Katherine from @sewblooms on Instagram generously provided Megan and me with some beautiful fabric she bought on her recent holiday in Bali. She texted us with a photo of the bolts of fabric and we chose the one we wanted. You can see that I drew a red arrow on the one I wanted!

They are rayon and very drapey and you can see that they are from the same pattern family. She bought us 3 metres each, which is quite a lot of fabric.

Katherine immediately made herself a pair of self-drafted culottes and a lovely gathered top, Megan made trousers and a vest and I… fiddled about! I didn’t want to have much fabric left over so thought I’d make the MILAN AV-JC zero waste trousers (pattern is available at https://zerowastepatterndatabase.wordpress.com/2020/03/01/act-trousers/). These trousers take a scant metre of fabric so I knew I’d have plenty to make a top. But which top?

I was waiting for inspiration when the latest issue of Fibremood was released, and although I am an insider and saw all the patterns a few weeks ago, it wasn’t until I saw everyone’s makes that I realised that the Odyna shirt with the big sleeves would be perfect. I made the shirt with the regular sleeves first, so I knew that the fit would be good, and then set about making it from this precious fabric.

I had a tiny amount of fabric left over and briefly thought about putting some pockets on to the front of the trousers – they have back pockets but none in the front. I desisted as I do have an unfortunate habit of putting my hands in pockets and I can hear my mother telling me off!

I felt that the light colour was cream or off white and found what I thought would be matching thread, but it didn’t look right, so I investigated the thread stash

I chose the top thread even though these both look very similar on the fabric. Here it looks like a cream colour but it is in fact taupe or even “greige”.

I found the perfect vintage buttons in my stash – once again thanks to my mother. I always smile because she frequently removed buttons by just cutting them off and I’m often examining the fabric to see if I can remember the make.

Here are my fit photos and they look pretty ok, so i duly announced that I had finished – even though the trousers weren’t yet hemmed

I had a couple of days to spare before our meetup, so hemmed the trousers, gave everything a final press and relaxed. Then I blogged the other version of this shirt and noticed that the shoulders looked a bit wide. I re-examined the photos from this set and thought they looked ok, so didn’t panic. The morning of our catchup I got dressed and looked in the mirror and decided that the shoulders looked saggy and I couldn’t live with them, so this is me half an hour before I needed to leave home.

Had I had more time I would have removed the sleeves, reduced the width of the shoulders and reinserted the sleeves. I’m ashamed to say that I just took 2cms off the width of the seam. This means that the sleeves are a bit shorter, but I felt much happier.

We met in Kings Park as usual and had a lovely time taking photos. I thought you would appreciate these candid shots with the beautiful Eucalyptus caesia, or Silver Princess gum in the background.

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and then we had to do the seated photos

whilst we were sitting about we attracted the attention of three magpies – they clearly are used to being fed and were begging. They got very close and did lots of warbling as they looked for handouts. This is why wildlife shouldn’t be fed. Please note the sophisticated tripod – my shibori book which I used to prop up my phone.

I wanted to style these two garments with other things but I ran out of time, however I wore the shirt with my Pattern Union Hannah culottes to a catch up with a friend. I like this combo too.

Please note: I cannot pull off a French tuck!

This was such a lovely challenge and I am so grateful that Katherine thought of us whilst she was on holiday and now we all have a souvenir!

My son appeared with Miss G today and she wanted to do some sewing. I felt it was high time Daddy did it with her and he certainly rose to the challenge. This is the introductory video, showing that Tom has forgotten everything about sewing with a machine! There are four more photos as we follow his skill development with this one session.