My Sewing Blog

Yet another post about a sale! I decided to do a 20% discount for Black Friday, through till Monday. Things have been dead in my shop over the last six weeks or so. August and September were quite good months and at one point I hardly had any stock left, but during October I think I only had one sale. November has been quiet too up till now. I sold an item last week, finally hitting 40 sales! I had another sale yesterday when I started my Black Friday sale so I'm now at 41 sales. I'm still unsure about whether to continue with this business. Sometimes I feel quite positive about it, but other times, like where there are no sales and I still have a ton of credit card debt, I feel like it's pointless. Any new ideas I have involve me having to spend money on new/different fabrics, so they're not worth pursing at this point because I can't afford it. I can't even afford to sew any personal projects for myself at the moment. I think my plans for now are to try an...

I decided to have a 10% off sale on my cloth pads to celebrate the Women's Environmental Network's Environmenstrual Campaign. This is my first ever sale! I've sold two things so far, but who knows if it's because of the sale or not.  There are more discounts from other companies  here  on the WEN website of you're looking for a bargain!

I haven't updated here in about a month. I haven't had much to post about though. I think I'm still a bit burnt out after all the summer sewing I did. The weather hasn't been great either. Even though it's warm inside my workshop I don't always feel like trekking through the rain or cold to get there. I'm actually thinking about bringing my sewing machine inside to make a new batch of cloth pads. I still haven't finished the sweatshirts I started, mainly because it involves re-threading the overlocker and I don't like doing that! I need to make an effort though because it's sweatshirt weather now. I uploaded a few things to my shop earlier this week. It's always disappointing when you upload new stuff and it gets zero views. It might be that it takes a bit of time for the items to make it into the search results or something. I also uploaded some more cloth pads about two weeks ago. I've been selling a few things here and there, but ove...

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 ...