Next to the latest edition of Angling Times in my local newsagent, I saw a copy of
Ottobre Design. It's a title I'd not heard of before – a Finnish
sewing magazine with bold, contemporary fashions for women. It looked
positively other-worldly up there on the top shelf next to the
mundane publications either side, a cheerful middle-aged woman with
short white blond hair and trendy geek specs wearing a bright yellow
zip-up jacket on the glossy front cover. A quick flick through and it
went straight into my shopping basket.
I love that Ottobre's models are
healthy-looking women of all ages and sizes. There are so many
designs in this issue I'd like to make: the Art Teacher linen dress;
Sammalikko printed leggings, Clean Lines techno jersey dress; but I
started with the New Bohéme jersey tunic, mostly because I already
had some suitable fabric so could get going straight away.
When I turned to the pull-out pattern
sheet in the back I realised it was not going to be such a quick
make.
Confronted with an unfathomable mess of different coloured
lines I did my best to follow and trace out the green line, while
pausing to have a moan about it on Twitter. Angela came to my rescue for future pattern tracings directing me to
Melissa Fehr's blog
where she recommends using a tracing wheel with the pattern map
placed on top of a piece of paper laid on a carpet or other
soft surface so the tracing wheel has something to get its teeth into! This would've made the whole procedure easy-peasy and
I'll be using this technique for future pattern tracings.
I used a knitted woolly textured fabric bought from the fabric stall at Worthing's Wednesday market, it has plenty of ease for this design and I wanted to make something that would be warm to wear. Ottobre's sewing instructions are clear
and easy to follow and the tunic came together very quickly. It
looked great on my mannequin but when I tried it on I could only just
squeeze my arms into it. It looked and felt awful on me. I realised I must
have followed one of the wrong lines in tracing the sleeve, so I
lopped off the too-tight arms and just had enough fabric left to cut
some wider sleeves (though a bit short of the required length). I
unpicked the side seams then sewed on the re-cut sleeves Cappuccino dress
style. I'm still annoyed that I drafted them out wrong but the
finished dress is very wearable. Sleeve error apart it's a good
looking garment and armed with a tracing wheel I will definitely attempt a second (third,
fourth?) outfit from this ace magazine.
