Beautiful buttonholes - hooray!

Ta da! Buttonholes!

Nine of them, to be exact, though I'm not counting the mistake at the bottom which was meant to be number ten. Clearly, I was getting cocky. Clearly, I was thinking I had this buttonhole caper whipped. But no! I managed to bugger up the last one completely. We'll say no more about that.

So this is my new shirt, made out of fabric I bought from Rathdowne Remnants a year ago for $5 a metre, and which looks like Liberty at $50 a metre instead. I'm pretty happy with the deception. Mock Liberty shirt for one-tenth the price? Count me in!


I used Simplicity pattern number 4077 - it seems it may have gone out of print recently, as I cannot find it on their website for the life of me, so you'll have to make do with this badly lit and out of focus photo. Apologies. The pattern is a good one though, if you can pick it up second-hand or from Simplicity's out-of-print pages, you're bound to enjoy it. Again, I didn't need to do major alterations for it to fit well, and that's fantastic. I'm definitely going to use this for shirts in the future.

I've worn the shirt three times already this week ... is that too much? Once to work with a camel-coloured skirt; once to a friend's place for dinner, and last night to go and see Daniel Kitson doing 66a Church Road at the Melbourne Arts Centre (I highly recommend it).

I totally love it - and isn't it great when you finish a piece, and it fits, and you love it, and other people say nice things about it? That's the sewing trifecta, for sure!

(PS - these are the first pair of shorts I made, the ones that were meant to be throwaways and which instead turned out really well!)

In 2010 I resolve to .....

..... finally write a post about my New Year Resolutions.

Maybe I'm a masochist, but I actually enjoy making New Year Resolutions. That is to say, I never make the usual ones - eat less, exercise more, be tidier etc - because those are year-round goals for me and nothing about the first of January makes them a special objective. No, those are the ever-present aspirations that I labour to reach every single day.

I've tried the "restrictive" new year resolution too, and that never works. For example, last year I resolved to spend less money on clothes. And failed miserably. If I didn't already know that already, I think the personalised, handwritten Christmas card I received from the Anna Thomas boutique in Little Collins St, would have tipped me off. 

In my opinion, come New Year we should be resolving to do fun things, good things, the things we wish we did more of. Why not try to increase our happiness quotients instead of focusing on the negative things in our lives? One year I resolved to "use my instincts more" and it really worked for me. I think that was the year I ended up moving to Dubai on a whim, which changed my life in many ways.

This year I have some definite resolutions. They include:

• doing lots of recreational sewing, just for my pleasure, and not letting markets take over my life in quite the same way they did in 2009 
• doing more experimental sewing with lots of failures that teach me good lessons
• to make an entire 50s style dress out of Liberty lawn (but I am not allowed to use this one as a failure lesson as I cannot afford to make mistakes on it because oh my god the expense of the stuff) 
• finally create a sewing room instead of continuing to make the dining table completely unaccessible to anyone else in the house
• to redo the front garden which is full of horrible azalea bushes with white flowers that I hate passionately - does anyone in Melbourne want to come around and relieve me of six quite well-grown azalea bushes that I'm sure would look lovely in another yard that isn't mine?
• to try new recipes rather than just thinking about how nice they sound
• to remember that I am not defined by my day job

I also have a list of craft-specific resolutions which is long enough to require its own separate post, so that will be forthcoming in the next couple of days. But for now, the list above seems pretty good to me - and reasonably achievable, too.

And isn't that the objective, after all? Achieving what we set out to do? The Buddhists say that happiness is the achievement of small goals, and I can certainly put my faith in that. Happy New Year!