex.

Not the rockbuex. Don't worry, all will be explained.

Problem: the rockbuex wasn't cold proof.  Summer was cruelly short-lived this year, and that Friday morning, the only things I could find that went with the rockbuex were t-shirts, which was not going to cut it any more. So the first thing I did, after a cup of tea but before breakfast, was sew a jumper.

Here. Rockbuex + emergency sweater:

It's not going to win me any style awards, but this cropped Linden with a hem band hits the rockbuex in exactly the right place, taking the whole thing just far enough over the line (for me, anyway) between oversized pyjamas and acceptable street wear. Nothing more or less than super-comfy, super-relaxed stuff for Friday through Sunday. Happy happy.

Excuse the face #Fridayisforderps

But some projects just spontaneously breed other projects, don't they? And once I'd made the Linden, I realised that I wanted with toddler-like urgency needed more things with sporty 5 cm elastic waistbands, so I could mix and match the comfy stuff all weekend and never have to squeeze myself into a pair of jeans again, or at least not before the day I get round to making jeans that fit, which is very likely to be several decades hence (does anyone else have projects that just appear in your head as a fully formed thought, exactly like that overly long sentence?) Also because, well, different shoes need different outfits. Of course. Even when it's just one pair of trainers or the other.

Or perhaps all this was actually just a load of mental excuses for making an Ilsley skirt. *LOVE* those hem curves.

Like with the rockbuex, I used my favourite, most comfy waistband technique, which is: 5 cm wide elastic threaded through and then topstitched down twice, making a channel in the middle for a drawstring.  Cheapskate tip: shoelaces make excellent drawstrings. They can be found in good range of colours and thicknesses without too much difficulty, and cost about half as much as the average crafting cord, and BONUS the ends are already finished.

Both the jumper and the skirt were made from sweatshirt fabric I had in my stash. The black for the sweater cost 2.5 euros in a sale two years ago - I got 5 metres of it, and there's still a good bit left (see here for a previous, not very different, outing). The grey for the skirt I bought at Les étoffes du Sentier in Paris last January - it was 3 euros a metre, and I got four, and have just squeezed out this and a Freemantle coat from it with nothing but tiny scraps left over. All in all extremely satisfying!

The fact that these were stash projects, and one of them was a TNT pattern I'd made multiple times before, also meant they came together extremely quickly.  Both of them that same Friday, in fact.  And I have to admit - I sort of hate to during #slowfashionoctober, but I must -  I have quite a serious weakness for the quick & dirty when it comes to my homemade clothes. I guess fast sewing isn't the same as fast-fashion in the high street sense, but I do think sometimes the "rush" of having an idea and executing it IMMEDIATELY is in no small way similar to a shopping high.  This was brought home all the more by the fact that my next project was/is the aforementioned Freemantle coat which forced me to take things slower. I don't know what to think about this. On the one hand, well, so what? My fabric sources and project choices are what they are, and I'm not sure what I could do otherwise, realistically. On the other had, I sort of feel guilty. Should I, do you think?

Well anyway, let's not end on too serious a note. Here I am, getting out and about and taking action shots for the Better Pictures Project:

God it's exhausting to even look at. And watch the grass - my own personal launch pad!