Sewing project no. 2

Yesterday I took the time to finish my second sewing project ever, FINALLY!!!!
I started this project in March, when we went on vacation in Fitou, France, where I was allowed to spread out all my tools and fabric  in the beautiful dining room of our friends Christine and Hagen. At this point I thought that maybe I could manage to finish the whole project during our holidays, but in the end I couldn't even start to actually sew because it took me so long to prepare everything and cut out the fabric. 

8 weeks later, my second self made garment is done and I'm proud as can be. 

In case you wonder where my sewing project no. 1 has gone, I haven't even blogged about this one yet, as I have no pictures of it. It's a very nice skirt, which I like a lot, but I'll show this one another time. 

For sewing project no. 2 I decided to sew a kimono or dressing gown. I wanted to have one for quite a while, for these days, when it's not really cold or wintery outside, more like spring time and you want to throw on something light in the morning when it's still a bit freezing. I started looking at online shops and also went to several stores in town, but I couldn't manage to find anything that looked the way I wanted it to. So when I decided to stop buying new clothes for one whole year in January (yes, another blogpost waiting to be written), I thought I should start sewing again with something easy, losely fitting, so that it wouldn't be noticeable when I made a mistake or the fit wouldn't be perfect because of my amateur skills :) 

Right from the beginning I noticed that I had chosen the wrong fabric, or maybe not the wrong fabric, but one that was too difficult to sew with, at least for me and my lacking experience. The material had a bit of stretch and was VERY light, which resulted in it slipping away and deforming in every direction possible when I tried to transfer the pattern on it and later cut the pieces out. Once I had started to sew, my sewing machine wouldn't transport the fabric properly, so that it would end up pulling together the yarn and fabric in one messy bunch of stitches, which caused a lot of pleats along the stitching line. After some time, I figuerd it out a bit and a lot of the seams aren't visible in the finished gown, but there are still some pieces, especially in the center front part of the gown, where you can see a lot of wrinkles or pleats where there should be none. But again, this doesn't bother me a lot, because I will wear this garment only at home, so not a lot of people will ever see this garment at all :) 

Before I show my self made kimono/ dressing gown, I want to tell you where I got the sewing pattern from, as I found it very helpful and easy to sew with, even as a beginner with very little experience. I chose The Buchanan from gatherkits.com (http://gatherkits.com/shop/product/the-buchanan), which came with a very detailed instruction booklet. I you like the fabrics shown on their site, you can also order a complete sewing kit with pattern, booklet, fabric and other materials. My next sewing project will be The Red Botanical dress. 

So at last, here comes a picture of my new, self made dressing gown, which I like a lot :)