Refinery29 fashion and beauty website and a screenshot from Patricia Kiing’s MyStyle Pinterest board.

I spend a lot of time looking researching Living Abstracts Style content, looking for new style finds and inspiration. While much of it links in some way to Pinterest and is going into building resource pages to be launched in the coming month or two, I thought it might be useful to readers to see some of the most recent finds and news. So here we go …

WEBSITE: Refinery29 - a magazine/blog style website that promises to help you live a more beautiful life. I could get lost in the content and its “How to” section is my fave, with sub-sections of I DIY, Styling Tips and What to Wear.  The I-DIY section has a lot of original ideas: videos on how to make Celine-inspired knotted leather cuffs, necklaces and a Kenzo-style ribbon sweatshirt. I like the styling tips especially: one article on one piece three ways: how to pull off pastel denim (a pair of dusty pink jeans) stepped outside the regular matchy-matchy road as did 5 fresh ways to style a plain, white t-shirt (even though I am not a fan of harsh white for everyone). PS The Huarache sandals on the slide above are from Urban Outfitters (unfortunately, no longer available) and the Liberty print shorts by Thom Dolan.  The What to Wear section covered everything from wedding outfits to styling blazers.  If I could change one thing, it would probably be to add more content.  We’re now in May, this is my first visit to the site and I was going back to October 2012 in a few clicks; if I was a regular reader (as I may become), would it be worth my while?

After I had found Refinery29 via one blog, Business of Fashion mentioned it too – talking about its future.  In a couple of months, Refinery29 is going to be relaunched and rebranded, integrating commerce and content.

M&S: Business of Fashion also posted about M&S’s new clothing strategy to ‘focus on better quality and styles in womenswear, deliver more compelling and clearer sub-brands and make shopping easier in stores’ after two years of declining sales. I rather hope so. The changes are due to come into effect at Marks & Spencer from July. Fashion Editor at Large shared photographs from the new AW collection under Belinda Earl, formerly of Debenhams and Jaeger.

POP-UP SHOP: Yasmin Sewell – one of the people whose looks I find myself collecting on Pinterest has a pop-up shop in Shoreditch until August.

PINTEREST: Pinner Patricia Kiing’s My Style pinboard: a lot of pattern, many pairs of shoes and a minimalist/Scandi vibe.

SWIMWEAR: And I discovered Albion swimwear through More Design Please. US company Albion makes leisure wear including one-piece swimming costumes and bikinis, many of which have an old fashioned charm and look as they may fit all kinds of bodies.

Blogger StraightGrain is Belgian mother An sewing for her daughter the CUTEST outfits. OK, this is slightly off topic in that she’s making dresses for a three-year-old, but many of the techniques she uses are applicable to womenswear. She has tutorials on making a bubble skirt,  origami raglan sleeves (a guest post on another blog) and a dress with pleats and piping. The tulip sleeve details are something I’d like to try in the future as are the notched sleeves.

StraightGrain links to the sewing of another blogger, Sanae Ishida, who does some wonderful clothes for her six-year-old and who wrote a marvellous post about body image. I’ll let you read it yourselves, but essentially she is going to start sewing for herself and be a positive role model for her daughter and has painted the most exquisite illustrations for her story.

Great British Sewing Bee competitor Tilly Walnes has a light and airy blogsite with a great series of sewing tutorials. Her Pinterest boards are inspiring and it was sweet to see her blog post about the opening of Birmingham haberdashery shop Guthrie and Ghani by fellow GBSB competitor Lauren Guthrie.

There is some good advice in 10 Things I’ve Learned on The Sew Weekly and The Thrifty Stitcher (written by GBSB consultant Claire-Louise Hardie) including a set of PDFs on sewing basics such as getting to know your sewing machine. Sew Mama Sew has similar information, in a fab ’50s style website including a guide to buying a new sewing machine.

Squidoo has a plethora of sewing tutorials and links to free patterns – although quite a number of the links are out of date and don’t work.

Pattern company Simplicity explains ways of working with more difficult fabrics, fleece and knits.

So there you have a collection of online resources for starting sewing.  Are there resources that you love to go to for your sewing? Perhaps there are online material retailers which you especially love?   Guess I’d better find some time to crack on and sew those patterned trousers – they’re not going to make themselves.

It did inspire me to get off the bus at Peter Jones on Sloane Square to look at patterns and materials for the first time in many years.  I have sewed in the past, making curtains, dresses and shirts and even a soft-tailored jacket … but have not sewn since I moved home about eight years ago. Can you forget how to sew or is it like riding a bicycle – and you never forget?

After leafing through the pattern books at Peter Jones, I found a pattern I wanted to make. Only it wasn’t in stock and the assistant suggested the quickest way to get it would be direct from the manufacturer.  Plan B was to go to Lewisham’s Rolls and Rems – with a decent stock of fabrics, patterns and notions (what a great word for zips, thread and stuff).  I found myself at the pattern books again with three other women – one from Cheshire, who has been sewing for 30 years, one from Kent and another from Jamaica. It is, it seems, seriously difficult to find a decent haberdashery shop, hence the travel.  I was almost ashamed to admit being relatively local.

Life rather got in the way of sewing until this week, when I had time to visit the material shops of Goldhawk Road, recommended on many sewing websites – Rosie Martin’s DIYcouture has an especially thorough review of the shops, complete with photos and pricing. (The tulip skirt tutorial looks great too – no actual pattern as such – just free, downloadable instructions with lots of photos, variations and diagrams).

I had a pattern from John Lewis at Oxford Circus (their patterns you can just find yourself in labelled drawers, unlike the old systems of needing an assistant to rifle through mysterious metal filing cabinets) and wanted some cotton fabric to make wide-bottomed trousers.

I went to A-Z Fabrics, found some very odd material in a mixture of hot pink, khaki, black and mustard that I fell in love with. They helpful staff don’t sell cotton officially, but they did have a mixed pack which they broke to give me a khaki roll – bonus! Visiting the other shops will just have to happen on another day.

I’ll let you know how I get on with returning to sewing.

It seems to be to clothing what Not On The High Street (NOTHS) is to crafters and small retailers in the UK. The Cools site turns away 90% of those who apply to join their site – the same percentage that NOTHS founders Sophie Cornish and Holly Tucker quote for their site in this month’s Director magazine. The Cools however charges a total of 15% commission (including transaction fee) and NOTHS charges 25%.

I like The Cools.  Just scrolling through the women’s latest clothing page brought me three things for Pinterest boards – pretty good going in my book. You can click to Pinterest (+ share on Twitter/Facebook) through a menu on the top left-hand-side of each photograph, although the website seems to have disabled use of the Pinmarklet ‘PinIt’ and ‘Clip to Polyvore’ toolbar buttons.

You can see who else has liked each item of clothing, so search the site through others with similar tastes.  When I signed up, the website hung, but when I quit the browser window and went onto a fresh one, the sign-up had worked.

Your profile page is a wall like Facebook, but you can write on others’ walls and mark them private or public, avoiding the permissions issues of private messaging. There is a magazine (it looks just like a blog) and tastemakers to follow and be inspired by. It was disappointing I couldn’t see a list of those items I had favourited (added to my ‘cools’), although they appear on my wall.

The shop has art, vintage and book sections as well as clothing. The vintage section reminds me of a grown-up Urban Outfitters and overall the site feels like CultureLabel.

Has anyone else signed up? What did you think? Useful to you? Or, given that it’s a US store, would you buy from it if you’re outside the US (worldwide shipping is offered at the checkout)?

The celebrations were to mark the contribution of the Huguenots – French Protestant refugees who fled Catholic France. The Huguenots were responsible for much of London’s silk weaving industry and arrived from the late 1600s. I had no idea London even had a silk weaving industry, so it was educational.

On arrival, there was a sheep and her 10-day-old lamb, a donkey and electric ukulele player on the stone surrounds of Spitalfields market.

Inside the market itself was a range of stalls, many run by the London Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, selling hand-woven cloth, threads and silkworm cocoons. Members ran demonstrations of weaving methods and you could try circular, rag and table loom weaving.

I met milliner Sofia Mac Mullen from Buenos Aires, who loves colour – she and her hats are such a delight.  I was sorely tempted by a dark green cloche from velour felt with French silk bias trimming.

Seeing all the weaving and threads took me back to basics – that this is the basis of clothes and if I wanted to wear something truly bespoke, that you could have it hand-woven for you as it would have been three or more centuries ago.

Once all the stalls were visited, I went outside to find Morris Dancers – not one, but two groups (is there a collective noun for Morris Dancers?) Their shoes are fascinating – so sturdy.

Handily, the lovely A Gold was across the road from their performance, so you could munch on a home-made scotch egg or flapjack while watching.

In the case of this skirt, however, the original plastic buttons have always needed changing.  Even when I bought it, I factored in buying replacements into the overall cost.

One of the odd things about the skirt is that the front tabs weren’t put on symmetrically – one folded towards the skirt centre and one folded outwards. Because of an obvious hole in the waistband from an old button thread, I had to fold both tabs outwards. This probably was not the designer’s original intention but better than being unsymmetrical.

It’s only taken about six months to buy the buttons, matching thread and sew them on but finally the finished skirt is hanging up, ready to weaer. Don’t ask about what else needs sorting out in my wardrobe, there seems to be a never-ending list of mending, single socks and updating.

Erin Loechner recently wrote in her Design for Mankind blog about Exactitudes, a fashion project from Rotterdam-based duo photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek. They documented more than 120 style tribes from around the world over more than 15 years

The style tribes are displayed in sets of 12 images, virtually uniform in their dress code. What is unsaid and equally interesting is that the body shapes are roughly the same too. The similarities lead to the project name: Exactitudes – a contraction of exact and attitude. When you look at set after set of tribes like Worldly Gentlemen, Volunteers and Yupstergirls, you’re reminded that there is no getting away from the fact that we are tribal animals.

The answer came from Homemade London – a craft and sewing cafe in Portman Village tucked behind Marble Arch and Selfridges. Owner Nicola Barron had organised a workshop where you could take items of clothing for remaking and updating.  The tutor had a million ideas for the clothes that about 10 people brought along. My skirt she turned inside out and suggested that I loop up bits of material with a double-threaded needle and cotton so that the material bunched together, hiding the holes. It was relatively easy, although the two sections I looped together looked nowhere near as good as the one she did.

I had also taken along a spring green cashmere jumper that was past its best but the nicest colour and I couldn’t bear to throw it out.  I’d wondered about felting it – a definite repurposing. She had brought along a battery powered woollen shaver to de-pill the jumper, which worked very well and I had another winter from it. (The jumper is now completely past wearing and I still want to turn it into a felted bag).

Someone else at the class, who made a point of never buying anything new, had brought a blouse that seemed too big for her in the body, even though the neck was a great fit.  The tutor’s answer – and apparently one she used a lot – was to create two darts running down the back of the blouse around the waist area, a few inches either side of the spine. A variation on that was to add loops for ribbon, to allow lacing like part of a corset.

Is there anything in your wardrobe that could do with remaking?  Perhaps a few darts could do it, either by your own fair hands or a dressmaker?

She makes the point that women who wear jeans are more likely to be depressed based on a survey of 100 women, asking what they wore when they felt depressed. Jeans and baggy tops seemed to top the list of ‘depressed’ clothes, with ‘happy’ clothes generally being well-cut, figure enhancing and made from bright and beautiful fabrics.

Professor Pine suggests that in order to make ourselves feel happier on flat days, we should choose our happy clothes and leave the jeans in the wardrobe.

That seems a fair assumption. But what if we loved all the clothes in our wardrobe? What if everything in it reflected who we currently were, fitted well and covered most occasions? What if we couldn’t wait to leap out of bed in the morning to get dressed?

Stylist Gok Wan preaches a similar story and before him, Trinny and Susannah. That clothes affect how we feel about ourselves, including or emotions, and can mean make or break in job interviews.

And yet, so many clothes on the market today are just ghastly. I can’t imagine them looking good on any figure or anyone being complimented when wearing them. Who designs them? An accountant? This isn’t to diss the taste or design talents of any accountants … but given how lacking in aesthetics so many clothes are, the only logical explanation is that they were put together with only economy in mind.

Researching for new finds and curating for LAS is more dismal than I expected. Far from finding hundreds of skirts, dresses, coats, shoes and blouses that I want to buy immediately, it can be several hours before I find three tops to go with one skirt.  And that search is theoretical – it does not take into account sizing or price. Thank goodness for the internet and Pinterest.

Happy clothes are out there – they just take some finding.

1. Skirt: BHS, t-shirt Roak | 2. blouse AF Vandervorst at FarFetch | 3. blouse Christian Wijnants at FarFetch