A new blogging project: famous "little black dress" frocks

Those who know me will know that I love a blogging project, especially one which involves a list to work through. I've been dabbling recently with a bit of LinkedIn publishing, so this one has been a bit neglected and due some attention. If my HR insights (ha!) are the reason you're here, you might find more of interest over on LinkedIn...but for the more personal sewing/parenting/random burblings, this is the place to be.

The new project, then. For my birthday, I received a book called "Famous Frocks: the Little Black Dress" (this).

It has patterns for 20 garments based on ten iconic little black dresses - each one, a dress and a variation of some kind. It's a very beautiful and stylish book. I'm ever eager to improve my sewing skills, and this book uses lots of techniques that I've not yet tried...or have tried and failed (buttonholes...I'm looking at you), so I thought it would be a good set of projects to play with.

I can't promise to make all of the garments in the book - I'm not going to spend time and money making dresses that I know I won't wear - but I will have a crack at as many of them as I'm likely to wear, and blog about the process and outcomes. A very long drawn out review of the book, perhaps!!

First: Coco Chanel. Watch this space! Fabric to source first...

Being a sewing bore

I'm conscious that I've been tweeting a lot about sewing things lately so am going to try and get (most of) it out of my system with a blog post. If you read it, and you're bored, you only have yourself to blame!

I started sewing little girl clothes about 18 months ago, and then progressed into adult clothes in January this year, after a trip to Lisbon which has amazing fabric shops, where I bought some fabric that wasn't brightly coloured quilting cotton, and realised that I could make wearable clothes. I like a challenge, so have generally tried to introduce a new skill or fabric type each time I make something different, and have made quite a lot of things I'm pleased with. However, I'm a wobbly, inaccurate and messy sew-er, usually cobbling things together which look ok from the outside, with slightly wandering hems, but are a chaos of trailing threads and frayed seams waiting to happen, on the inside.

Bearing this in mind, I was very very VERY excited to receive an overlocker for my birthday. Overlockers (or sergers if you want to be American about it) are slightly industrial machines which use 3 or 4 threads to create immensely neat edges really quickly (sewing and cutting at the same time) - if you look inside something you're wearing now, and it has seams which are sort of encased in thread, that will be the work of an overlocker. This appeals to my desire for neatness, but also my innate laziness (who wants to spend time neatening seams? That's not the fun part), and my inner geek - more techniques to master.

Having been reading about them for a while, I'd built up a fear of threading it - apparently, according to the internet, this is hard. It came threaded, so after playing around with it for a bit, I took the fear head on, pulled all the threads out, then tried to follow the instructions. Thankfully, it worked, although tweezers are supplied and very necessary, and I didn't even have to resort to YouTube. If you think this is overdramatic - this is a picture of the mechanism:

Threads in place, it all seems to be working. Slightly uncharacteristically, I'd prepared by cutting out the fabric for four different patterns the weekend before my birthday so that when I got my hands on the overlocker, with Martin away for most of last week, I'd be ready to sew. I was delighted that I did this - I might even do it more often as cutting out is my least favourite part of sewing! Things I've learned this week:

• Tacking darts makes them a whole lot easier to sew accurately
• Accuracy is suddenly a whole lot more important...cutting off the seam allowances as you go doesn't leave a whole lot of opportunity to unpick and make the garment bigger
• An overlocker is noisy
• A normal sewing machine feels very slow and tame ( a bit like driving a real car after playing Colin McRae on the XBox for a bit too long).
• I suddenly care a lot more about neatness and found myself hand sewing bits so that the seams wouldn't show on the outside, where I would normally have just used the machine for speed...I was aware of the ridiculousness of having two sewing machines on the table, whilst I was sat on the sofa with a needle and thread.
• Having two sewing machines out on the table makes the dining room look a bit like a sewing production line...the phrase "sweat shop" was used...
• I find it difficult to resist the lure of the machine - being left to myself in the house to tidy up on Saturday morning, I spent most of the time sewing in my pyjamas.

Also, very excitingly, I managed to finish three garments in just a few hours of evenings and Saturday cleaning time. Excuse the photo (lighting is terrible), and the flowery dress is one which looks much nicer on than on the hanger - but I'm pretty pleased with the results. Particularly the flowery knit - a bargain bought on our return trip to Lisbon a few weeks ago - which is lovely and soft and drapey.

And look at how neat and pretty the inside is (I still can't sew in a straight line though).

Next challenge: the straight line thing (possibly overrated), and working out what else I can with that fancy machine.

Phew. Ode to the overlocker over, I feel better now and will stop peppering your timelines with sewing tweets!

Does anyone else have an overlocker? What do you find it most useful for?