SewHip star prize and a great sewing class

 I was extra excited to receive the last issue of SewHip magazine on the post.  I almost fell of my chair when I looked into the Gallery page and what do I see? The photo I sent with the tea dress I did back in June. After my initial shock I realised I had also won the star prize of the month and will receive £25 worth of fabric loveliness from Abakhan. YAY!! I started jumping up and down and my excitement lasted all night. In addition to that I was constantly looking at the magazine to see my face on it. There is something odd in seeing yourself printed in a magazine.
I am well chuffed to have won star prize and it gives me such a confidence kick in sewing. I know I have miles to go in order to do garments successfully, etc but this sure made my day. It made my month actually! I can't wait now to receive my fab prize and start planning what gorgeous things to do with them.  A big thank you to Alice and all the SewHip staff for this prize!!!

I was also well excited that my sewing class with The Thrifty Stitcher was approaching and couldn't wait to spend a whole day talking and doing sewing. Off I went to London on Saturday (waking up at 7am was no problem, comparing to when I have to go to work) and was greeted by the wonderful CL. The studio, in Stoke Newington, London, is lovely and full on wonderful sewing related bits and bobs. The class was "Getting started with a commercial pattern" and I know I have sewn wearable items with a pattern but felt I needed this to learn how to do things properly. I decided to do a A line skirt and practice my darts. Also keen to do some fitting adjustments. In the morning we spend time talking pattern, cutting and marking language and I learned many useful things that I was doing wrong (like folding fabric wrong sides together when marking and cutting and aligning at top ends rather than selvedge ends). I also got wonderful tips which will make life, and in this case patterns, so much easier. Afternoon was spend at the sewing machine and iron. In this stage I learned how to properly do a dart. It's so simple but I never realised I should pin the dart and that's why I was getting wonky darts. Duh!! After assembling the skirt we moved on to one of the most exciting parts of the day: learning how to insert an invisible zip. These look so sleek in a skirt or dress but can be a bit scary to do. With the great tuition and support of CL it's not scary anymore. In fact, with the right foot and careful measuring it's easier to do than a lapped one. Awesome! We moved on to do a waistband and using twill tape (or was it grosgrain?!) it was done in no time.
Next stage was fitting and some extra was taken out from my hips. I decided to disassemble the skirt and use it as a working pattern. Was a bit sad to cut it out but I wasn't going to wear it anyway. Lastly, CL shared with us a wicked way to do a hem on a full dress skirt, especially useful in slippery fabrics. I might take the hem of the Leopard print vintage dress up.
All in all, what a great day!! I probably could have gone on and on for a few more hours. Highly recommended if you want to get your teeth into sewing but are afraid of trying. Check their website for more info on what's on offer. They also have a meet up group and drop ins. Shame I'm not in London!