I’ve heard of Patrones, Knipmode & La Mia Boutique from sewing bloggers and on forums, but have never bothered to buy them before. In part because it’s a bother: none of them are available on news stands in Canada, so it involves some hunting, online ordering & exchange rates in order to procure them. And in part because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to mess around with patterns where all of the instructions would be in languages I can’t read.
Then I made the World’s Most Complicated Shirtdress (thereabouts) and thought, if I don’t need to look at the instructions to make a shirtdress, maybe I can make things up that are basically instructions-free. And I ordered one or two of each and picked a pattern from each that looked simple enough to be a good test of instructions-free sewing. First up was this different-but-easy Knipmode t-shirt pattern in leftover yellow cotton jersey.
(I’m writing this in early June, by the way, in case it gets published well after other posts that make mention of the new sewing magazines.)
I didn’t look at the instructions, because they were in Dutch. Google translate helped me confirm that it was made up in a jersey and that “mouwbies” means “sleeve band” and “heupband” means “hip band.” Otherwise I traced, cut and serged.
And it’s … ok. The armscye is too big (story of my sewing life) so I’d shorten it by 1″ or so on front and back if I were to make it up again, and this jersey being yellow is–though not thin–translucent. Why. Anyway, you can see the facing. And last but not least, the front was about 2″ shorter than the back. I have no idea if this was a pattern error or a tracing error on my part, and I don’t care enough to go back and see for something that’s so easy to fix.
So I don’t know how much wear I’ll get out of this, but I did learn two things:
- I can sew in Dutch.
- I can make a few modifications to this and end up with a really cute and different t-shirt pattern, so long as I make it out of something completely opaque and not too drapey.
Zoopolis 
I love, “I can sew in Dutch”! 🙂 I have a Patrones and a couple of Burdas in German. I should totally make an attempt.
facings with jersey are always a toss-up, aren’t they?
You could totally do it. I’ve had a few interesting moments with Google Translate trying to figure out an odd piece here or there but on the whole I’ve found non-english sewing magazine patterns to be very doable.
They are. Plus yellow. It’s like that skirt you made a month or two back–it looks opaque on the bolt or when cut but when you put it on, somehow yellow is always a bit see-through.
I, too, love “I can sew in Dutch”!