How Lovely is By Hand London?

This post’s subtitle is “It’s the wrong pattern, Grommit”, but this only works in a Wallace and Grommit voice.

On Monday, while the Small Boy was having his afternoon nap, I decided to do some cutting out. I pulled everything out the cupboard, took and uploaded some photographs of my fabric for my last post, and then faffed around a bit.

I’m always a bit scared of the cutting process, if truth be told, probably because it’s one of those bits it’s very difficult to go back and fix if you get wrong! And it’s especially scary when you have limited resources of very lovely fabric. For this reason, and out of curiosity for the Charlotte skirt, I decided to start with cutting my skirt rather than my coat. In the Charlotte Sewalong, By Hand London says (as do many blogs, books etc etc) that I should trace my patterns and given that I, somewhat wishfully thinking, cut my Megan Nielsen Kelly skirt in too small a size, I decided to give this a go.

So, to my Charlotte pattern. I’d read through the instructions previously, but hadn’t pulled out the pattern, and when I did, I realised immediately that something was amiss. Can you spot it?

I have the Elisalex dress inside the Charlotte skirt packaging! As I got the pattern as a gift, I wasn’t sure where my mother-in-law had bought it, so I contacted By Hand London directly. I used their online contact form but as this didn’t illicit a response within a few hours (I am now impatiently wanting to start on this skirt!), I tweeted them instead. Almost immediately they got back to me, offering apologies and to send out the correct pattern… and the Elisalex booklet to go with my paper pattern too. How nice is that?!!

So, now I feel I owe them a FO very quickly and so will be prioritising the skirt over the coat! I do think the skirt will make up very quickly though, and so will be a quick FO hit (hurrah, shiny new thing) and then should get me back into the sewing frame of mind before I next tackle the coat.

*Update* - On Thursday (3 days after I contacted them), not only did By Hand London send the promised patterns, but also included, with a lovely hand-written note, a lovely Charlotte tote bag "for good measure". Thank you so much, ladies!
I later used this story, at work, as an example of "good customer service" in a team meeting! :)