My July Plans (And June Recap)

My goodness, I cannot believe that we’re six months into 2025.. where is the time going? I actually had to grab out my diary and scroll through my phone’s photo app to remember all that I did this past month!

And July will be harder with all the happenings that are happening…

Disclaimer: This is a personal blog entry and you will not learn anything from reading this other than my thoughts and feelings, which will help you to know me better! 🙂

I Set a Personal Challenge

If you’ve read a ‘Chit Chat’ life update before, you’ll be aware that my ‘creative hobby’ away from my creative business is art. I love to draw and paint, so each month I set myself a personal art challenge which I document on a small YouTube channel.

June was ‘Trees’ month, because I love trees but am absolutely rubbish at drawing them. It’s the perfectionist in me that thinks that any trees I draw or paint need to look *exactly* like the real thing.. and that just isn’t realistic.

So I spent time in June trying to simplify trees. I think it worked – purely because I’m not shying away from them now – so I strongly recommend practising something that you’d like to get better at.

Maybe you struggle with inserting zippers. Or sewing straight lines for seams. Finding time throughout the month to practice will do wonders for your confidence.

I Took An Online Class

One of the things I want to be better at is illustrating people. I have mentioned it before, but when I was in my final year of fashions school, my tutor at the time told me I wouldn’t be able to show my fashion collection at Graduate Fashion Week in London unless I fixed the illustrations for my portfolio.

They were brutal (the tutor, not the illustrations) and ever since I have really struggled with my confidence when drawing people.

So, when I saw that there was a fun mixed media people class available online, I bought access to it, and my confidence shot up. Not because I learned anything new, but because I was able to practice and play without judgement.

So, is there a skill you want to improve that a short online course might help with? But I have five tips for getting better at fashion sketching if you just want to focus on that for now!

Pssst… I should mention at this point that I will have some online classes coming up that you can buy early access to in August! By that I mean, they’ll be cheaper then because they won’t be live until September, so you’ll be getting them at a pre-sale price before they’re fully available.

Learn more about:

Learn to Sew here
Basic Bodice Drafting here
Sleeve Pattern Drafting here
Collar Pattern Drafting here

There are more coming too, but I have learned to underpromise, so I’ll provide a more accurate update on those later in the year!

I Designed a Book Cover

Yep, you read that correctly! My fiancé (have I mentioned we got engaged a while back?) had a novella coming out and he really wanted a linocut print cover for it (as did his publisher)… so I pulled out my linocut tools, and spent a couple of days getting that designed and printed.

Everyone appears to be very chuffed with it, so that’s a win for June too!

I Singlehandedly Removed a Wasp Nest

Discovering the wasp nest was bigger than expected

This one feels a bit daft to mention.. but while my Man was away, I realised we had a wasps nest. And me being me, I decided to take it on by myself.

I actually took a bunch of photos and wrote it up if you want to learn more about how dealing with a wasps nest is like learning to sew…

I Edited So Many Blog Posts!

This was a big one because they take time, but I put almost 100 blog posts into draft mode and then worked slowly through 22 of them in June, rewriting the text to be more up to date, adding new photos where possible (I have few available as they all lived on my damaged external hard drive)…

I have many more left to do but this is great progress for someone who does it all alone!

I Wrote 4 New Sewing Blog Posts (And 2 Chatty Ones)

I had hoped to be back on it with writing new tutorials and guides for you, but all that editing took it out of me, so there were only 4 new sewing related posts in June. Not bad going though. You can catch up on them below:

I Recorded and Edited A New YouTube Video!

Eve smiling at the camera thinking about her summer sewing plans

I find creating videos for this blog to be really time consuming. I think it is the nature of documenting creating something from scratch. There’s often hours upon hours of video footage that then needs to be gone through and edited down to just a short 10-ish minute length video.

I could outsource it, but realistically, that just isn’t in my budget at present, so for now, my goal is to upload a video twice per month. We’ll see if I can manage that!

The video that I did uploaded was all about my summer sewing plans – you can watch it in this blog post or on my channel here!

I Created A Free Short Course

This is something I created in order to help people decide if learning pattern drafting was right for them. It hasn’t gone ‘live’ yet, but it will in July, so stay tuned for that – I’ll share it in the end of month recap!

I Made Four New Sewing Patterns

Ha, when I say ‘made’, I mean that I got the first version and prototypes done. There is still much to do, but I am hoping to have two drop in July – assuming time allows – and the two remaining patterns in August. They’re super easy to tweak and finish digitizing, but it will add to my workload.

We’ll see how that goes though, because I know July will be super busy as well with visits from family to enjoy!

July Plans

I’m not sure anyone will actually make it this far down, but I figured this would be a good opportunity to set some July plans. I’d call them mini goals, but that often has the effect of overwhelming me…

Work Stuff

I’m going to be ‘unavailable’ for about 14 days in July, so work will have to be crammed into the days I am able to do it…

Be Consistent With Emails: First up is to send my “For the Weekend” emails more consistently. And by this I mean every weekend. They have a great open rate and click through to my latest blog content, so it makes sense to keep on top of this.

I also love that I get replies from my long term readers, so it’s like getting updates from friends in return.

Write 4 New Blog Posts: I think this is something I can manage, even with the week away. I’ll probably write two per week, and get it done in two weeks. The struggle will be photos…

Edit 10 Old Blog Posts: Not an essential to do, but an ‘I’d like to get this done’… it would feel like some progress if I managed to get ten edited and published.

Not Work On Holiday: This will be the hardest of all, because I find it really hard to not do anything work related. It’s the ‘must work hard or I won’t earn anything’ mentality. I will allow myself to write the Weekly Email while away, but that is it. Promise!

Personal Stuff

I’m hoping to have some proper downtime when on holiday, so the personal stuff will be minimal for July.

Draw Every Possible Day: It’s going to be hard to achieve this, as we will be on holiday for some of July and I have two younger family members coming to stay later in the month too.. but my aim is to draw something every other day. Fingers crossed!

Sunstar Swimsuit sewing pattern cover, from Helen's Closet

Sewing Projects: I need a swimsuit for our holiday, so that is the first sewing project I will do in July, and then see how it goes from there.

I’d love to get all three refashioned projects that I mentioned in my Summer Sewing Plans video complete, but that’s pushing it a bit.

Right’o… I think that’s everything for my June update! It feels like it was a manic month but I suspect July will be busier with all the travels. I’ll be sure to write that up on the 31st, as I’ll be travelling that day, so stay tuned for that!

And sending you the biggest hugs for making it this far!

Eve