Petite Republic

I made a little jacket inspired by Chanel! A little back story – I always thought those little tweed jackets were quite granny-like and something I would never, ever wear. However, lately Ive been seeing people sewing Chanel inspired jackets using hand sewing and couture methods – they made me feel quite inspired. I started plotting my own Chanel-inspired jacket that feels modern enough for me. Also, this year I’ve been channeling my love for sewing winter coats into summer jacket sewing – I guess a way to satisfy those coat-sewing-cravings in the summer. So while I was digging through my vast fabric stash and saw my beige linen with a substantial weight – I thought- this looks like tweed! The idea to make a fitted little Chanel jacket was born!

I used burdastyle 2014/01/120. BTW – what happened to burda?! I had no idea that they totally changed up their website and no longer had user projects or old patterns. Even the new website had issues and wouldn’t allow purchase to go though – I had to use a UK version of burdastyle for the pattern. I’m glad I was able to hunt it down *somewhere* because it’s such a nice and perfect pattern for this jacket! I did my typical 91% shrinking + size 38 to adjust for height. I did my regular alteration on top of that – took in shoulders by 1 inch, and slimmed the sleeves aggressively.

The edges of the jacket are bound with black linen bias tape. I would first machine sew one side on, and then iron, and hand stitch the other side in so that no stitches are visible. It took forever, but I kind of really enjoy the slow process, especially when the result is so clean.

The inside of the jacket are all finished as well – most visible seams are finished with hong-Kong binding. I did a bias tape finish on the shoulder seam, which had a nice side effect of a nice sleeve head, especially convenient since i dont believe in shoulder pads. (Okay fine, i do but im just too intimidated by it.)

Oh the pockets – we need to talk about those pockets!! They took me a week or so to finish, and they are so far, the most amazing pockets I’ve made in my history of sewing. I was going to do a regular welt pocket, but after i realized i forgot to embroider my logo for the inside of the jacket and am too lazy to take out the stitching on the neck seam – i had to think of where to put my logo instead. (My logo on a coat/jacket project almost feel mandatory these days). I realized my logo is actually the perfect shape for a patch pocket! I really wanted an embossed look so that my logo is subtle in color, but pop in dimension. It took me quite some thinking to come up with the idea of hand stitching on bias tape shaped in my logo. And the top bar is a perfect place to switch to black again as a nod to its Chanel-inspiration.

I just love a jacket that’s finished beautifully both inside and out – and how it looks on the hanger is just as happiness-triggering as how it looks on me!

Thats all the details!! I really enjoyed this little jacket. It’s so office-ready, but unfortunately I wont be going into the office any time soon. I am still loving wearing it around the house when i want to feel a little more prim and proper. I am wearing it here with a little silk cami, me made rayon pants, and my juebejue belt – I love the look!

Thank you for reading – I hope you are all doing alright in your corners of the world and there are plenty of fabric in your stash!

I made a little cropped jean jacket that i just ADORE!!!

In order to talk about this little jacket though, I need to show you a new style of sewing i picked up – paper piecing!!! A few weeks ago I decided that I need to make a placemat for my new puppy ( Did I mention that I bought home the most wonderful little Shiba Inu last year?? He is REALLY awesome and have been bringing our family so much joy and comfort during this crazy year). So I researched for a quilting pattern, and LOVED the Shiba pattern from Silver Lining. It is a paper piercing pattern, so after some YouTubing and surprisingly working on it for only one weeks, I finished:

It was surprisingly easy and oh-so-magical!! I was hooked. I thought, wouldn’t it be awesome if I can do a paper piecing Of my JuebeJue logo?well, after some design work and experimentation, I did! And its the basis for my jean jacket!

Isn’t it lovely?? Ive been wanting a little jean jacket fro a while, and I have also been wanting to re-make burdastyle 08/2009 jacket 118 that I had made over 10 years ago:

I loved the pattern, but i didnt pick the smartest material for the project – a very rough silk for the lining plus a polyester shell. I really didnt like the feel of the jacket and ended up donating it. The pattern has the coolest shoulder design (there’s a piece of thick epaulettes that goes from the shoulder seam, over the collar and sewn under the collar on the inside), so I had kept it in my mind to re-make at some point.

I also decided to embroider my time stamp on the inside of the sleeve cuff this time.

And because I was always very annoyed about needing to carry a purse for my phone with my last cropped jacket, I just had to add a phone sized pocket on this jacket. It’s impossible to stick my hands in there, but it’s just large enough for my phone and pretty much takes up the entire front bottom of the jacket!

As usual, I was too lazy to deal with button holes, and used snap buttons. And the snap buttons that matched the best happened to be the same colors as the one I put in for my maxi dress, making the two very cohesive to be worn together! Happy unintentional design!!!

Thank you so much for reading!! It sometimes feels so superfluous to be talking about my sewing when there are so much going here. Hope everyone is fairing okay in this crazy times.

Hello Friends! I am long overdue for a report of my 2019 sewing! I haven’t been blogging very consistently in 2019, and instead used instagramto keep track of the backlog of projects for the year. However, I still love making blog post and dot down details of my makes. So some of the simpler projects will just show up here in my review!

Stuff for the girls:

I will say that I have outdone myself with some of these dresses. I didnt make a LOT but they are all very much loved.

Made these two to match my own pokadot tank. They got worn a ton. Even little A who by default likes to dress like a tomboy LOVES wearing hers to school.

A Pokémon dress for little A – she chose the fabric at Joann and loves wearing this and it’s already a bit worn out.

A piano dress for little K’s first piano recital! She wore this often after the recital.

A Hedwig dress! Fabric chosen by little K at Joann because she is really into Harry Potter (she’s on book 4!). oh also! We got a puppy last year!!

I had some fabric left over from a dress and little A loved that fabric, so she asked for a dress from it. It fit super perfectly with her birthday deco too!

Stuff for ME

First up, some of my “Fails”! They actually were pretty well sewn, but sometimes when you make something, you run the risk of not being able to try it on and realize its not all that flattering before you make it!

A linen Vogue 1432. Unfortunately the fit is a bit off in a way I couldn’t verbalize or figure out how to fix, and the look is just a but too… airline hostess like. I really enjoyed sewing the curves though!!

I honestly LOVE how this dress looks. It is exactly what I envisioned and the pop of blue and white is lovely. The fabric is a cooling crispy rayon crepe. But I am just… too old for this look! I will save this for my girls 🙂 the pattern is a French pattern called Robe Paoline from Anna Rose. .

The rest are all pretty much a success and I love all of them! So I’ll group them by types.

The knits

A pair of burda style 2017-04-107. I removed the ruching and its a very nicely fitted T-shirt dress.

A trio of burdastyle 2010/02/112, cropped. Because at some point in 2019 i had some awesome abs. They are now in hibernation with the shelter-in-place as an excuse. But really I just got addicted to HAppy Lemon’s cream milk tea back the past few months. I still rock them though.

Winter knit dresses! I blogged about them, and i love their designs very much.

The Dresses

Wrap dresses! The white dress is my first collar with Minerva Fabric, and I have so much more to share there this year! You can read more about it here.

A pair of rayon peasant dresses!

Two maxi dresses. This recap made me realize that I forgot to blog about the forest green rayon crepe dress. It was a really nice flow-y one.  You can see it in action here:

This picture really doesnt do this dress justice. I will need to blog it someday. It’s another version of my spider dress, but alternating between a coated shiny cotton and a matt linen. I wore it for the office ALL. THE. TIME.

This is a silk slip with tassels that I just adore – its really comfortable and fun. I wear it at home a lot, and want to go to the dessert and wear it there. It is a modified Ogden Cami.

The Coats!

Well, if you have read my blog for a while you will know coats are my favorite thing!! Here is the round up:

This one is with my mother now and she LOVES it. She says its too “old” for me but I suspect she just really like it. Or at least i like to think that 🙂 in fact, I wanted to make this pattern for her before I made this jean version, and she told me not to (because I have amazing family like that).

To be honest, the shape of this coat is not really my style. It’s a bit boxy. However, its so light AND warm, and really a lovely color. I find myself reaching for it often in the winter months.

I didnt blog about this one, but its a reversible… burdastyle Talea (cant go a year without making a Talea!). I found an amazing fur from Joann that is a nice suede on one side and fur on the other. SoI made sure to bound the seams nicely, and made it reversible. The fur trim on the suede side is basically the seam folded over and hand stitched down. I ended up wearing it mostly with the suede side out – because it has a pocket and the fur is cosy against my skin.

I still wear this convertible coat very often. The color is so fun and its great for the outdoors. The only thing I wish is i wish I did more topstitching on this. I wash it often and also have been wearing this as my “coronavirus grocery shopping” coat.

Lastly, my favorite little trench coat! I really love this new silhouette and just LOVE the construction 🙂

Misc

I commissioned someone to make a JuebeJue belt buckled for me this year, and it turned out really awesome and I used it all the time!

Summary:

total made:kept:worn_often Ratio is 28:28:26.

total made:kept:worn_often Ratio for myself is 22:22:20.

My selfish: non-self sewing ratio was 22:6

And the type of stuff:

• Kids clothing: 5 dresses and 1 skirt
• 3 tops
• 14 dresses
• 5 outerwear

A year with a decent amount of sewing, but focused on quality and design. I am quite happy with my output!

I made self drafted dress!!

When I saw this striped maxi dress from Tabitha, I just loved it – especially that big striped circle skirt. I immediately went to Joanns and bought a springy, linen-y striped fabric. This year I finally got around to making it!!

The fabric is very casual, so i knew this would be a weekend attire. I decided to draft the top from a basic dress block. It turned out slightly wide, but I feel a bit lazy about fixing it, especially after I have already installed snap button on one side of the dress.

I was going to do a zipper down the back, but realized in order to get the stripes to match perfectly, AND install a zipper, will require many seam ripper sessions and a bit of cursing. So I opted to close the top on the side instead. I only had to re-do the front chevron pattern twice to get it perfect! I did a little bit of pattern matching with the side seam – I feel pretty smug about all the matching! When I was sewing this, I kept thinking about how scrumptious it all looked. the top is also lined with a white seersucker fabric and the fabric itself are all interfaced. It feels very comfortable yet very sturdy and structured on top.

The bottom is actually circle skirt. Since its a maxi length, even a 60” wide fabric is not enough to cut out a circle skirt- I decided to attach another stripe of fabric on one side the vertical way – I love the asymmetrical-ness that brings to the right side of the skirt!

Also – I didnt want to disrupt the seams by cutting a seam into the skirt  – so I made placket for the first time in a while – and put snap buttons down the placket. This way, I only need to cut 6-9 inches into the skirt and the stripes are undisturbed.

Lastly, I hate hemming a circle skirt. So instead I made yards of bias and sew that onto the hem instead. So much easier (at least for me!). More fun stripes as well!

I dont think I’ve shown this top here, but this dress goes quite well with this top I made a few years ago – which totally didnt come out as i intended but, I started calling those thick bands design features instead of bugs and it works well with many of my outfits. Also, totally wore this for my WFH day today – its still business enough on top!

Thanks for reading!! This dress made me pretty happy and helped me keep sane through a pretty rough (work) week. I feel really really lucky so far, I get to work from home and still able to have an income safely, my girls are for the most part amazing angels and homeschooling them isn’t all that bad. I hope wherever you are in the world, you are going through this pandemic okay!

Hello! I hope most of you are doing well through this global pandemic. In my little corner of the world, we have a shelter-in-place where school, work and almost everything else has moved into our homes. I feel fortunately that for us, life has not completely stopped, but just slowed down a little. I get a little (okay a lot) more time with the girls, a little bit less time to myself (because homeschool + still a full load of work), lots of cooking (trying to avoid eating take outs) and walking around the neighborhood.

About 2 weeks ago I saw the Aquamarline sweater made by Alison and I fell in love, hard. I really wanted to knit one. Problem was, I had not knitted after the last project, and have already given all my knitting needles away, who went out of the country. But I had some really awesome scrape yarn (many cashmere blends) from a friend that i thought would be perfect for this project, and i wanted to get supplies before everything shuts down (which seemed like the direction we were going towards). So i ran to Joanns, grabbed all the needles I needed, and the day after, bam – shelter in place. I was equally happy with myself for getting all the knitting supples on time as I was with stocking the house with food before the shelter in place. (Side note, Joanns apparently is still open and considered essential service, which, had me raising my eye brows a little but hey, I have enough fabric stash to last me through 5 years of quarantine and if i didnt, i may have considered Joanns essential as well (70% /s). At least they did supply free mask making kits to the public!)

Anyways, i didnt work on any projects besides making masks and this sweater the past 2 weeks. This is such a easy knit, and such a fun knit too. I never thought about combining yarns together to create a marbled look before- but now i might be hooked!!!

I made 2 modification to the pattern – I made the cuff much smaller, as it was still very loose. I also started knitting the neck band ribbing in the round right at when the instruction said to separate necks. I wanted a slight off the shoulder look. I had to re-do the neck band 2 times – it was always looser than i expected. I had to switch down to a size 7 with very tight gauge to get it just right. In the end, the sweater overall came out a little bigger than i expected, but i love the oversized look!!

Here’s all the views of the sweater!

(The yellow and medium grey was scrape from two other sweaters; a dark and light thin grey from thrift shop; black and beige+black + thin fuzz white which made part grey area around my chest and upper arm fuzzy looking from my friend Nat, and the thicker grey yarn for the top part of the sweater in my stash).

The completion of this sweater got me out of my sweatshirt + sweatpants for the past two weeks. And i can tell you, lets hope i can still pull off this outfit after the coronavirus quarantine! Getting those pants on was a struggle! I am grateful that this is my biggest problem in this pandemic so far though.

Also, I might have bought a load of elastics to sew masks because the one spool with 288 yards was the only one that was going to arrive in a week. If you are sewing masks and need some elastics, i can mail you some (US only!). Leave me a comment and I’ll email you to get your address! Hope you are all surviving the pandemic okay out there!!!!

Lastly, above is “instagram” and below is “reality” 🙂 Not too bad, eh?

I usually buy my fabric online, but whenever I visit Joanns, especially the past year, they seem to always have the best knits. I went a few days ago and saw a knit that is thick, comfortable, good recovery and made from mostly rayon!! I had to get 1.5 yard to try it out.

The pattern is lengthened from a basic knit top, again, except i didnt add enough room for the hips as this fabric is not super stretchy for a knit. No prob;em, I just added a little gusset (basically a triangle) on the back seam and now it looks like a design feature! the little skirt is simply a half circle skirt, I added a half circle skirt and then trimmed it down to the length I liked. The fabric does not fray and is a bit thick, so I left the skirt unhemmed.

That’s it, a very simple, quick dress that looks great and is super comfortable. Thank you for reading!

I am so excited about sharing this project with you! I made a cropped trench coat!!

The inspiration for the cropped trench coat is from various cropped trench coats Ive been eyeing after on wendy’s lookbook. I figured that if it looks so fun on her (a petite), it may look good on me.

Ive had this fabric in my stash for a few years, its a cotton gabardine from Crooks Brook that I hunted down and ordered 4 years ago (it was hard to find cotton gabardine!). I wanted to use the same type of fabric as Burberry, though this is a cotton gabardine and repels water a bit, the Burberry fabric is a bit thinner but stiffer. However, its still a very nice weight and feel for a trench coat, I’d highly recommend this source! The color was a bit drearier than I expected, so I left it in my stash for a while. That’s why I decided to use some bright red as a pop!

I used 2 heavily altered patterns – the base of the coat is a cropped and front-altered Burdastyle Talea – as usual. Years of slow alteration evolution made it pretty easy for me to just crop the bodice, as I used the same the altered front of this Talea. The outer caplet thing + collar is an altered I used BurdaStyle trench coat 09/2012. #103,which is what i used for this coat here. I debated whether to make it a true caplet or sleeves, and ended up doing sleeves, making it a more faux caplet.

The inside Is lined with bright red rayon Bemberg lining, it feels really amazing on. Of course, I have to add my usual logo embroidering.

I chose to use 4 pairs of magnet buttons as closures, as the red stuff is making this little cropped trench quite busy already. ITs kind of fun to wear magnet buttons.

After I made this little trench, I couldn’t stop wearing it. There are so many new fun outfits to be had with a new silhouette, I love it.

Those are just a few random ones I have with a bunch of me made dress/skirts – this goes well with pants and sweaters too!!

thank you for reading!

Its the end of the year and I realize I am sooooo behind in my posting of this year’s creations. Let’s see if I can catch up in the next few days!

I got this super thick, cotton sweater knit from fashion fabric a few years ago, and I didnt quite know what to do with it. It felt like it would be too stiff for a sweater, and too thick for a body con. At the end, I decided to make a skater dress. It turned out REALLY well, I’ve been wearing it with boots quite a lot this winter.

The pattern is just a basic knit top, with a slant cut to make it asymmetrical, and I attached a regular circle skirt to it, and then trimmed the hem to make the skirt hem even to the floor. Having a cover stitch made making of this dresss a breath! This thing was simple, easy, fast, comfortable but such a chic dress!

Thank you for reading!!

Hubby loved my red poka dot dress a lot – I decided to make another with more work friendly prints. It’s pretty much the same pattern but longer sleeves. I made it with a rayon crepe and let me tell you- this is one amazing material! It’s crisp, drapery, and cool to the touch. Swishing around in the wind in it is the best!!

I love having a flounce on this material – it is really bouncy. I needed to hang the dress and let it hang for a bit before cutting off some area due to how drapy it is – its also a pretty weight-y material and would pull the flounce down one area more than the other.

I have been wearing this dress to work a ton! I love how comfy it is and now I am on the hunt for more rayon crepe!

As mentioned in previous post, I made a black version of the peasant dress. This one is much more like the original inspiration. It has much more skirt, and asymmetrical gathering, and a longer top. I ran out of fabric at the end, so the ruffle is made from a slightly different rayon.

Not more more to say about it except that I had been wearing ti to death this summer. It is super fun to swish in, and the asymmetry makes me feel curvy and hip-py 🙂 Plus it goes really well with my favorite elephant bag and Greek sandals!