9 January 2015

Emergency Winter Sewing

Snuggly sweatshirt Coco dress - Tilly and the Buttons sewing pattern Snuggly sweatshirt Coco top - Tilly and the Buttons sewing pattern

Are you cold? I am. It's freezing in London! I did some emergency sewing over the holidays and now have two snuggly sweatshirt Cocos to keep me warm - one top and one dress. The fabrics, which I bought from Goldhawk Road, are super soft, thick and squidgy, with fleecy insides. I may look like the Michelin man in them, but I don't care - I feel so snug and smug!

Snuggly sweatshirt Coco top - Tilly and the Buttons sewing pattern

It was great to find that the Coco sewing pattern works so well with sweatshirt knit fabric – the simplicity of the design looks great as a sweatshirt top or dress, and the pattern includes enough ease to work well with low stretch material. I did, however, make a few simple adjustments to account for the thickness of the fabric and its shrinkable nature – namely, deepening the funnel neck piece to allow it to roll sufficiently, and lengthening the hemline. I’ll go into these in a bit more detail in the next post, along with some tricks I figured out along the way to make sweatshirt fabric easier to work with...


I also decided to taper the side seams on the skirt part of the dress version, making it straighter than the usual slightly A-line shape. There wasn’t any particular reason for doing this with sweatshirt fabric, I just fancied a change, and a couple of people had asked me how to do it - so here’s how. Simply redraw the side seam line on the front dress pattern piece, with a slight curve from just below the hip going into a straight line down to the hem. Square off the bottom corner into a right angle so the side seams will match up in a straight line when you sew them together. Repeat on the back dress pattern piece, making sure the new lines are the same length. And that’s it!

Snuggly sweatshirt Coco dress - Tilly and the Buttons sewing pattern

These two garments are now on constant rotation in my wardrobe until the season changes!

[Soundtrack: 'River' by Ibeyi]