---
title: "Vibe Check #8"
date: 2022-12-04T21:59:53Z
slug: 2022-12-04-vibe-check-8
author: Thomas Wilson
---

Winter came to Oxford in the last seven or ten days.  The other day I stepped out of my house and got that _Winter in England_ smell that I forget for six months of the year, and alternately resent and treasure in for the other six.  It's the smell of cold air and slow-to-wake mornings where the dew can't make it off the ground yet. 

It's heating-on weather, and my uni student standards have only slipped a little in the past eight (!) years.  I'm still young and able enough that the jumper/socks/tea/stubbornness quartet gets me quite far into winter.  

In November I worked hard at making wearable garments.  Two shirts, to be precise.  With a fifty per cent success rate.  

The first shirt (white muslin with a blue print) came out well, though a little baggy.  My imprecise (one could say _slapdash_) alterations to the pattern produced a bulge-at-the-buttons and pinched biceps sibling (in an equally nice white-grey pinstripe pattern).  

I look like q tiny hulk, bursting out of a tiny shirt.

I could have made a toile to test the alteration, but it would have been my fourth shirt toile in three months. I could scream from shirt making at this point. 

So on to trousers I go.  I'll be mocking up the [Wardrobe By Me mens Chinos](https://wardrobebyme.com/products/chino-pants-sewing-pattern) soon.  This is the first trouser pattern I found that went down to a 28" waist (even down to a 26!).  

I toyed around with a Thread Theory pattern over summer, but they only go down to 30" waist.  I loved my recent adventures in drafting and altering (thanks, once more [freesewing](www.freesewing.org)) but I want something prefabbed to tweak, not something rough that needs shaping.  

Finding clothes that fit has always been hard for me.  Ready to wear formal menswear is designed for larger (upwards, but also outwards) bodies.  The skills to make, and then change, sewing patterns is a lot.  It's been a year and a half since I picked up my first sewing machine and I'm still finding new things to trouble-shoot.  They're smaller things, and I think I'm getting better at fixing them, but it's a lot of energy.  

Sometimes you want more immediate gratification.

And so what if I have two more metres of beautiful shirting fabric in the post.  I'll have to eat my words and make _another_ shirt.




