Yves Saint Laurent's collection Winter '84-'85

One side of the fabric stretched on the wooden frame.

When you buy beads and sequins, they usually come threaded onto something called a pompon, which consists of 10 individual strands of thread tied together. On average, a pompon holds 10,000 sequins, or 1000-3000 beads depending on their size. When you begin embroidering a piece of fabric, you need to transfer the beads or sequins from the pompon onto a separate piece of working thread. 

Last month, I ordered three patterns from Style Arc: Jessica Dress, Danni Dolman and Layla Dress. And then a piece of fluoro 70's jersey knit from my stash was shouting, 'Pick me! Pick me!' In my head, the fabric matched the Jessica dress pattern perfectly and a minute later, I was ready to cut and slash and twist and sew!




For this dress, I cut the skirt according to the size 8 pattern, which turned out to fit fine due to the stretch of the jersey fabric. For the bodice, if I had not shortened both ends of the twist, the neckline would have been super revealing! So by decreasing the length of the ends by 2 cm, I managed to keep my cleavage inside the dress.


Here I have tried to show you how almost perfectly I managed to match the stripes on the right side ;) Due to the original design of the skirt (four front tucks), it was difficult to make the stripes match along the left seam.

This dress has been promoted right away to my wardrobe favorites! I love the smoothness and lightness of the fabric against my body and the fact that it does not wrinkle. The fabric doesn't fray either, so the skirt and armholes are unhemmed.


A few more words about my experience with Style Arc... The pattern was hand drawn!!!! An envelope sent from Australia contained three A4 pockets, each of which included a thick sheet of paper with each pattern drafted by hand!!! I have no idea why Chloe does it manually as that seems to me like a hell of a lot of work, even if she has templates for each size and model in her shop! All of the patterns include seam allowance. Easy-to-follow, step-by-step drawings and explanations are printed on two additional A4 sheets. Another nice personal touch was that Chloe had glued a scrap of knit fabric as a suggestion.
Have your worked with Style Arc patterns?

Donja - sleeping coat

Even Japanese traditional shoes, tabi, were made with scraps of fabric.

This rare piece is in fact female underwear. Women, often ashamed of keeping such an intimate item  for too long, often disposed of them instead of passing them down to the next generation. The top part of the underwear is made from very simple and plain fabric. Women tried to save the most beautiful piece of fabric for the bottom part, because it would be seen under their kimonos.

More sexy underwear!

These cute quilted pieces are diapers. Unlike the underwear, they would have been used for many babies Would you like to wash diapers by hand in cold water?!

 Guests were treated with great respect and the hosts spared the most beautiful donja for their guests.

Children's boro

People visiting the exhibition were allowed to touch the clothes. I took a close-up shot of this pair of trousers. Look at those stitches! Don't they remind you of something?


Exactly! The prick stitch and the catch stitch! Japanese women knew something of couture sewing!

The older generation in Japan often say "Mottainai!" which means "Too good (to be thrown away)." After I left the exhibition, I thought about how many things which were still good to use I have thrown away; how many useless things I have bought, and how many scraps of fabric have I wasted?

What's the most innovative recycled garment you've seen?