Mid winter cleaning and a project

In a bit of mid winter sewing cleaning I've been trying to tidy things up here at Top Notch. I've now added a button to my side bar so you can see all the things I've made.  I'm still cataloguing some of the past makes but its on it's way.

The other bit of mid winter cleaning I've been doing, is to fix up my list of sewing plans. It was becoming a mess and was difficult for me to see what was going on.

I've also been thinking about a few things over the past couple of weeks:

1. I love to buy patterns (obviosly, just check out all the ones I've bought recently) but
2. I'm only excited about making a pattern if I have absolutely the right fabric, otherwise I'm just not that excited or into making it and
3.  Like Morgan over at Crab and Bee I'm most excited when I buy fabric for a specific purpose and it is hot out of the fabric shop.  For me, it's the old law of diminishing returns. The longer it's been in the stash, the less exciting it is.

So with that in mind I had a long hard look at my stash and was happy to find that I don't really have a lot of it.  Well, I have a lot of left over fabrics of various sizes, lots of scraps, boxes of it really, from finished projects. But not a whole lot of good meterage. I'm talking fabric of a metre or more.  There is very little in there that I could make a top out of..A zipper purse yes, but not a top.

Apart from the denim that I bought a load of and used a little bit of for my Miette, I really only have two other usable* pieces in the cupboard. One I bought just last week at the Addicted to Fabric sale and the other, Richard and Lyla from the Spring Summer 2013 Liberty Art Fabrics collection,  I bought earlier in the year.

My plan is to keep it this way and have only a minimum of projects on the go and fabric in the stash.

So, to justify what I hope to be some lovely purchases at Tessuti on Saturday (yay to a trip to Sydney), perhaps for some of these patterns .. I've started on a project to use up my Richard and Lyla  fabric.

When I bought the fabric earlier in the year, I thought it might be a fun Archer, but then I realised it might be a bit over the top, so it is now on it's way to becoming my second Mathilde. (As an aside the Mathilde is such a nice pattern that one day I should sew it up in plain fabric that shows off the pintucks).

Sewing this yesterday when it was rainy and foggy felt so weather inappropriate but it did make me dream of summer holidays. The weather isn't quite right for this just yet, but when the rays of sun poke through I'll be ready! Just the buttons and the sleeves to go.

*ok so there are a few metres of fabric in there that I will never use - they are on the top shelf at the back and I need to think about doing a giveaway or something with them....