Sewing for cheats

I’m not really a floral person and tend to stick to plain fabrics and block colours. It’s not that I don’t like pretty prints and fancy frills, I just have trouble translating them into a look I feel comfortable in. Sticking with wardrobe staples means never having to think too much about what goes together at the same time as struggling to open my eyes at 7am* each morning. Having a wardrobe full of grey, black and pale pink means I can dress myself in the dark and know I won’t attract any strange looks at work (to be honest, in my office I could probably rock up in pyjamas and no-one would notice – it’s all men apart from me).

Sometimes, just sometimes, I see something I absolutely have to have. You see, I love things that are a little bit different, things that make you look again and think “Hey, that’s clever”. When I found the 1960s dress kit (which sadly didn’t work out) I began wondering if such things (i.e. mail order clothing kits) were still around today and then I stumbled upon Cloth Kits and this skirt.

The designs at Cloth Kits are, in my view, really simple, basic and incredibly expensive. It’s the fabrics that stand out and when I saw this Nana Jigsaw skirt, I simply had to have it. The fabric design is from Mini Moderns and a quick search yielded nothing in way of shops selling fabric by the metre apart from Cloth Kits who sell it for £29/m!  So more searching of the Cloth Kits site saw that they were selling a seconds version of the skirt kit for a much lower price. The kit comes with a pattern pieces printed onto a sheet of fabric ready to cut out and sew together along with instructions, zip, lining and thread. The facings of this design have a really cute wood effect print and on the seconds version one of the facings is blank. Oh, check out the pattern matching on the centre back seam – wholly down to Cloth Kits’ attention to detail and not my own.

I feel a bit of a fraud for buying this skirt kit when I’m perfectly capable of cutting and sewing my own version from a pattern and it was way more expensive than any other sewing project and probably even cost more than a shop bought skirt. Had I seen this skirt in a shop, I would have bought it regardless of the price because I love the print so much. And the easy, hassle free mid-week sewing fix was worth the expense so I won’t beat myself up over how much I paid.

*I know that 7am is probably not early for many of you but it is for me. I need my beauty sleep.

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