Reader Shelley commented a couple of weeks ago that she envied my ability to sew, and this set me thinking as to how incredibly useful this skill really is.

But why would anyone want to learn to sew, when there are so many nice garments available in the shops?

The first issue, for many sewists, is fit. Many of us take up sewing because we simply can't buy clothes in the shops (aka: ready to wear) that fit, and we're fed up of pulling and tugging and shortening and twotting about with everything we buy off the rack. 

As an example, the average female garment is cut for a B cup, assumes a height of 5' 6", allows for about 6" of difference between waist and hip, and rather bigger hips than bust. 

In contrast, I am a C-D cup, 5'1" tall, have 12 inches of difference between waist and hip, and hips about the same size as my bust.

In other words, I don't have a hope in hell of ready to wear garments fitting me without substantial alteration.

For jackets and tailored garments, I can head for petite ranges, which at least have sleeves the right length, and the correct button placement, but these still tend to be too flat in the chest. Short does not necessarily mean that you don't have curves.

Petite ranges assume I want my skirts much shorter than I do, and I continually have to shorten trouser legs, losing flare or bootcut in the process. I also have to take in several inches of slack on the waistbands of trousers, skirts and dresses. 

Other women face different issues: sloping shoulders, long necks, low-slung bustlines, rounded tummies, rounded backs, asymmetry - you name it, there's some woman built like it. And when you make your own clothes, you can correct all these figure faults with relative ease.

The second issue is style. The vast majority of fashion is aimed at particular market segments and many of the garments available are too young, too short, too tight and too revealing for women who are not in their teens and 20s. Luckily for the rest of us, there are dress patterns instead, and in the past 20 years there has sprung up a multitude of small independent pattern companies producing really fabulous, innovative designs that suit women who don't want to look like Barbie. I am particularly fond of Japanese-inspired designs such as those from Miyake for Vogue, or Sewing Workshop, and I like clothes that layer and wrap and tie and allow lots of adjustment. 

The third issue is cost, and cost is the reason that I myself first learned to sew, after watching a college friend calmly cut out a pattern from newspaper and sew a dress together during the course of an afternoon. Having no training (I loathed sewing at school), I bought a book and tried to follow it. I was not particularly gifted but I quickly learned to sew simple skirts, tops and pull-on trousers for myself, friends and family for absolute peanuts. I also bought rubbish garments from charity shops and took them apart to look at the construction. Over time, I gained more skills and increased my repertoire.

A fourth reason for learning to sew is that your garments are unique - you will simply not see anyone else wearing quite the same thing that you are. And this uniqueness can be accomplished very quickly: once you crack a few patterns you like, you have almost unlimited possibilities to ring the changes with fabric, drape, colour, texture etc. Most experienced sewists use only a few patterns but use them over and over, making the garment shorter, longer, more or less formal, darker or lighter, or adding different sleeves, collars and embellishments, and in this way building themselves an entire wardrobe. The combination of fabric, pattern and embellishment is infinite.

The last reason, of course, is that the hobby itself is so very fulfilling. There are only three things that get me in the 'flow': sewing, beading and gardening. Do any one of these three and I lose track of time. Having something beautiful at the end of it is only a bonus. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about what to sew for myself this summer and since I have plenty of skirts and dresses already I've decided to concentre on culottes and skorts.

Culottes are a more useful option for me than a skirt, as I can tuck them into my wellies to go out into the garden, sit cross-legged, walk easily etc. However, culottes seem to be very few and far between in the shops. Periodically they're in fashion, as they were in the 1970s, but then they disappear again. That means you have to make them instead but this is actually a fairly easy option with a modified trouser pattern or a specialist pattern.

Also high on my list is trousers with overskirts, of the kind Shirin Guild sells (at massive expense), or a longer version of what might be called a 'skort', as some of us used to wear in gym.

A trouser with overskirt gives a bit more coverage than a plain trouser and depending on cut, can even look exactly like a skirt from the front and sometimes the back too. If you like the practicality of trousers but don't fancy drawing too much attention to your rear end or inner thigh area, these designs work brilliantly, and with certain designs, you can even choose quite a transparent fabric because you're double-layering.  

I'm also a big fan of Thai fisherman's pants, with their wrap front and fold-over top section; Islander pants (which wrap front to back and back to front, being open at the sides); and hakama-type pants, which again you wrap front to back and back to front, but which have closed side seams. All of these Eastern-inspired pants are incredibly comfortable to wear and give you a wider range of movement than Western trousers, and if you choose a fabric that drapes well, they also look very good.  

For all of these pants there are some lovely patterns out there for the home dressmaker (of if you don't sew yourself, you could always have a pair made up). Some of them are vintage and I've spent years, on and off, tracking down designs that I like. Conventional culottes tend to fall into two styles: quite crisp, almost mannish trousers, and very full, almost dirndle types, but more modern variations are much more interesting, and I favour the wrap-over variations. 

My personal favourite is the Tahoe Pant from Sewing Workshop, shown above in ideal form and on my shorter, wider figure. This has an extra-wide leg that wraps to both front and back to create what looks like a skirt. You can see the shape in these pictures - this is one I made some years ago in a border-patterned hemp. Vogue also produced this pattern (left, in red) which is very similar, but only has the wrap at the front. 

I've just bought the McCall's long skort pattern at top left, which I've been after for some time; the trouser pattern with half-skirt (shown right above) - a new variation for me; and these two wrap designs with tie waists (left, in white and grey). I think all of them will get lots of use in my wardrobe. 

Still to get are this super Marfy pattern with button sides, and the trouser with tie-over half-skirt (shown in a flowered fabric above), by Birch Street Clothing. 

I was reading an old copy of Threads magazine today and found an interesting article.

Threads is a sewing magazine, of course, so it's all about choosing the right fabric to sew with. But the same decisions can also be made in ready to wear: the upshot is, if you pick the right kind of fabric, with a heavy drape, your clothing can take pounds off you. 

I'm sure we're all aware that darker colours are more slimming - it is, after all, one of the reasons that 76 per cent of the average British female's wardrobe is in black. But the handle of the fabric also makes a difference - fabrics with good drape hang closer to the body, skimming your curves and moulding gently to your silhouette rather than standing away from it and making you look larger. The exact same garment in lightweight beige linen and in black satin-backed crepe looks dramatically different. 

So what gives a fabric good drape? This is something sewists deal with regularly, but you can copy these ideas in your ready to wear too. 

Weight: heavier fabrics tend to drape better. This needn't mean, with summer coming up, that you need to bundle up in woollens again. I've bought a few linen dresses recently on Ebay and found dramatically differing weights in each. Those made from Irish linen are usually the best, and Per Una has proved very solid - their linens are heavy and drape nicely. Their habit of adding godets at the hem also helps, as this weighs the fabric down a bit (see Garment design, below). 

Weave: knit fabrics such as jersey drape better than woven ones - 'slinky' knit drapes best of all. Twill fabrics also drape well, as does anything tightly woven such as wool worsted, wool sateen and wool serge. Crepe fabrics are the best-draping wovens and work in any fibre, including silk, wool, polyester and rayon. 

Stretch: the addition of between 2 and 5 per cent Lycra also helps a fabric to drape better.  Above 5 per cent and you're more into controlwear.

Bias: when fabric is turned to the bias, it automatically becomes stretchier - somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent, so cutting on the bias results in a similar look to stretch fabrics. 

Garment design: garments that are fitted at the top but full at the bottom carry most of their weight near the bottom and this makes for better drape. Examples include flared trousers with a flat waistband, A-line skirts, especially 6- or 8-gore, circle skirts and skirts with godets at the hem.

How to detect good drape

* Hold the garment up to your body and look for long lines of vertical folds. 

* Shake the garment and listen for a muffled snap. 

* Scrunch the garment up and try to get the whole width of it in one hand. 

Add drape to your existing ready to wear. 

If you've got a garment that's a bit floaty or sticks out when you wear it, you can add weight to it with fine metal chain (a gold chain is traditionally stitched into the hem of every Chanel jacket to create better drape), buttons, beads or other detailing.

In fine garments such as wedding dresses and evening gowns, silk-covered lead weights similar to those found in curtains are often used to ensure correct drape, especially on trains or cowl necklines. A small weight of this kind also works very well in the inner hems of trousers to ensure they fall neatly over the foot.

I routinely use large buttons or metal-link chain to weight garments made in lightweight cottons and make them hang better - it also stops a full but lightweight skirt from blowing over your head when the wind gets up. 

Purple with frustration recently at the awfulness of my bras, I decided to embellish them and see if I could improve matters. I have to confess, I am quite pleased with the results.

These bras, I should point out, are modelled on my mannequin, Isabella, and stuffed with old socks...

In deciding which embellishments to choose, I logged onto Figleaves and tried to define what I liked about certain bras. Apart from more embroidery on the top cups (something I'll try later using appliques), I noticed that pretty bras usually have the following:

* bows at the bottom of the front straps

* sometimes bows up the straps themselves

* a strong central motif between the cups

* embroidery outlining the cups

* pretty straps

* interest on the bra band

* a pretty back

* occasionally,  sequins on the cups

Some of these ideas can't easily be copied - there is a little you can do, for instance, to prettify a back band because that would affect its elasticity. The same applies to the straps, though I will try, at a future date, to applique a narrow lingerie ribbon on top of the thunderingly wide straps of the Doreen. But I decided to give some of the other ideas a try. 

The bras shown are all Doreens by Triumph. A Doreen bra, though fabulously supportive and shaping, generally has little in the way of adornment other than a small central bow, though the Luxury variety also has prettier lace on the top cups, satin fabric, and picot edging on the cups and straps, which the other types lack. 

On the black Luxury Doreen (right) I added scattered gold sequins in the centres of the flowers, a little gold cross pendant (more Madonna than 'the Madonna', I hope) and embroidery round the cups in gold floss. This is very easy to do - you just use a large-eyed crewel needle and push it through the fabric, weaving in and out of the lace, then tie a knot at the back (take care not to pull the thread tight, as you'll reduce the cup size!). If you keep the sequins to the top half of the cups, you can sew right through the outer layer and inner lining but it won't irritate your nipples, or you can take more care and keep the stitching to the front layer only. The bra looks pink underneath, btw, because of my pink sports socks!

This red Doreen (left) is the standard model, which has quite rough, opaque lace. I added a red and gold pendant as its central motif, and the same gold floss embroidery as the black bra. The little red bows at the base of the straps (see close-up at top left) came from the old central motif of both this bra and the other red one shown and are held on with a gold bead, while the gold braid around the bra band is - believe it or not - off a posh chocolate box. 

And finally this red bra is my favourite. The upper cups are liberally sprinkled with irridescent sequins, and the central rhinestone motif is taken from a broken bracelet, as are the rhinestone bars at the bottom of the straps. The jade embroidery floss is actually knitting silk. The more embellishments the better, I think and I like this belly-dancer's-top result: the key is keep it tonal - all these embellishments are in the pink/jade range, which matches well with the red fabric.

Because I sew and make jewellery, I tend to have sequins, thread and findings hanging around the place, but if you want to try this idea yourself, the bits and bobs are readily available - lingerie bows, lingerie roses, applique lace and rhinestones can be had from any haberdashery or craft shop - I even found lingerie bows in a office supply shop.

Keep the embellishments flat and smooth for the best results. Curiously, though, I found that the cheaper and gaudier the ornament, the better it looks - real gold chain and silver don't work nearly so well.

I'll post some more pictures later, when I've embellished some others.