Let's Knit Issue 63 ::

Last week, issue 63 of Let's Knit magazine hit the shelves, displaying my Jessica Sweater on the cover!

I'm crazy proud of this.  I do love this sweater and really enjoyed knitting it (I do love a bit of colourwork), but I never ever expected it to make the cover.  This is only my second ever knitting pattern and my first pattern published in Let's Knit.
This is now my third cover in my short designer life time, I cannot believe how far I've come in such a short space of time, it just goes to show that if you are really passionate about something and put you all in to it you can do anything you want!

Anyway enough beaming.

 

I love this issue, I realise I say that a lot about magazines, but I really really do.  The theme is vintage, and there are some really cute 50's inspired sweaters and a great piece on stranded colourwork, if you've never attempted it before.

D ::

I did it!  I stitched together my first garment from a pattern and in Japanese at that.

I am so proud of myself, I mean the shirt itself is no where near perfect, but it is wearable, just about!

I decided that I should start with something reasonably simple looking and that wouldn't require too much fabric and I only used an old sheet.  That way if it did go terribly wrong I wouldn't have ruined some beautiful, expensive fabric.

I am so glad now that I decided to just get stuck in and have a go, because I learnt so so much by actually doing it and it wasn't until I started putting all those techniques in to practice that they started to make much more sense, some a little too late for this garment unfortunately, but that is of course what practice runs are for!

I really struggled a lot with the binding on the neck and the sleeves, it just didn't seem possible!  I actually ended up making some larger binding for the neck piece and handstitching the sleeves.  I'm not sure how to prevent this from being such a disaster next time, but I'm sure with a little more book reading and internet searching I'll get there.

I also didn't even consider raw edges until I'd finished!  For this garment it's not the end of the world, but next time I will definitely consider how to finish the edges.

I used Built by Wendy's sew u book for a lot of the technical stuff, I've had this book for ages and ages, but I've hardly even flicked through it before (I think I may have read a bad review of it just after purchase and it just got neglected after that) however it was actually really really helpful and I had it next to my sewing machine for constant reference throughout.

So next up....a dress!  Well maybe anyway.  I really want to make a dress to wear for my cousins wedding in April, but I'm not entirely sure I'm brave enough to make that big step of cutting up beautiful, carefully purchased fabric just yet!  Maybe another practice run first would be best.

• pattern D from stylish dress book 1 available here


• burdastyle notes here