Making things with my own hands.

In a bid to be more environmentally-friendly, I have been trying to minimize buying new things where I can. This Chinese New Year, I challenged myself not to buy anything brand new (it used to be a tradition to buy new clothes to wear during this festive season), but still come up with new outfits. One of the ideas I had was to add a little something to an old clothing piece I had but never wore much! Remember this shift dress I made 4 years ago at Sew Over It? I wear it some

I’ve unofficially tried to embroider stuff before, but only basic things like words (and doing it based on logic, without any instructions, so I didn’t know cool stitches). I was delighted to find a complete starter kit on Hoffelt & Hooper Co. while browsing Etsy for random DIY ideas. Even more amazing was that I could customize text on the design! I thought it would be a great project that could be used for my upcoming wedding 🙂 The kit was delivered in a neat little box wh

Visited the dreamy Studio Ghibli museum in Tokyo, and brought home a little DIY sewing kit to create my own Totoro! Built him as a little project on a Saturday – thank goodness I have some basic sewing background, because the instructions were all in Japanese! Grateful for diagrams and my knowledge of Chinese characters (so I could roughly make out some parts of the instructions) Although the end product is so cute, some parts of the process didn’t look quite as adorable, esp

After completing the Dressmaking Weekend course, I was itching to make another piece of garment for myself, and this Ultimate Pencil Skirt workshop looked like a perfect fit! This was a next level class (categorized as Advanced Beginner), and also offered the chance for me to make a pencil skirt tailored just for me – how amazing was that! (I find it really difficult to buy pencil skirts that fit me off the racks because of my weird waist/hip proportion). For this piece, it w

After completed the intro to sewing course, I moved on to taking classes which allowed me to make my own clothes (woohoo!), starting with this Dressmaking Weekend at Sew Over It, where I learnt how to make a skirt and a dress. On the first day, we made a full circle skirt, based on a sewing pattern from Sew Over It. A sewing pattern is just like what it sounds like – patterns on a sheet of paper for that one uses as a guide for sewing (a garment usually comprises of a few pie

I made this picnic bag as part of a little project done at the last bit of the Intro to Sewing class at Sew Over It. Dom was super flexible in her teaching – we could choose to learn how to do alterations during the last session of the class, or any other sewing project we were interested in. I didn’t have many clothing articles with me during my time in London, hence didn’t need to alter anything. I found a lovely picnic bag in one of the sewing project books at the studio.

I made the cutest beagle tote bag & lined zipped bag as part of the Intro to Sewing course at Sew Over It. This was part of the same 2-day course where I made a cushion cover. One of the things that drew me to Sew Over It when I first checked them out online was the extensive range of fabrics they have. When I saw the beagle-printed fabric, I was in love, and could not wait to make something with it when I signed up for classes. So many adorable fabrics to choose from You mig

I picked up a little bit of sewing during a brief stint in London. I loved how I went home after every lesson with a little item I made, and they got progressively more challenging / personalized. The first thing I made was this cushion cover with an adorable print. This wasn’t the first sewing lesson I went for, but first (and pretty short) sewing class I took was eons ago – more than 10 years ago! Yes, this was a class outside of Home Economics. My mum signed me up for dres