Oh golly. So hard to find a title that’s not super-obvious and not cheesy or twee… I don’t think I’ve succeeded. Not that anyone reads this blog anyway, but I didn’t feel entirely comfortable announcing right upfront that I HAVE MADE UNDERWEAR!!! This was on my summer sewing challenge list so I’m really happy to be ticking this off so early.

The pattern I used was Cloth Habit’s Watson bikini that comes with the Watson bra, and I found a video by Liz Sews in my YouTube subscriptions the other day about making these which prompted my finally sorting myself out and starting this project. This video was very helpful because in it she demonstrates the ‘burrito method’ which I’ve heard about a lot on the blogosphere in relation to shirt-making but never seen demonstrated – and it turned out that this was a much tidier approach than the one in the instructions, which leaves one seam unenclosed.

The fabric I used was all scraps – sea-green viscose jersey from the 2 tops I’ve made out of this, plus a skerrick of grey cotton-lycra jersey left over from the grey Hudson Pants I made – and the elastic I ordered off eBay.

I’m pretty pleased with this experiment. The fit’s pretty good, I’ve made good use of an awkward couple of remnants that otherwise would probably have just sat around being annoying for ages. It didn’t take a vast amount of time – all good things.

In theory, these are super-easy to make. Construction is simple and easy to understand, and the elastic was a lot easier to attach than I’d expected. However, the small pieces and lightweight fabric meant that I spent nearly as much time dealing with hideous thread snarls as I did in actually sewing. Maybe it’ll be easier second time round – certainly my elastic application improved as I went along – but actually this pair took about 3 hours to pull together.

I’ll definitely be making more of these – why buy knickers when I can use up scraps quite quickly like this and get a result that’s much the same as the sweatshop version? I’m thinking I might make a couple of tweaks to the next version though – specifically to raise the centre front and back by about an inch.

Pattern: Watson bikini
Size: XL
Mods: None
Fabric: viscose/elastane jersey scraps, cotton/elastane jersey scraps