I am returning to one of my oldest and favorite hobbies after a break of many years - sewing. My experiences are all pre-internet, in terms of resources for help and/or ideas (patterns?). Anyone on here have any go-to places on-line (or elsewhere)? I am not a beginner by any means, just rusty. If I get one idea out of this, I’ll be thrilled!
Good for you! I want to get back into it myself, I want to sew a couple of cute sundresses for the summer.
You might take a look at sewweekly.com, which hasn’t been updated in months, but there is a large archive. Home sewers whip up, discuss, and display their efforts after a ‘challenge’ (sew something yellow, something Christmas-y, something nautical). I could spend a whole day looking there. And there are links to niche sewing pattern and notion sites, very interesting! I just love sewweekly.
Am I the only one who thought this was going to be a question about Ed Norton… 
Fabric stores still have pattern books. The pattern manufacturers now have websites, too.
McCalls seems to have become to patterns what Carnival is to cruise lines. The company now includes:
McCalls:
http://mccallpattern.mccall.com/
Butterick:
Vogue:
http://voguepatterns.mccall.com/
Simplicity is still out there, too:
http://www.simplicity.com/c-144-patterns.aspx
Plus – here are a few more than just those four old warhorses – see what your local fabric stores have.
If you want fabulous, take a look at “Vintage Vogue”:
http://voguepatterns.mccall.com/vintage-vogue-pages-850.php
(re-issues of period designs; deeply-discounted just now)
Experienced sewers are all full of shit.
Thanks everyone! I can’t wait to check out the links. Vintage… yum.
Another interesting link is folkwear.com, you could spend a week just looking at the beautiful drawings of all kinds of - well, folk wear. (I’ve made, in my head at least, the Tibetan jacket in brocades…). Need Edwardian underthings? Authentic Japanese laborer clothes for working in the rice paddies? A tango dress? A French cheesemaker’s smock? A velvet hooded cape for sweeping across the moors at midnight? Well, there ya go!
There’s a reason terms like “seamstress” were used. Is there a gender-nonspecific equivalent?
Sew-n-sews?
tailor
Many people nowadays use “sewist”, although I still prefer “sewer” myself (pronounced to rhyme with “mower”, of course, rather than “wooer”).
Check out ThreadsMagazine.com. I don’t recommend their digital edition but I think the print magazine is terrific, and there’s a lot of good stuff free for non-subscribers on their website.
there are a lot of sewing blogs out there right now. If you search, the most popular will pop up first. Make sure you narrow your search to the type of sewing you want to do: vintage, garment, craft, quilting, etc. There are also blogs that feature posts from dozens of other blogs, so you get a wide variety of sew-ers represented.
BTW, try adding a hyphen for a gender neutral name for a crafter who likes to sew. I haven’t seen it much but I like it better than Sewist.
Mr. Van der Kellen: “Oh, I have a cousin like that. He’s a sewer.”
Bob Hartley [Newhart]: “That’s not a very nice thing to call him.”
Mr. Van der Kellen: “No, that’s what he does. He’s a sue-er. He sues people.”
www.patternreview.com: has tons of pattern reviews from people who have sewn them up, and an active and friendly forum. They do sew-alongs, competitions and have online classes from time to time.