July Projects Roundup

Welcome to my project roundup newsletter! This is something I'm just starting as a way to organize all my projects in one place so anyone who's interested won't miss a single thing. I hope you enjoy coming along on my sewing journey!

Lemonade Skirt

Personal Sewing

I’ve been steadily working on my embroidery for my test bra, but took a break over the 4th of July holiday weekend to sew a skirt for summer. I'm slowly on a mission to sew my entire wardrobe for a few reasons, fit and fabric selection being the two most important. I chose a wool tartan from my stash for this project, because yes, wool can be a summer fabric. This one is particularly lightweight and I've not had any issues wearing it in the heat of summer.

I have some lingerie pattern reviews on my blog, so I wanted to continue that here with my personal sewing projects. This pattern is the Lemonade Skirt by Evelyne Patterns. She is a French designer, but this particular pattern is available in English from her personal website. Overall, I thought the pattern was really well written and I didn't need to make many alterations. The only things I did were:
1. take in the side seams a little bit
2. change the seam allowances to 5/8" so I could do French seams throughout

I would recommend this pattern for beginner sewists and would consider it a weekend sewing project!

Embroidered Bra Sample

Sewing for Content

This project has been quite the journey! I've been envisioning what this bra would look like for over a year, but with a cross country move and a lot of uncertainty in my life, I didn't have the bandwidth to tackle such a large undertaking until recently. This month I finished the sample bra and I love how it turned out, but there's changes I need to make to the real bra and lessons I learned along the way.

The first thing I improved throughout this practice bra was my shading skills. I am new to embroidery so I had a lot of learning to do. Shading feels like a painterly skill, and I am not a painter. 😂 I wanted the flowers that overlap to have depth and it’s been difficult to make the depth appear realistic working in such a small space with only 3-4 colors. However, I’ve made a ton of improvement and am happy with how the flowers turned out.

Later in the month, I realized the embroidery was taking quite a while and got a little concerned with the time I would need to embroider the actual bra. I went ahead and did a little math and guessed it will take me about 300hrs of embroidery. 😮 There's always a push to be producing something for social media and that makes it really difficult to commit to a project as intricate as this one where I'm going to be doing something so repetitive for hours and hours.....which means my videos will all be very similar so I started playing around with how I edit things.

I focused on smooth transitions between the sections I was embroidering in this video. I really liked how it turned out, but across all platforms it did poorly. This is the part of content creation I find sooo interesting, because I thought it was my best video yet, but the views say otherwise. The nice part is, I have a few more embroidery videos to publish so I can continue to play around with the editing.

That was my last video of the month and since my videos are published on a delay, this is a sneak peak of where I actually am in my project! I finished the embroidery and was so nervous to cut into the silk after spending so much time on it, but I reminded myself this was just a sample.

Because I'm looking for specific notions, some of them are plain white, which meant it was time to break out my dye. The colors turned out pretty close, but I realized my clasp is polyester, meaning neither my acid nor fiber reactive dyes will work. Instead of using 3 different types of dyes (because my back band material is nylon and my boning casing is cotton), I am going to experiment with Rit DyeMore, something I’ve never used.

Overall, the bra fit relatively well, and I learned a lot about sewing with silk. It’s somehow slippery and strong at the same time (at least the organza is anyways) so I need to be careful both cutting and sewing to make sure the seams match up. Because the silk is very stable, there’s not much room for error in terms of fit. Some adjustments need to be made to the cups, but instead of making an entirely new bra, I’m going to try and pin the cups to the underwire casing to get a rough estimate of whether or not I need even more adjustments. I might cave and end up making a second entire bra just to triple check, but I haven’t decided yet.

Until next month,
Sarah