#pattern-review — Public Fediverse posts

A Preview of My First Sewing Pattern

I’m very close to my first sewing pattern release – I’ve been sitting on this secret for a little while now, and I am so ready to finally talk about it.

Something New Is Coming — And I Can’t Wait to Share It

My very first sewing pattern is almost here.

Introducing the Basic Briefster — a women’s underwear pattern designed to be straightforward, well-fitting, and genuinely size-inclusive. We’re talking XS through 5X, with a hip size range of 34 to 54 inches. Because everyone deserves a go-to underwear pattern that actually fits.

A Little Sneak Peek

Before the full release, I wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what the pattern is like to work with. In the reel below, you’ll see me assembling the tiled version of the pattern — that satisfying (and even meditative?) process of printing, trimming, and taping it all together.

If you’ve never worked with a tiled PDF pattern before, don’t worry — the process is more approachable than it looks, and I think seeing it in action will give you a good feel for what’s involved before the pattern drops.

Why Underwear?

Honestly? Because good-fitting underwear is one of those things that makes a huge difference in everyday comfort, and yet it can be surprisingly hard to find — especially across a wide range of sizes. When I set out to design my first pattern, I wanted it to be something genuinely useful. Something you’d come back to again and again.

The Basic Briefster is designed to be just that — a reliable, comfortable foundation piece that you’ll actually want to sew more than once.

What’s Next

The pattern will be available in the near future, and I’ll be sharing all the details — sizing, materials, construction notes, and where to find it — right here when it’s ready.

In the meantime, I’d love to know: are you a tiled pattern person, or do you prefer A0/copyshop printing? Drop a comment below and let me know — it always helps to hear how you work!

Stay tuned. This one’s been a long time coming. 🧵

A Preview of My First Sewing Pattern

I’m very close to my first sewing pattern release – I’ve been sitting on this secret for a little while now, and I am so ready to finally talk about it.

Something New Is Coming — And I Can’t Wait to Share It

My very first sewing pattern is almost here.

Introducing the Basic Briefster — a women’s underwear pattern designed to be straightforward, well-fitting, and genuinely size-inclusive. We’re talking XS through 5X, with a hip size range of 34 to 54 inches. Because everyone deserves a go-to underwear pattern that actually fits.

A Little Sneak Peek

Before the full release, I wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what the pattern is like to work with. In the reel below, you’ll see me assembling the tiled version of the pattern — that satisfying (and even meditative?) process of printing, trimming, and taping it all together.

If you’ve never worked with a tiled PDF pattern before, don’t worry — the process is more approachable than it looks, and I think seeing it in action will give you a good feel for what’s involved before the pattern drops.

Why Underwear?

Honestly? Because good-fitting underwear is one of those things that makes a huge difference in everyday comfort, and yet it can be surprisingly hard to find — especially across a wide range of sizes. When I set out to design my first pattern, I wanted it to be something genuinely useful. Something you’d come back to again and again.

The Basic Briefster is designed to be just that — a reliable, comfortable foundation piece that you’ll actually want to sew more than once.

What’s Next

The pattern will be available in the near future, and I’ll be sharing all the details — sizing, materials, construction notes, and where to find it — right here when it’s ready.

In the meantime, I’d love to know: are you a tiled pattern person, or do you prefer A0/copyshop printing? Drop a comment below and let me know — it always helps to hear how you work!

Stay tuned. This one’s been a long time coming. 🧵

Thurs. Feb. 12, 2026: Theatrical News

Thursday, February 12, 2026

Waning Moon

Jupiter Retrograde

Snowing and cold

You can read the latest over on Gratitude & Growth.

A job listing landed on my desk yesterday, wanting 1-3 articles per week at $60/each. Stop underpaying your writers, people, and stop acting like your exploitation is an offer I’m going to jump to take. Especially when there is research involved. Research takes time and needs to be paid.

I’ve been somewhat following the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case, and I feel terrible for the family.

The whole FAA trying to shut down airspace around El Paso, TX for 10 days was just – I mean, what new stupid and illegal thing was the administration trying to do? Airspace hasn’t been shut down since 9/11. And then it’s claimed it’s because the DOD can’t tell the difference between party balloons and drones? Not even this administration is that incompetent. They were about to do something illegal and were caught out.

Congress needs to get its thumb out of its collective ass and do its job. Schumer and Jeffries are busy still selling us out and need to be replaced.

I managed to layer the chapter of BETTING MAN on which I’d been working, and then finish it. So that felt good.

Did a bunch of admin, did a bunch of housework. Figured out the sewing plan for the next few months. One of the things I want to do over the weekend is to make a pattern from a top I really like that I sewed years ago, but the pattern has gone astray, and I don’t have another like it. The top itself is now too small (I made it in high school), but I took measurements, and I think I can do it. It’s a very easy piece, if I get the measurements right.

Measure twice, cut once.

I found an old pattern that’s a stylish, classic dress that is only a single pattern piece – with pockets. You KNOW I’ll be making that up in various fabrics.

Did some research reading in the afternoon. Repurposed some leftovers to make something new for dinner. Read in the evening.

I got some good news near the end of the day yesterday. The Athena Project is going to feature my play THE WOMEN ON THE BRIDGE as one of the two plays in March 16’s Read ‘n Rant. They featured JUST A DROP last May, and it was a great experience. I have the same dramaturg this year, and we work well together, so I’m looking forward to it. I knew it was one of the four finalists and I would get to work with a dramatist, but it’s been chosen as one of the two featured plays for discussion, and I’m delighted.

THE WOMEN ON THE BRIDGE is the play that was inspired by the Edvard Munch painting of the same name in the Clark Art Institute’s exhibit. I started writing it in the Nightwood Creatryx Unit, then worked on it in the Boiler House Residency and finished the first draft during the Dramatist Guild’s END OF PLAY program. It’s gone through several rounds of revisions since, and is ready for more outside eyes.

I also heard from a colleague who runs a theatre in upstate NY that they are still considering the two full-lengths they requested last year, but would like me to submit to their one-act festival. So I will get that out this morning.

That perked me up, after having a couple of days that were rather depressing.

I slept reasonably well, and woke up a little after 4 AM, which is better than waking up at 3 AM, but I’d rather wake up around 5, the usual time.

On today’s agenda: the online meditation group, signing off on the materials for WOMEN, submitting the requested one-act, #FreelanceFriends chat, writing, library meetings. So it’s a busy day, but the good kind of busy.

Have a good one!

Thurs. Feb. 12, 2026: Theatrical News

Thursday, February 12, 2026

Waning Moon

Jupiter Retrograde

Snowing and cold

You can read the latest over on Gratitude & Growth.

A job listing landed on my desk yesterday, wanting 1-3 articles per week at $60/each. Stop underpaying your writers, people, and stop acting like your exploitation is an offer I’m going to jump to take. Especially when there is research involved. Research takes time and needs to be paid.

I’ve been somewhat following the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case, and I feel terrible for the family.

The whole FAA trying to shut down airspace around El Paso, TX for 10 days was just – I mean, what new stupid and illegal thing was the administration trying to do? Airspace hasn’t been shut down since 9/11. And then it’s claimed it’s because the DOD can’t tell the difference between party balloons and drones? Not even this administration is that incompetent. They were about to do something illegal and were caught out.

Congress needs to get its thumb out of its collective ass and do its job. Schumer and Jeffries are busy still selling us out and need to be replaced.

I managed to layer the chapter of BETTING MAN on which I’d been working, and then finish it. So that felt good.

Did a bunch of admin, did a bunch of housework. Figured out the sewing plan for the next few months. One of the things I want to do over the weekend is to make a pattern from a top I really like that I sewed years ago, but the pattern has gone astray, and I don’t have another like it. The top itself is now too small (I made it in high school), but I took measurements, and I think I can do it. It’s a very easy piece, if I get the measurements right.

Measure twice, cut once.

I found an old pattern that’s a stylish, classic dress that is only a single pattern piece – with pockets. You KNOW I’ll be making that up in various fabrics.

Did some research reading in the afternoon. Repurposed some leftovers to make something new for dinner. Read in the evening.

I got some good news near the end of the day yesterday. The Athena Project is going to feature my play THE WOMEN ON THE BRIDGE as one of the two plays in March 16’s Read ‘n Rant. They featured JUST A DROP last May, and it was a great experience. I have the same dramaturg this year, and we work well together, so I’m looking forward to it. I knew it was one of the four finalists and I would get to work with a dramatist, but it’s been chosen as one of the two featured plays for discussion, and I’m delighted.

THE WOMEN ON THE BRIDGE is the play that was inspired by the Edvard Munch painting of the same name in the Clark Art Institute’s exhibit. I started writing it in the Nightwood Creatryx Unit, then worked on it in the Boiler House Residency and finished the first draft during the Dramatist Guild’s END OF PLAY program. It’s gone through several rounds of revisions since, and is ready for more outside eyes.

I also heard from a colleague who runs a theatre in upstate NY that they are still considering the two full-lengths they requested last year, but would like me to submit to their one-act festival. So I will get that out this morning.

That perked me up, after having a couple of days that were rather depressing.

I slept reasonably well, and woke up a little after 4 AM, which is better than waking up at 3 AM, but I’d rather wake up around 5, the usual time.

On today’s agenda: the online meditation group, signing off on the materials for WOMEN, submitting the requested one-act, #FreelanceFriends chat, writing, library meetings. So it’s a busy day, but the good kind of busy.

Have a good one!

My grandmother taught me to sew. Or at least, she felt strongly that it was something that I (a girl child) ought to know how to do. She taught me hand sewing techniques, replacing buttons, repairing seams, re-binding buttonholes, and applying patches to the knees of my trousers (which, due to my disappointingly unfeminine inclination to spend most of my playground time on my knees playing marbles, never stayed intact very long). She taught me basic embroidery stitches – chain stitch and silk stitch and ladder stitch and blanket stitch, all of which genuinely *would* come in useful, though I resented them at the time, when I learned how to suture as a veterinary student and realised I knew all of these patterns already. (A word to the wise medical or veterinary student in training – when someone is mid-way through a tortured explanation of how to create a Ford Interlocking Suture pattern, exclaiming loudly “Oh! It’s just blanket stitch!” isn’t necessarily going to make you best friends with the demonstrating surgeon…) 

What she did only grudgingly, for very short periods and under extremely close supervision, was allow me to sit at her precious sewing machine. I got as far as understanding how to wind a bobbin, and thread the machine, and do basic straight and zigzag seams, but never really got the chance to make anything complicated enough to start to learn from my experience. Grandma died when I was in my first year at university, and sadly I don’t know what became of her sewing machine in the resulting house clearance. It was a couple of years after I graduated, in desperation at the dismal choices and ridiculous prices of pre-made curtains, that I bought the first machine of my own. 

What I really should have done, in the absence of Grandma to teach me properly, is taken some lessons – and if you’re at around this point in your sewing machine journey, I heartily recommend this approach to you. I know there are video tutorials of everything on YouTube but – personally at least – I find them almost useless for sewing things. I can just never see what I need to see, you can’t get a sense of *feel* at all, and frankly the people demonstrating them talk at about a third of the speed of a normal intelligent human and the whole thing just makes me want to scream. What I did was buy a good book (you should definitely do this too, and the good book you should buy first is the Readers Digest Complete Guide to Sewing, second hand, in absolutely any edition you can get your hands on cheaply and conveniently) and started experimenting. Things with nice easy straight lines and right angles first – curtains, cushion covers, tote bags, and later, with a little more confidence, roman blinds. And eventually (not least because I was very much by this point buying beautiful fabrics at a much faster rate than I had any plan to use them) I decided to try my hand at dressmaking. 

In over ten years of making my own clothes, on and off, obviously I’ve got better at the technical stuff – though actually, if you follow the instructions carefully in a modern pattern the chances of getting a new technique right first time are pretty high. I used to describe myself as a rubbish seamstress but actually I’m just a slow one – the results of my dressmaking efforts in terms of finish are pretty good (better than most retail garments, more of which later), it just takes me a whole weekend to make something that the competitors on the Sewing Bee manage to make up in less than half a day. 

The things I’ve really learned though, aren’t about choosing the right stitch length or tension or even about the absolutely bastardingly-technical 3-D curve matching problem that is sleeve insertion. 

I’ve learned that dress sizes are meaningless – and that more importantly, the ‘right’ size for a garment, the one that will flatter you and you will enjoy wearing most, isn’t the smallest one you can get the zip done up on without a fight. Clothing patterns are designed with two sorts of ‘ease’ (that’s to say fabric allowances in excess of the body dimensions you’re expecting to put the garment on). The first (and most obvious) is ‘wearing ease’, the extra space in the back of shirts, for example, that mean you can move your arms forwards, and the extra puff in a sleeve-head that means you can move your arms at all. It’s what makes something a wearable piece of clothing, and not a straightjacket.  The other is ‘pattern ease’, the thing that actually defines the shape of the garment – it’s where the difference lies between a body-skimming design and a garment designed to float loosely over the wearer’s form. 

This ‘ease’ means most people can actually zip themselves into garments one or even two sizes smaller than the one that would fit them best. And many people (especially women, who are socialised to invest a ridiculous amount of their self-worth into the size on a garment label) are wearing clothes too small for them for exactly this reason. It’s time to get over hangups about label sizes. If you try something on and it’s not quite *right* somehow, try the next size up. If the number on the label upsets you that much, cut it out!

I’ve learned the sheer amount of  labour that goes into making even the simplest piece of clothing. With the exception of machine knitting (and even machine knits need their seams finished by hand) every single garment you buy has been assembled by hand by someone sitting at a sewing machine just like I do. Statistically, probably a woman, probably earning pitiful piece-work pay in awful, loud, dusty, miserable working conditions somewhere in the developing world. This can still be true of expensive garments of course, but (ignoring the other awful costs in terms of waste and pollution and so on, which we shouldn’t ignore either) the ‘fast fashion’ phenomenon is entirely built on the exploitation of garment industry workers. 

It’s no surprise then that most retail garments are just plain badly made. Pick up something you own and turn it inside out; look at the seams, see how many trailing threads you can find. Compare (precisely) the lengths of the sleeves, and the diameter of the trouser legs. Look at how the buttons are attached. Look for seam reinforcements, particularly in the crotch of trousers (a rare thing to find these days).  All this will make the garment fit less well, wash less well, and wear out faster. None of these things matter to fashion retailers of course, you bought this one, after all, and shortly (sooner than you think) you’ll no doubt be along to buy another. 

I have learned not to skip processes (but definitely to cut corners). Garment making isn’t a process that starts with cutting out and ends with hemming. It’s a process that starts with washing, drying and ironing your uncut fabric – absolutely essential if you ever expect to need to wash the item once it’s made (yes, this includes curtains and blinds and cushion covers). I buy some unusual fabrics (particularly West African wax resist prints) and washing these vividly-dyed cottons fills me with fear every single time. One of these days I will find a fabric that I will ruin completely in a 40C machine wash – but when I do, however sad it will be, it will be better than having spent several days making a dress out of it and then ruining *that* the first time I wash it. Most new fabrics (particularly natural fibres like cottons and linens) will shrink between 10-15% the first time you wash and iron them.

The other process that sewists tend to be tempted to neglect is seam finishing. The first few garments I made, I settled for cutting the raw edges of my seams with pinking shears. This zig-zag cut finish gives some resistance to fraying but the fabric will start to unravel eventually. A proper seam finish either requires making encased seams like french seams where the raw edges are completely hidden, or finishing the cut edges with a zigzag stitch, by hand overcasting, or if you’re one of those sorts of wizards, using an overlocker. In all of these cases (except if you’re a serious overlocker user and brave enough to use it for all-in-one work like commercial garment makers generally do – at the risk of making mistakes that cannot be corrected by unpicking), properly finishing your edges means running each seam through the sewing machine at least once if not twice or three times more (for instance, if you’re making a solid trouser seam you might want to zig-zag the cut edge, then press the seam over and topstitch it down twice (have a look at the seam on a pair of jeans, many of which use this approach). It adds time, and you’re working slowly already, and you just want the garment finished so you can wear it… I know, I know. You will be very grateful that you took the time when you have something that withstands wearing and washing well enough to justify the time you spent making it. 

(As for cutting corners… don’t neglect seam clipping. It can seem scary, but the corners on your collars and plackets will never look right if you aren’t brave about this.)

I keep my clothes forever now. Not just the ones I’ve made, but the ones I buy, too (which is very few). I wear them until the fabric wears thin and the cuffs fray, and then I keep wearing them. I patch and repair and reinforce seams as they show signs of unraveling. There is nothing in this world more comfortable and comforting to wear than a pair of jeans or a sweatshirt worn soft with age and love and use, which has conformed itself perfectly over the years to the form of you. 

I’ve never understood fashion, really. But I do love my clothes – the bright, beautiful, sometimes over the top patterns and colours and textures that just make me smile – and what I learned at my sewing machine was, I guess, to let them love me back. 

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https://loreandordure.com/2024/04/02/a-stitch-in-time-lessons-from-my-sewing-table/

#clothing #diy #family #fashion #handmade #history #patternReview #quilting #sewing #skills