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Mood Fabric's free pattern archive is impressively large and I thought I'd test a few out! I'm in the opinion that you get what you pay for, and you should expect to do some extra work if the cost is nothing, but I was willing to take the plunge. I'm real bad at drafting with negative ease in mind. Giving up and relying on a professional to do it for me would yield better results, I figured. Simple tanks and tees should be impossible for someone to screw up, given that they aren't me.
(All following garments were constructed using an overlocker, all hems were zig-zagged and all bindings were topstitched on a regular sewing machine).
Here's a fun thing about me: I experience choice paralysis when it comes to my projects. I often agonize about which little details to include or leave out because I, conversely to many sewists' habits, normally resolve to only make one of any non-basic garment. Meaning whatever view I make has to have the optimal wearability, or it's probably going in the trash.
A coverall jumpsuit is just one of those things I'd feel weird making and owning multiple of. But I can see why a person would want more than one. Sometimes it's too hot and you don't want to roll up your cuffs, you'd rather have short sleeves to begin with. Sometimes you want to do the cool street style thing where you tie the sleeves around your waist and wear it like regular pants. So I took all that into account and made a convertible pants-to-shorts, short-to-long sleeve jumpsuit.
Or I would have, except I decided last minute to keep the top and bottom separate garments. More on why, later. It's a matching set, not a jumpsuit. Or it is a jumpsuit, just in two pieces. It's everything. It's nothing. It's art. It's... something or another.
June is not the month a person would want to wear wool in my corner of the Earth, but it is the month in which my mother was born and she has shown to appreciate knitwear, so... a sweater she gets! The chilly season isn't that far away.
Even though I am not much of a dress or skirt person, a simple pencil skirt pattern or sloper is an excellent thing to have on hand when inspiration hits. And it hit me twice with this cotton stretch sateen dress and denim skirt. Adding a bodice and then a center placket were both cinches.
I elected to use a commercial pattern to practice following other people's instructions. I probably didn't need to settle for something as easy as this pencil skirt from McCall's, style 8051 (a reprint of style 3830) but why not, I figured. I get tired of drawing and cutting tracing paper sometimes!
Do you ever get the urge to do something that doesn't make any sense, just to see if you can? Does it skip the denial stage, because you've already admitted to yourself that it's a bad idea, but you want to push forward anyway?
As a purposefully self-indulgent, impractical, not-for-everyday-wear garment, I believe it goes even further than #SewFrosting. It's not suitable for wearing at any occasion or time of day or really ever at all!
