Temperatures are back to 'normal' in France the past couple of days - a bit lower than normal, actually - but we had been basking in a heatwave for a while this past week or so.

Thirty-degree heat for days on end gave me the opportunity to rediscover the delights of wearing yukata.

Yukata are a form of Japanese kimono that are worn as bathrobes, sometimes for sleeping, and for casual wear in spa resorts and at the coast. Made usually from cotton, though sometimes hemp, and often in the colourway blue and white, they are the most wonderful, comfortable, airy garments you could imagine. Japan has a hot, humid climate in summer and the Japanese know a thing or two about how to keep cool.

I have a sizeable collection of vintage kimono, but until now, only two yukata - one in polycotton, a gift from a friend, and the one shown above, in a cotton 'ro' - a fabric woven with thousands of tiny holes that look like hemstitching and allow air to pass right through (see bottom picture).

Having lived in these for a couple of days, along with a silk ro kimono that was almost equally cool, I splashed out on three new ones - two worn vintage and one overstock from a shop clearance. I've always wanted a yellow yukata (the one above was 10 dollars); the floral one below (four dollars) is just gorgeous and has these lovely curved sleeves, and the stencilled one (99 cents) is in cotton Ro for maximum coolth. 

One of the reasons yukata are so comfortable in the heat is that - as with all genuine women's kimono - they are open under the arms. From where the sleeve meets the side body, the body is open for about eight inches, and the back of the sleeve is also open to the wrist. This is to prevent the kimono from binding when you wear a deep obi sash, but it also allows the free passage of air where you would otherwise be the most sweaty.

Kimono are traditionally worn wrapped left over right (in Japan, only corpses wear them wrapped right over left), but since I'm a westerner I feel no need to uphold tradition in this way, and I wrap mine right over left because it feels more natural to me. I hitch up the overlength, sash it with a narrow cord around the waist, drape the rest freely around the hips and sash it closed around the waist with a long silk scarf. I close the neckline with a brooch.  

The kimono at right, with the long sleeves is a different kind of summer kimono - silk gauze, known as 'sha'. This stiff, transparent, featherweight silk stands away from the body rather like silk organza, so it feels like you're wearing nothing at all. Sha silk kimono are far more formal than cotton yukata, and in Japan would always be worn over an underkimono, but since I work from home, I wear mine as yukata. Nothing is more comfortable when you're working at a desk all day. 

You might think that the sleeves of kimono would get in the way, but personally I don't find this. The shorter, curved sleeves stay out of the way, while the longer sleeves can be tucked into the side body when you're working, or tied back with a cord.

The big surprise is to see how addicted the DH has now become to kimono. Back in the winter I suggested that he wear a wool 'juban' - a kind of underkimono - as a top layer, and he found it so comfortable that he now practically lives in it, swishing around the house from morning to night. So I've just ordered him a yukata as well - this 1950s number in splashy cotton.  Note the different shape of the sleeves - indicating a man's style. The side body and sleeve are also closed, for those of you who prefer to be more covered up. 

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. 

It is wonderful once again to be in sandals instead of boots, and to feel cool, crisp linen on my skin.

Speaking of linen, it was rather a shock to find that my 'new' lavender linen Boden dress is now four years old, but on the upside, this means I am due a new frock, as I can now feel justified in wearing the Boden one for every day and not only for posh.

I therefore wore it on Monday to go shopping, along with a long white linen coat with a Nehru neckline from Hobbs (lots of cover to please the dermatologist, since I am now sworn off the sun forever and aye). 

Being a long-time sewist, I can run up a summer frock in the course of an evening, so when I buy one it's got to offer me something special, such as a good print, piped seams, a lining, or an invisible zipper. So I knew pretty exactly what I was looking for from my new dress:

1 Pale blue.

2 Floral.

3 Quality linen.

4 V-neck.

6 Sleeveless, so it can be worn alone, over t-shirts or under a top layer. Besides, nothing dates a dress like the sleevehead. 

7 Long, so I can go bare-legged.

And above, folks, after a bit of scouting around, is the very dress.

This little Monsoon number cost me £7.50 on Ebay, though I had to bid for it twice (I dropped out at about 16 quid the first time it appeared, when it was better photographed and therefore looked more desireable). So I hope it will be winging its way to me (or at least splashing) very soon. 

I did notice, however, that my criteria for a dress were only met by certain makes, so thought I would share the information. Here, in no particular order are the brands that seem to me to go that extra mile when it comes to design offerings that will suit a mid-life babe:

1 Monsoon - good silk dresses as well as linens in vibrant colours and nice prints as well as plains.

2 Boden - excellent stretch, wrap viscose dresses, plus linens with flare and interesting edgings.

3 Hobbs - arty, intellectual dresses with interesting design details. In fact my favourite linen items are all by Hobbs.

4 Per Una - flirty, feminine dresses with lots of volume at the hem, plus the same design in skirts.

5 Laura Ashley - basic linen dresses with thin cotton linings.

6 Phase Eight - pretty dresses with feminine details.