I'm very interested in the Lace Top article as I would love to make one either for me or for my daughter.
By the way, is it possible to subscribe to Sew Stylish? I think I used to have a subscription, but now I only get emails advising that it'll be coming out and wait and wait and wait for it to be available at local newsagencies!

I've been wanting this CD since they were first offered a few years ago, but my budget tends more towards fabric and haberdashery than magazine collections, sadly. If I won the CD though, I wouldn't have to choose!

Would love to see a copy of this book and have time and leisure to look through it in detail. My favourite memory of underwear was the first time I wore a garter belt with stockings (I grew up with pantyhose) - and trying to figure out how to go to the bathroom wearing it. How to get my panties down without getting them tangled in the stockings? My mother had to explain to me that it was ok to wear the panties ON TOP OF the garter belt! (Somehow that simply never occurred to me...)

not sure whether this counts as a sewing misadventure or not... I was helping out in a "fashion design" class at the school where I work in the office. Some of the girls in the class had never been NEAR a sewing machine in their lives, it appeared (what they were doing in that class I'll never know, unless it was so they could skip sports!)
I was helping one girl out cutting out some fabric when I glanced up and noticed that another girl was trying to sew on a machine with the presser-foot up, so of course she had very little control over where the sewing was going. I called out to her to,"put the foot down!" - and she proceeded to push her foot harder on the pedal!

Seeing the list of years that various synthetics were created takes me back to Billy Joel's history lesson "We Didn't Start the Fire," and the line "Orlon, Dacron, Bay of Pigs Invasion" - except that now I look it up, I see I got the words wrong, and only Dacron was mentioned!

argh. Anyone wanna pay for me to travel to and stay in LA for a couple of days? There was a local exhibition on of historical Australian clothing, but it consisted of maybe 20 or 30 different dresses, and some accessories, and was poorly lit, so difficult to see the detail. :-(

In this day and age, why are entries limited to residents of the US and Canada (excluding Quebec)?

My favourite go-to for instructions book would have to be the Reader's Digest one (mine has a yellow cover; my sister has the one with the dark-blue cover). I also have my mother's McCalls Easy Sewing Book and my sister's Simplicity Sewing Book, but I don't refer to them nearly as often.

Blondielou,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY for Wednesday! I turn 46 on the same day, and also am interested in dance type costume patterns, although I tend mostly towards the lycra type ones. I also lost a lot of weight (only in the past two years, in my case) and no longer have to make my own leotards for dance class, but costuming is still a passion for me.
I often buy old patterns on eBay and at local op-shops and recently tried to de-stash, advertising more than 80 of them on eBay, but only about a dozen of them went :-( Must find other places to sell them, I guess, or end up giving them away...
anyway, have a great day tomorrow,

Jen in Oz

Finally! I've been sewing for probably close to 35 years and I've never been able to do a lapped zip till now, so thankyou to Judy and everyone at Threads for such a clear and concise instruction manual on how to install lapped zips!

The only problem I have (and this happens with zips that are not lapped too) is that when I put the facing into the dress I was making, the top edges didn't match up - the left side was about an INCH longer than the right side, despite using steam-a-seam to adhere the zip in the right place before sewing.
What can I do to prevent this happening in future?
Please help!

I got two books when I was cleaning out my parents' house. One was probably my mother's, the other was my older sister's. The first is the McCall's Easy Sewing Book, published in 1962, so a couple of years older than me. It's a regular sized paperback book with line drawings only in black and white (no photos)
The other is the Simplicity Sewing Book Updated. It's copyrighted 1975 and printed in Britain. The cover has a woman in a yellow hat and top, with a "flower" made of a pin cushion and scissors and a tap measure on the hat, and a necklace made of thread reels. This book is a larger format paperback, with colour photos and two colour drawing illustrations. The fashions in the photos belong on the TV series Life on Mars ;-)

My most useful sewing book, however, is my copy of the Readers Digest complete book of sewing (I've actually forgotten the name, and it's not accessible right now). I know with that book that if I ever need to know a particular technique, I can almost certainly find diagrams and clear instructions on how to do it!