Sewing and Cooking

Yesterday I made my first cheesecake. I've made many cakes and muffins and such but I had never tried my hands at cheesecakes. I followed the recipe of one of my favourite food youtubers - Benedetta. It was a lot of work but quite a success at home and I'll probably make it again, maybe with some modifications (this one came a bit big for my cake dish.)

And my latest finished object - the Burda # 124 3/2013 linen shirt. Back in May 2013 I bought this issue of Burda and planned on sewing a hundred things from it and never got to actually doing it until last week.
The fabric is some fairly thick linen which I had bought with the idea for this shirt last year, together with some suitable thread. The pattern is of average difficulty, with sleeves, patches, a collar with neck facing and it even requires buttonholes.

Because standard Burda patterns are designed for height 168 cm and I'm only 156 cm, I had to modify the pattern. I traced it on transparent kitchen paper, measured myself and calculated that I needed to shorted the shirt above the waist with about 2 cm and 3 cm below the waist. Instructions on Burda site recommend removing 1/3 of the excess length at the level of the sleeve and 2/3 below the sleeve and above the waist:

Then I transferred the modified pieces on brown paper.

This is one of the elements that troubled me most - attaching a collar with neck facing. Burda patterns have very short instructions (the fact that my issue is in German and I don't speak German is another matter :), but I couldn't find any youtube videos for such collars, so I improvised. I think it turned alright, but I wish I knew the right sequence of steps, as it was  a bit tricky.

The elements that I like most about this shirt - the arrow patches.

Although my fabric is not delicate, it is very loosely woven and subject to raveling, so I finished most of my seams as French seams. I also added a button on the inside of the side seams to hide the arrow patch for when I want to wear the shirt straight. And I made all of my buttonholes myself on my sewing machine! I was quite afraid and did have to undo two of them, but they turned OK in the end. Sorry for the crinkles on my shirt, but this linen fabric is impossible to keep ironed.

And a final bite of my strawberry cheesecake :)