Bathing suit process

Hello summer! Hope you had a wonderful midsummer celebration! 🌸🌸🌸

I wanted to tell you a little about what I've been up to lately. A while ago I thought it would be fun if there were swimwear that was sewn to order on the website. So I sketched out a few different designs for swimwear, chose a model I wanted to try making first, a swim skirt. I sewed swim skirts in the store to order a few years ago, they were skirts you could work out and swim in, they were elastic at the waist and otherwise wide. Now I wanted to try and see if it was possible to make a comfortable, tighter swim skirt that looks like regular swimwear, even though it's a skirt. You want it to be easy to swim in, so I sketched out a design with a transparent skirt part.

Then I went to the fabric store and picked out some colors to sew the swimsuit in. There are such beautiful colors to choose from.

Then I made a pattern construction for the skirt, you play with the pattern a lot when making new models. You make a construction, sew a sample in fabric, try it on and see if it fits properly (it's good to try it on for a whole day or many hours, so you can feel if the pattern construction is pulling in one direction or if the elastic is too tight somewhere). Then if there are improvements to be made, you change the pattern and sew a new sample based on the updated pattern. You keep going like that, round and round, pattern - sample - pattern - sample, until it turns out as you imagined. Below is a picture of the first sample that I sewed up. It's not sewn in the right fabric, but just sewn up to test the pattern.

And it was when I tried this pattern that I noticed that you can lift the skirt up over the bust, (because there is a sewn-in bottom inside the skirt), and then it's a swimsuit instead, so fun! :) You like garments with multiple functions. When you wear it as a skirt, you can wear it straight so it's longer, or pull it up so it folds. Then when the pattern was ready, I sewed the sample in white, turquoise and dark blue on the parts. The material has a sun protection factor of 50 and can withstand chlorine water and salt water, it's called Econyl and consists of recycled polyamide. Then the skirt became this:

And if you fold up the skirt part, it's a swimsuit, or if you wear it lower: nice pleated fabric over the stomach.

So that was a little bit of what the process can look like from idea to finished product. See the swimsuit in the store: https://www.studio1800.se/products/swimskirt-white-turquise-navy-badkjol