I don’t know why, but I am on a sewing kick right now. Yesterday I finished the last two grocery bags, and then decided to rip out and re-fit a skirt I made a while back from New Look 6843 (the view in the bottom right of the pattern). It’s a simple a-line skirt and it fit right around the waist, but it was too wide in the hips and around the bottom, and I also made it too long. I took it in about 2" around the hips and 4" around the bottom, and I hemmed it above the knee. It still doesn’t fit quite the way I’d like it too, but it fits better.

Today I was at the Discount Fabrics store a couple of blocks away to pick up some fabric dye for the grocery bags and I found some surprisingly good quality cotton/linen blend fabric for only $6/yard, so I bought enough for two dresses – one in black, and one in a deep red. I was inspired by this alteration of Burda Style’s Celestina dress pattern (for the black fabric) but the instructions look to be beyond my current sewing abilities. So now I’m searching for some new patterns.

So far I’ve mostly discovered that searching for patterns online is a royal pain. On every major pattern manufacturer site I visited, the thumbnails were too small to get a good idea of what the dress looked like without clicking through. On most sites, the search was weak: typing “sleeveless linen dress” returned no results at all on Simplicity, and returned all dresses on Vogue, Butterick and McCall pattern sites: only Burda returned meaningful results. It seems like it would be useful to be able to search by fabric type and by style (e.g. sleeveless) as well as the most basic searches.

Sites like Pattern Review and thePattern Review forum on Craftster are helpful in that they allow you to see what other people have made from the pattern and get a better idea of what it might look like on your body type (and not some perfect model), but even those are hard to find things on. You really need to have the pattern brand and number already, and then search for pictures/reviews.

The patterns I’ve liked so far:

• Burda 8511 (the dress, but not the jacket)
• Burda 8061 (again, just the dress)
• Burda 3477
• Burda 8072 (though without the flaps)
• Burda 8076
• Burda 8071 (though not for the linen fabrics)
• Burda 8229
• New Look 6375
• Simplicity 3747
• Vogue 2941 (just the camisole and skirt – also not for linen fabrics)
• Vogue 7848
• Vogue 2091 (the high neck view)
• Vogue 2900
• Vogue 8357 (not the jacket – what’s with the jackets?)
• Vogue 8232
• Vogue 8025 (I actually like the jacket on this one – but it’s not for linens
• Vogue 8409 (not for linen)
• Butterick 4974
• Butterick 4598
• Butterick 4183
• McCall’s 4768 (I like the little flounce on this one)
• McCall’s 4369

(I hate the Simplicity web site most of all. Bad search, no way to scroll through the search results, no way to load all of the search results on a single page for faster scanning, you can’t search for New Look and Simplicity patterns at the same time, and you have to go through a popup to a PDF file to view the recommended fabrics.)

I also like this bustier/corset on Burda – look at the result (and also this one in red Dupioni silk, made by a guy on the Burda Style community for his fiancée!