The weekend's Sewaholic/Fabrics Etc. meetup, and a new project.

This past Saturday I went to the meetup at Fabrics Etc., where Tasia from Sewaholic Patterns was speaking. Well, that makes it sound all formal; I guess I should call it more of a friendly chat/Q&A. I'd heard of her patterns but hadn't really been familiar with them. Although they are available both printed and in PDF, while I was in Germany I put off buying any: I didn't want them to go through customs, as printed patterns would, and I didn't want to print the PDFs if I'd be able to buy the printed patterns once I got back to Canada (which was "any month now" much of the time I was there). I'm not a big printing-PDFs person, though it does have other advantages and I'll occasionally go for it especially if the pattern is small (lingerie, for example).

Anyway. I like her thought process: my understanding is she's more interested in the construction, and making fairly classic designs that work well in real life, rather than creating very avant-garde or over-the-top styles. The patterns are proportioned for the (so-called) pear shape, probably more of a pronounced one than I personally have, so I might have to size down the hip area for once, rather than sizing it up. I'm most interested in the Granville shirt with its back princess seams (I need either those or a waist seam to fit into the small of my back nicely) and the retractable hood on the Minoru jacket.

As for what I'm starting at the moment, it's a slip from Kwik-Sew 2394. I got some Antron tricot from Bra-makers' Supply, plus some ribbon and lace from Dressew, and I'm making View B, but cutting 4" off the short length, my current problem being that most of my RTW slips are too long. I may do a tricot-vs.-Bemberg faceoff one of these days, but here are my thoughts on the tricot as of right now.

1. It only comes in a few colors, none of which are really to my taste. I'm guessing since the trend has been away from synthetics for the past several years, and it seems to be getting harder and harder to find even RTW slips, there's not enough money to be made by dyeing this in anything other than basic colors. They've got white, ivory, pink, and black. It's all nylon so it should dye well, but I'm very skittish about that, since I rent and my entire apartment is light colors.
2. If you're looking for opacity, you're not going to get much from the light colors (not that you necessarily would from Bemberg either).
3. It has some stretch. There are several older Kwik-Sew patterns designed for tricot that must make some use of that: they tend to also allow you to use wovens, but only if you cut them on the bias.
4. It should be anti-static. I'll need to give it a real-life test to know how it compares in that regard to Bemberg, but at least so far it's behaving well and doesn't seem to be sticking to itself at all.