No, not a new show on Tacky TV. A unimportant conundrum I challenge you to solve. You might want to pop on some sunglasses, it’s going to get bright.
I have had these leggings a long, long, long time.
They are vintage/original/so-old-the-elastic-is-starting-to-crackle Benetton. Now, without going into the loft and fighting through several boxes of Christmas decorations to find my old photo albums I would date them to 1987-1994. What do you think? And given that this is a blog where I talk a little bit of sewing, that’s rubbish pattern matching at the front there. I clearly remember my Mum pointing this out to me at the time. The conversation went along the lines of “You paid how much for those? You’d think at that price that they would have bothered to match the flowers at the front.” Gutted as I was at the time, I know what she means. Now if I was re-making these, you know if it was actually possible to source 20 year old jersey, I might try the pattern-matching tips that I picked up at the lovely blog of Lladybird.
Here’s me trying the ‘one pattern piece on top of another’ trick whilst cutting out an après-ski style striped legging (Burda 7791).
The result?
Pretty nifty pattern matching.
You might want to further brace yourself for the extreme close-up. Perhaps go back and fetch those sunglasses.
Are you Ok? Recovered sufficiently for some more? Only, I made two pairs in slightly different snow-based-holiday stripes. Here’s the second pair:
Perhaps I should have warned you about the blurry bottom shot – I haven’t quite got the hang of the tripod/timer thing.
Now whilst these garments are more likely to be worn après-school than après-ski I’m living in them, well not literally living in them, I mean I can only accommodate my ample bottom half in them, I’d need something larger to house all of me. And, seeing as I am metaphorically living in them, I’d like to make some more. If all goes to plan the next pair will be in an animal print for Jungle January, if I can just find a print that won’t make me look like the rear end of a pantomime horse. Know any secret sources of groovy stretchy animal print fabric? Pop a link in the comments. Thanks.
I’ll leave you with some shots captured by my youngest.
pennylibrarian 