One of the injuries sustained to my parka was when I was pregnant with my second child I threw up in an alleyway with such force that I ripped open the lowest buttonhole.

That foetus is now 4 years old and in need of a new coat. Luckily the TN31 has plenty of fabric that can be lovingly repurposed for a quilted jacket for a small guy.

Behold! The Barboursaurus Jacket!

The pattern is the Fibre Mood pattern with some added spikes.

The fabric is bits of my old TN31 and some scraps from other sewing projects.

C loves the coat - it has plenty of room for his toy cars in both pockets.

Because I’ve reused the fabric, it has a lovely patina to it.

Anyway. This is a tuskaft vest from Pom Pom (RIP). The main thing to say about this is that I really like the yarn, which is De Rerum Natura Ulysse. It feels a bit rough but not itchy, and I am a real princess about itchy knits.

This is the first intarsia knitting I’ve done. I didn’t enjoy it. Not in the way that got better as I got better at doing it, it is simply an unpleasant way to knit.

The neck and shoulders are a bit amateur on mine, but looking at everyone else on Ravelry, theirs look a bit crap too so, just a difficult thing get right I guess.

I used the lilac dip rib, which obviously goes perfectly as it is designed to to. One issue I have with these dipped ribs is that the pattern calls for folding the rib in half at the neck, but if I did that I’d lose the dip. So I’ve opted for not folding, but the finish at the neck seam has suffered as a result.

I’m not 100% happy with the fit of this across the shoulders. It could do with being a cm wider. Unclear if that’s my sloppy sewing or the pattern.

Obviously it looks very fun with its little matchy jacket. Well done me.

I’ve loved wearing this with a long sleeved t-shirt underneath it (as it is winter and we are in a fuel crisis, babe). I actually haven’t finished the inner seams yet because I was so keen to wear it and then I forgot. Whoops.

However, when I made this and put it on it was just blah. Not right on me.

So I left it for a bit to marinate… and then hacked the bottom off to make it into a cropped t-shirt.

As a t-shirt I can’t get enough of it. It goes with everything and looks cool. The combination of linen and stretchy ribbing is something I find really irresistible. You get the warm folksiness of a linen gingham with a sporty and unexpected edge.

Here are some photos. I’m also wearing the Eve trousers in this which I’ll write up some other time no doubt.

This is the Megan Nielsen Hovea jacket in Merchant and Mills Rasai Jacquard. I think I was influenced on instagram into making this tbh. It worked out because I have worn it a lot, nearly constantly since I finished it few months ago.

I have a couple of notes on the pattern

I made the cropped version. There are three lengths; cropped, long, and somewhere in the middle. I knew which picture of a jacket I wanted to make but it took me a little googling to work out if I was aiming for a “cropped” jacket or a “normal” length one.

Before I made it I wondered if the pockets were going to be useful at all, and they aren’t. On the cropped version are too shallow to hold anything but sometimes I poke my hands in there.

I’m a tall gal so I lengthened the sleeves an inch so they could be nice and floppy, or cuffed up a bit.

I finished the internal seams by hand to get a neat finish on the bias binding. That took me ages.

Another thing that took ages was creating the bias binding for the exterior edge. This is because I had to deconstruct the jacquard to give me a single layer of fabric. The jacquard is really nice. It is two layers of cotton with some threads running through the centre.

I bought this pattern, and this fabric while I was pregnant as a promise to my future self that one day I would have a waist again and I would make use of that waist for keeping trousers up.

It’s got a side zip and back pockets and turn-ups. Per literally every M&M pattern there is a lot of ease through the thighs.

This pattern was very easy, not least because I used the online class. £50 is a lot to pay for a video, but it’s a very small amount compared to an in-person sewing course. The video is incredibly lovely, really well paced and extremely relaxing to listen to as you work. I hope Merchant and Mills are getting extremely rich off of these online classes because it is obvious how much work they’ve put into them.

The trousers are very comfortable now that I’ve flat felled the inner leg. That seam was extremely itchy when I used a zig-zag finish as suggested. I don’t understand why patterns like this don’t say “maybe do a flat felled seam if you can be bothered”, because the result is always more elevated than a zigzag.

This linen is Jacob’s Check. When I washed it, it went extremely wibbly-wobbly and to my shame I couldn’t be bothered to iron it out so everything is a bit wonky.

I lengthened them by an inch which I’m pleased I did as they’d be a bit small for me otherwise.

I’m going to make a denim pair next probably.

The Onesie

The onesie is for a baby aged 3-6 months, which my baby was once. It no longer fits him because he is, as I keep telling him, such a big boy now yes he is. The fabric was from Cloth House, the body is called “Japanese Wind White”, and the binding is “Japanese Wind Navy”. Those links don’t work at the moment because the website is “closed for Christmas” (lol ok).

This was really fun to sew and my son looked extremely cute in it. This onesie works well in summer but looks a bit strange under trousers because it is so puffy around the tum.

The Jacket

This jacket is reversible and I am obsessed obsessed with this rabbit fabric which I used as a lining. It’s also from Cloth House. The outer fabric is some leftover Japanese seersucker printed with small crosses which I made a vest out of a while back. Using seersucker has given this jacket a crumpled quality which hopefully means I won’t have to iron it because nobody has time for that.

The Trousers

These were great. Fun to sew, very sturdy feeling with lots of room for baby to roll and wiggle around in. I made them using some corduroy from Merchant and Mills leftover from a shirt I made a while back. They appear to have sold out of it. Annoyingly I cut one of the pockets upside down so it has the wrong NAP to the other one 🤦🏻‍♀️. He won’t care I guess. He doesn’t even know he has hands.

I’d like to make these again but also these babies man, they really eat into the sewing time.

On that trip I bought some tencel twill. It has the most lovely drape. It feels very luxurious.

I made another Florence top, but of course I was quite pregnant by the time I finished it. So here we are now, in December, I’ve finally gotten around to photographing it.

Look at her! isn’t she beautiful?

This is the Florence Top. I’m not usually a ruffles person. They’re a bit too fussy for me. Somehow, though, I love this ruffle. January is not your classic a cropped t-shirt making month but I’m 4ish months pregnant and I wanted to make something that I could fit a bump in (albeit with some tactical layering).

I already wore this to work and it’s fair to say several of my colleagues were big fans.

Pattern notes

The pattern was very easy to sew. I think I could get a more even spacing on the ruffle next time because I pinned this above the sewing line instead of on the sewing line so some of the nice evenly spaced small folds became plain old big folds.

I sewed a 12 with a 1 inch length increase in the bodice. I’m happy I did that - most cropped styles without the increase come out too short for me, even when I wear a high-waist trouser.

Fabric and notions

Big surprise in the fabric - it’s wool! Doesn’t she have a lovely drape? She’s so fine, I’ve never seen a wool this lightweight before. A friend of my mother-in-law has a brother who does house clearances, and he cleared the house of a recently deceased Danish woman living in Scotland. The woman had the most incredible stash. I spent a full hour looking through all of it and picked out a bunch of things which I paid for with a donation to the Christie At Macclesfield fund. Most of the fabrics were labelled with the purchase date, price and location. This wool didn’t have any details but judging by the rest of the fabric I’d say this was bought in the early 90s.

Pattern notes

This is the Merchant and Mills Right to Roam Rucksack. I made some Jack Tars for Lachie’s brothers last year but decided I wanted something that put the weight evenly across my back for me.

The bag is smaller than I was expecting, I think because the model in the photos on the M&M website is actually tiny whereas I am big.

It was an easy to follow pattern with some nice bits like the poofy pockets. I’ve used it a bit and it’s lack of structure makes it annoying for using to carry anything remotely bulky, but it is good for my day-to-day carry which is just wallet, keys, phone, water, work pass, headphones.

The straps are unpadded, so you’re not going to want to carry anything heavy or awkward shaped in this.

One thing I dislike about this pattern is the drawstring. It just seems really poorly thought out - I have to secure it with just a knot? This pattern could definitely have included sewing the ends of the drawstring in somewhere. The eyelets for the drawstring are also pain to add in but that’s really about how bad I am at using a hammer than a pattern issue.

Fabric and notions

I used oilskin in navy. Not dry oilskin but proper greasy oilskin. It’s so nice. It is oily and my hands very quickly felt very waterproof, but the patina on the fabric is just gorgeous. It is also very water resistant which is useful for a bag.

I used the barrier lining that Merchant and Mills also sell. This is to stop the things in your bag getting greasy. I had expected this to be kind of plasticky, but it just feels like a normal heavy tightly woven cotton really.

I used leather for the leather bits. I would have preferred not to use leather and initially I thought I could replace it with webbing, but some of the straps are quite narrow (1.3cm) so replacing it with webbing would have been a challenge. At least one person has done this on Instagram so it is possible.

I used the nickel set for the notions. Helpfully, Merchant and Mills sell the hardware set for this so you don’t have to track down all the things you need (you need a lot of hardware for this project)