Busy

There has been a lot going on at Lizzie's lately, but not much sewing of dolls or otherwise. I have almost finished pruning my roses, which had managed to produce this wind blown lot of buds and flowers mid winter.

I have been taking up the sleeve hems on 2 ready ready to wear jackets that I bought during the winter sales. And I managed to finish my train the trainer certificate, and pass!

There is always time for a little shopping though, and Tessuti kindly obliged by having a sale. I bought some linens, chocolate coloured boiled wool and some wool and cashmere suiting.

Spotlight has the most divine cotton that has a kind of satin finish. It was not on sale, but the quality was beautiful, so I bought some to make shirts. I also picked up some cotton Liberty voile fabric in the most divine patterns. This photo probably does not do it justice. The Liberty fabric is on the left.

Back in the 1990's (I think) I made this shirt out of liberty fabric. It is huge on me now, but I am thinking of doing a bit of a makeover on it such as taking out the shoulder pads (yes shoulder pads) and putting some casing at the mid-back for some elastic.

The print is not a subtle design at all:

Do you think these flowers are poppies or some kind of thistle?

And of course sale time fever would not be complete without the half price pattern sale. Now I have a whole lot more patterns to fuss over with fitting issues. Do I really want to do that?? I have heard that the Wild Ginger software produces really well fitting clothes, but I can't get an idea of all the designs available just by looking on their website. I think they have a design feature in the package, but I don't know if I would be any good at that. You can buy a module for just coats and jackets, so perhaps I will try that first. Once I finish my Ella doll, I will tackle another jacket using one of my paper patterns and see how I go with that. I will probably do one of my liberty tops first though, so I have that ready for when the weather starts to warm up.