(Tulle and silk flowers for headdress above were purchased at, and are available for purchase at Britex Fabrics brick-and-mortar store.)

 

If you haven't met Sonya Philip of 100 Acts of Sewing, here's your chance. She'll be teaching our very first Pop-up Britex on March 14 where she'll demonstrate all the skills necessary for making an a-line tunic dress. Here's a peek into her creative process using two pieces of linen from the our online selection.

Why did you choose these fabrics for your project? I adore linen. It is wonderful to work with and has a beautiful hand. Living in San Francisco, I find I can wear linen almost year-round. I chose the main fabric (Golden Wheat Linen/Silk Blend) primarily for the color--mustard and curry yellows just really speak to me right now. I wanted a strong contrast color and was taken by the richness of the Two-tone Raspberry Linen.

Heather Habig is an expert in her field, which is why we invited her to participate in December's BF Contributor. She lives in San Francisco, is launching a clothing line in 2013 and offers custom design services. The black & white wool double knit was a perfect choice for her pattern. After seeing her classic-but-bold, perfectly fitted jacket, we had a few questions for Heather. Here's what she had to tell us: 1. Why did you choose the black and white double knit for your project? What did you love about the fabric? What did you learn about the fabric? I'm always drawn to fabric and prints that are high-contrast, especially in black and white, and when I saw this fabric I was really excited. The fact that it's wool and a double knit sounded like fun to work with, and I knew I could get a great-fitting garment out of it. When I made the pattern for the jacket, and I kept the silhouette relatively simple because of the bold pattern. As I was working with it, I was surprised by how much it was shrinking under the steam iron. I might recommend to someone else using this fabric to buy an extra 1/4 to 1/3 yard - to account for shrink as well as matching the stripes.

We’re so fortunate to have such talented and sweet-natured tailors in San Francisco! Carlos is from Scissors & Cloth; they build couture collared dress shirts, each hand-draped, hand-cut and handcrafted through various classic and modern shirt-making techniques. My goal is to provide exceptional customer service through one on one appointments in my downtown, underground shirt-making workshop. Each client is personally hand-draped with muslin to find that perfect fit.  Once the fabric is smoothed over all shapes of the upper torso, all seams are then drawn in using chalk, including the yoke, neckhole, armhole, side seams and hem.  This gives me an accurate pattern to work from. The muslin is then transferred over to paper and the patternmaking process begins.  I build as many samples that I need to until the client is happy with the fit. Once the fit is deemed perfect, I go to work on the final piece. Patterns are then filed away for future use. Britex Fabrics and Scissors & Cloth collaborated over a length of classic black and white houndstooth wool fabric to come up with this warm and spiffy shirt. Contributing designer Carlos says, “I chose to work with a wool hounds-tooth because of its sheer classic beauty.  However, any fabrics with patterns can be more time consuming to work with.   As far as working with patterns goes, I typically cut each piece one at time, even if there are multiples of the same pattern. Take the yoke for instance, I start by placing my yoke pattern on one piece of fabric, trace around it, then cut out the piece.  I then take that cut piece and lay that down on more fabric while matching up all the patterns on the fabric to the first yoke.  If done precisely, the first yoke blends into the fabric pattern so beautifully that you cannot tell that there are two pieces.  This can be very time consuming but your guaranteed identical pattern pieces, which makes the end product that much nicer. Another issue I came across were raw edges that were fraying.  To better deal with this, any time I cut a pattern piece, I always ran a 1/4 stitch line around my fabric pattern pieces so that the fraying would not run over my 3/8" seam allowance. “