My Sewing Blog

I counted up all the things I've cut out. There was over a hundred! Okay, lots of them are cloth pads, or at least the topper parts of cloth pads. I'll need to get some more flannel for the wing parts and probably some more plain white PUL in order to finish them. I have quite a lot of fitted nappies cut out but the fabrics I need to complete them are quite expensive, so I probably won't finish them for a while, unless I can think of a cheaper way to make them. I'm working on the pocket nappies that I have cut out first because I have all the stuff for them. Or I did. I just ran out of elastic. I had a small roll of it! I've also used up 4 1000m spools of white thread since I started too. I need to finish the last all-in-one that's ready to sew but I'm still working up the courage to do that! I have several more cut out but again I need some more stuff to finish them. My plan is to finish up everything I possibly can with what I have here before I buy any ne...

School is back and I have two taking exams so it's going to be a lot of work. As home educators it also costs us around £100 per exam, so it's going to be expensive too. I won't be able to spend hours in my work shop now. I'm glad I made my goal of making 50 items in August though! I think I made about 68 in the end. I thought this month I'd set a goal of doing something sewing related for at least 30 minutes a day. I have quite a lot of odd bits and pieces cut out. There are nappy cuts, cloth pads and some baby trousers. Cut out pieces are pretty much useless and have no value so I really need to get them sewn up so I can sell them. I have a lot of money to pay back. There seems to be way more stuff than I remember cutting out. Maybe I've been cutting things out in my sleep?! I think there are 8 embroidered nappies, a few I abandoned because I wasn't happy with them but looking at them now, there's nothing much wrong with them. I can sell them as se...

I worked on this today. It's the first garment I've sewn in ages! I've been working with tiny things lately so I wasn't used to the bulk of a full sized item of clothing. I'm not finished yet but I'm really not happy with it. Firstly, I've messed up with the stripes. They don't match up. I remember cutting it out and making sure that the stripes on the front and back would match but I don't remember what I did with the sleeves. I thought maybe it was something to do with the raglan sleeves. I'm not a fan of raglan sleeves normally. One seam seems to match up pretty well but the others are completely off. It's disappointing and I don't have any more of this fabric left to try and recut them. I had a bit of trouble getting the pieces to match but I think it might have been my cutting since I'm using a knit fabric. I had huge trouble with the under arm seams. They don't match at all. I could have matched them if started pinnin...

I thought I'd make a new post for this since the last post had got quite long. There will be more crappy phone pics here, sorry. I've spent most of the day working on some Opulent Monsters AIOs. They are HARD. I knew from reading the instructions that attaching the inner sections together was going to be difficult and I wasn't looking forward to giving it a go. The first one I basted in was tricky but I thought it looked okay, no tucks or folds or anything. Once it's basted you're supposed to overlock it. That ruined it. It's really hard to see what's going on with my overlocker so it ended up with loads of tucks and looked terrible. I ended up unpicking all the overlocking and starting again. This time I decided that after basting it, I'd stitch a line of permanent stitching at 1/4 of an inch and then overlock. It looked okay after I did the line of stitching but I chickened out with the overlocking. I did a zigzag over it instead, because who is going ...

Earlier this week I said that if I'd had no sales by Sunday I'd call it quits. It's Sunday night and I haven't sold anything. Most of the 12 nappies I uploaded don't even have a single view, so it seems that this isn't working. I have a pretty big problem though. After floundering around at the start trying to make things with very little money, I decided to see if I could get a credit card. Even though I don't have a proper job or income, one of the banks gave me a credit card. So I bought a bunch of PUL, flannel for some new cloth pads and other bits and bobs. All the time I was ordering this I was calculating how much profit I could make etc and everything seemed like it would work out fine. But if no one is going to buy anything I've made, how am I going to pay the money back to my credit card? At this point, even though I've made loads of items, I don't think I've made enough of them to cover the credit card bill, even if people were buy...

I think last time I updated I'd completed 33 items. Over the last couple of days I've finished 29 more cloth pads, which takes the total to 62 items made this month! I did say I was going to make some fitted nappies, AIOs and other stuff but I haven't got round to that yet. Most of the stuff is cut out for them so I might make a start on them. I think I might sew up the pocket nappies I embroidered recently though. I really need to stop making pocket nappies because I've hardly sold any. They're obviously not very popular items. The last pocket nappies I put in my shop (the robots and dog ones) have hardly had any views, and almost none of the new ones I uploaded have had any views yet. Views and visits are picking up a bit though, but still no sales yet. I need to pay my credit card bill for this month... Luckily I had a bit of cash set aside for that. I'll add some new photos here tomorrow once the new cloth pads are washed and dried. Maybe I'll have fin...

A bit of a late update... Total for week three was a measly 11 cloth pads. It feels like it should be more. There are about 30 pads in a half finished state but I actually only completed 11. So I'm on 33 out of 50 items now. I spent the last few days taking photos and uploading them. My cloth pad photos look horrible for some reason. I think I want to retake them. My shop now has 32 items in it, which is the most it's ever had. I feel very disillusioned though. I've been working constantly for around three weeks and all I have to show for it is 33 items. There's about £400 worth of stock in my shop now. Minus roughly 10% for all the fees, so that's about £360. That won't even cover what I put on my credit card to buy all the materials I've bought recently. Once I complete another batch of items then maybe I'll start to make a profit, but it's not very motivating. It doesn't feel worth it. Just to make it even less motivating, I woke up th...