A New Beginning

October? How did that happen?! Somewhere between moving to a new appartement, travelling, dance classes starting, social dance nights starting (with all the meetings coming with the dance-stuff...), being ill, work etc, the blog fell away. Two weeks without a post, that's bad. One month, I figure we're talking revival, right?

So this is a New Beginning of Swingin' it in vintage! Since blogging a bit here and there doesn't seem to work very well for me, I'm going to aspire to a post-scheduale. I feel I have a tendency to get stuck in one thing all the time, so I thought I'd do two posts a week, with different themes. One post around Sunday, showing outfits, vintage finds, fun stuff I've done etc, and one post around Thursday, about creativity (like sewing projects, all sorts of craft, but baking also would fall under this category). What do you guy's think? Does it sound like a plan? Please note the aspire and around, I don't do too well with things I must do, so I'm keeping it more like a plan of intentions than a fixed duty =)

I figured I'd start right here and now! It's Thursday, so it's all about creativity and creations today! A year ago I got the idea that I would sew a coat. A really warm, vintage-inspired wool coat, to be warm but pretty in. I thought about modern patterns, as the style I wanted seemed to be hard to find as a vintage pattern, but then this Vogue pattern from 1952 came up for auction at Tradera:


It was perfect! The princess-seams, the lovely collar, even the size (with a FBA, of course).
The coat in my dreams was green, and I knew just the place to get the fabric: Handelsgillet. Did you know wool in ordinary fabric stores can have as much as 10 % other material, and still be called 100% wool? Horrifying! *shudders* However, people who sew historical clothing sometimes are very picky with the authenticity of their fabrics, so some companies (like Handelsgillet) have specialized in making sure their fabrics keeps to the standards demanded by for example medieval re-enactors.


My fabrics! From the left: 1) The wool. Warm, breathes, relativley thin, heavy. Perfect! =) From Handelsgillet. 2) Interfacing, a woven but fusible interfacing. 3) Interlining, 100% wool, so soft and light I keep picking it up to see that I've not imagined it =) 4) Lining, in a strange colour that shifts between brown, purple and sometimes gray. All the last three fabrics are from Sidenateljén, a local seamstress that sells beautiful fabrics by the meter.

A coat demands way more tailoring skills than I master, so I signed up for an evening sewing class. It's great to have someone show me the trickier parts and hold my hand through the project!


Longtime projects are fun, but sometimes the sewing bug demands instant gratifications. For this skirt, I had the outer skirt already cut out, bought some lining, made some pattern changes and put the whole thing together since Tuesday.


New things for me with this mini-project: lapped zipper, lining, this version of waistband and the back-split. (Above: lapped zipper and covered button, and a so-and-so waistband).


Front view (sould have pressed it better...). I inverted the pleats from how I did them the last time I used this pattern.

I had plans to just machine stitch the lining, but then the machine kept pulling it, so I ended up doing an invisible seam. Quite fun to hand stitch, and I love how it looks! =)

All for today, I'm off to sewing class to figure out toille-changes for the coat. Wish me luck! ; )
Love, Erika