Emergency Winter Sewing

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!



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!



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

[Soundtrack: 'River' by Ibeyi]