Category Archives: Sewing

January 17, 2014 · 9:26 pm

My Wild, Crazy Friday Night

Um. So I’m officially old and boring, k? I’m cool with that. I think. My Friday night was awesome. I bounced between cooking with Syo, playing Final Fantasy XIV with Osiris, and sewing. I’ve moved from procrastinating on the Pikachu onesie (photos forthcoming once I manage to pin Tyo down) to procrastinating on Syo’s onesie. So instead I grabbed this gorgeous knit (a lightweight sweater-knit which, amazingly, has only been marinating in stash for a few weeks) and my knit sloper.

And all I can say is, why don’t I have two dozen tops like this?

This.

Cozy. Comfy. Sleekly elegant. Perfect.

Yes, I’m wearing my fleecepants. Aren’t you? Why not?

Not much to say about construction, except that I finished the seams with my new/old/borrowed serger (that’s a whole ‘nother story I’ll hopefully get around to. Or not; it may not be interesting to anyone at all but me.) But I haven’t figured out what kind of needle it takes so I couldn’t try a four-thread serge so I didn’t want to use it for seam construction, so I did my usual thing of sewing the seam on the sewing machine (narrow zigzag, very basic) and then overlocking. Actually, overlocking first works better, by the way. If you can get everything aligned properly. Again, I found the length a bit short, so I added a wide band on the hem, which is coincidentally the easiest way to finish the bottom of a knit tee if you haven’t got a coverstitch. Which I haven’t. Someday, my pretties. I wonder if my taste in tee-length hasn’t changed in the last couple of years. Though I would’ve sworn I’ve always liked them long.

I used steam-a-seam to get nice, crisp sleeve hems, and then wimped out and did a zigzag finish. I didn’t feel like fussing with a twin needle.

I used fold-over elastic around the neck, the way I wanted to with my fleece shirt (because I bought some since then) It’s maybe a little heavy for this fabric. I increased the tension going around the sharper curves so it wouldn’t stick out, but it also gathered up the neckline a bit more than I would’ve liked. It doesn’t actually look gathered when worn, which I was a bit worried about, so it’ll work, but I think a narrower elastic or the fold-over fabric binding I used on the fleece shirt might’ve been better.

My only reservation about this fabric (some kind of a poly-rayon blend) is that it hasn’t got any spandex, so I’m not sure how much it’ll bag out with wear. That could interfere with these sleek, elegant lines I’m loving so much. I can always take it in if I need to, right?

I hope your Friday night was as exciting as mine!

26 Comments

Filed under Sewing

Tagged as knit sloper, knits, tees

Image

The moment I have been dreading

Since Tyo made it clear that she REALLY wanted zip-off feet, has come to pass.

Yep. One of the feet is pointing backwards.

I wish I drank, because this moment calls for one.

26 Comments

January 11, 2014 · 11:48 pm

Image

Increments of Pikachu

This would go faster if I didn’t keep losing things. Like ALL MY SEWING MACHINE ATTACHMENTS. Including zipper foot. No, I still haven’t found it, and I even mostly-cleaned my sewing room! And deciding I need other things I hadn’t even thought of before. Like tape for binding the insides of the zippers.

But. There are feet. There is a hood. There are bits that go in between that. And someday soon, I just barely dare to hope, there will be a Pikachu onesie..

9 Comments

January 9, 2014 · 7:55 pm

December 31, 2013 · 6:47 pm

The fruits of procrastination

I can’t finish Tyo’s Pikachu onesie quite yet. I ran out of yellow thread and, more problematically, I forgot to get yellow zippers and that grippy material for the bottoms of the feet. I could’ve gone out and gotten some, but that would’ve required leaving the house. I don’t have much time off this year and most of what I did have off was spent running from one family engagement to the next. Which is as it should be, but still. Busy. So I’m treating my scant leisure time with fierce protectiveness.

It’s also been fucking cold. Long, steady, solidly cold, with lots of wind. I needed a tiny bit of black fleece for Pikachu, but it being black fleece (and on sale!) I got two metres. So today, whilst stymied on the Pikachu front, I made a fleece shirt.

I used my knit sloper, which I haven’t done in about a million years. It felt good.

I used the same technique to up-size my sloper for (not-so-stretchy) fleece as I did with my Grandma’s sweater, with much the same results: the size is good but the shoulders are just about too wide. The sloper has pretty narrow shoulders, though, which is why I went for it. Nice thing about using my knit sloper—it’s cut out of Bristol board, so I just grabbed a sliver of soap from the bathroom (since all my chalk is AWOL. Seriously, everything is AWOL. I mean, I’m not the most organized person, but this is ridiculous.) and traced around it. So much neater than pinning everything!

When I got to trying-on, I had to scoop out a bit under the arm, but otherwise the fit was pretty good. I thought the body was a bit short so I finished it with a wide band; the sleeves I just hemmed under with a three-step zig-zag.

The high point of my construction was binding the neckline. I used black cotton-Lycra, the stuff I use for underwear and leggings. I just cut my strip wide, zig-zagged it in place on the right side, folded over so the edge was bound, and top stitched the whole works, then trimmed off whatever I didn’t need from the back.

It’s not really the right fabric for a top—a little stuff and awkward, not enough drape. Nor is it a wonder of professional-looking finishing. But it’s warm and serviceable and warm and practical and warm and generally just WARM.

Yeah, I fear this blog suffers stylistically in the winter. My brain shuts down and all thoughts of fashion are replaced by cries of “Is it WAAAAARRRMM?!?”

At least it goes well with my fleece pants…

17 Comments

Filed under Sewing

Tagged as fleece, knit sloper, whining, winter

December 31, 2013 · 12:36 pm

Sewing and thought (or the lack thereof)

As I procrastinate on Pikachu, I’ve finished up a pair of undies that has sat, in a sad, forgotten wad behind the sewing machine, for several months now. I had decided I wanted to finish them in stretch lace. I like this finish on quite a few of my RTW pairs; although it isn’t the sturdiest, it’s comfy, pretty, and mimizes panty-lines. But first I couldn’t find the lace I had purchased, then found it but used it on another project, and eventually got more but hadn’t ever pulled it all together. I think these are a modified pair of McCall’s 4471, with the arch-over-the-front-leg reduced. I think. They’re largely identical to my 70s-pattern pairs, at this point, aside from the finish.

As for thought? Well, depending on the finish you choose for something like underwear, you may or may not need a hem allowance on the edge (on McCall’s I think this is 5/8″ as usual, but don’t quote me on that because I didn’t actually check.) On some of my other patterns, it’s 1/4″ or 3/8″. If you stitch an elastic to the edge and turn it under, you’ll need a hem allowance. If you cover the edge with a fold-over elastic, you don’t need any hem allowance at all. And if you add a wide band, like, oh, stretch lace… you may just want to reduce your pattern pieces a bit. In this case, I remembered to lower the rise (especially in the front), but didn’t think to do anything about the legs or, more particularly, the width through the crotch.

When worn they’re a bit more like boy-shorts than panties, in fact.

Which is fine, but definitely something I will try to think about when I next make a pair. And if I write it down here, maybe my chances of remembering to think will be just a little bit better.

Oh, and can I just say, until I was sewing my own, I don’t think I ever in my LIFE thought about how wide the crotch in my underwear was?

Also, grippy fabric (for soles) and zippers for the Pikachu Onesie have now been purchased, and if Tyo has her way I’ll be finishing it tomorrow. OK, if Tyo had her way, it would’ve been finished a week ago, but, well, have I mentioned before that she’s quite persistent when she wants something? It will be done soon, anyway.

7 Comments

Filed under Sewing

Tagged as McCall's 4471, Underwear

Image

Pikachuchuchu

I failed at Christmas sewing this year, pretty badly. Aside from my grandma’s sweater, I made Osiris fleece pants, and that was all I had time for. But I did manage to order the Jalie onesie pattern, and find the right fleece. So work has begun on Tyo’s Pikachu Onesie.

11 Comments

December 26, 2013 · 9:34 pm

December 19, 2013 · 4:28 pm

Snugly-wugly

Simplicity 2603

Three pattern pieces. That’s about right, I gotta say, for gift sewing. Well, any sewing, these days. I’m all about the quick reward.

This is a present for my grandma, who I actually SAW this Christmas. Well, this pre-Christmas. The idea came to me about two days before she arrived last week, just enough time to impulsively buy expensive fabric and (fortunately) dig out the pattern, which I haven’t used since I made my red cardi-wrap.

Stand by for rather more photos than something so simple and last-minute really deserves, especially when they’re all blurry nighttime iPhone photos. Quantity over quality?

Scrunchy

I made the version with the shorter drapes this time. It’s still pretty drapey. Also, doesn’t it go well with my fleece pants?

Front view. Dirty mirror. Ugh.

OK, sorry for the dirty mirror, but the shots Tyo took didn’t show the front very well.

Back view

I used the same small size I had already traced for myself, but I made a couple of adjustments to make it a bit more roomy, adding a bit at the back fold and along the sides and under the arms. In hindsight, I should’ve just added on the sides and under the arms, the extra width at the back just makes the shoulders too wide. In hindsight, that should’ve been obvious, but, y’know. I like to learn things the hard way. There’s a bit of excess ease in the sleeve cap, which I tried to ease in when I should’ve just trimmed it off. I don’t remember noticing that the last time, maybe because I was using a squishier sweater-knit. So the seam where the sleeve is set in is a bit stretched and bumpy. I am hoping it will settle in after a wash or two, but probably it won’t. Honestly, my Grandma has a full-blown dowager’s hump and extremely forward shoulders at this point, so really the shoulder-fit has plenty of other problems.

Swishy. With fleece pants.

The fabric is a heavy Ponti de Roma, the sort of thing I normally don’t buy unless it’s, oh, 70% off, but for Grandma I splurged, and I’m glad I did, as it’s wonderfully snugly yet smooth. I have this sinking feeling it will pill like crazy later on, but for now it’s lovely.

Side view, with drape

Did I mention most of the good shots were blurry?

Wings.

There’s still a fair bit of wing.

Shoulder seams.

Sewing ponti is about as easy as knit sewing gets. I did feed in some clear elastic into the seam along the shoulders and back of the neck, for added stability. Probably not necessary, but it won’t hurt, right?

The best knit-sewing cam on my White machine.

I sewed it on my White, since it has a few knit-specific stitches that Grandma’s Rocketeer doesn’t.

Twin needled hem on the sleeves

I didn’t finish the edge around the front and bottom of the sweater, but I did hem the ends of the sleeves. I used a twin needle for the first time in a long time, and tried out something I think I maybe got from Kadiddlehopper, which was the idea of using fleecy nylon thread in the bobbin for doing twin-needling. Apparently it is stretchier and reduces tunneling? Although I should probably have wound it by hand. Anyway, ponte is not a good place to test it, since it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve ever managed to hem with a twin-needle that didn’t tunnel like crazy.

inside of twin-needled hem.

But, the resulting hem is nice and stretchy, and I did a pretty good job of lining my stitching up with the edge of the folded-under part, if I do say so myself.

I was worried the sleeves (which I made to my length) would be a bit too long, but although Grandma isn’t as tall as she used to be, I don’t think arms shrink the same way, and the monkey-arms thing is a bit of a family condition. The sleeves are a little long on her, but really about where they fall on me.

Of course, any time I tried to get a picture of her wearing it, her hand was in front of the camera, so I don’t have any good pictures of it in action.

I have one last bit of Christmas sewing to finish, PJ pants for Osiris (they just need elastic and hems, but of course I can’t really work on them at our house 😛 and it’s hard to sneak over to his sister’s without him), and the kids are getting fleece fabrics and promises.* We’ve just about finished decorating the tree and wrapping presents. I may actually survive Christmas this year after all. Although I still didn’t send out cards…

*They got laptops earlier in the fall, “for school,” with the understanding that those counted for Christmas presents. So really, they’d better be cool with whatever they get.

9 Comments

Filed under Sewing

Tagged as Christmas sewing, Simplicity 2603

Image

Last minute Xmas sewing

Never really a good idea. Nonetheless, I decided yesterday I should make a warm and snugly sweater for my grandma. It needs to be done by this weekend.

What last minute crazy Christmas stuff are you trying to cram in?

24 Comments

December 18, 2013 · 6:16 pm

November 17, 2013 · 11:59 am

I am a bad girl.

Oops!

I have a winter coat cut out that needs to be sewn. Syo needs some costuming made for a dance performance at the end of the month. And did I mention I’m working two (sometimes three) jobs right now? AND I need to get started on my Christmas sewing, if I’m actually going to do any. Which I want to. I have a whole post on that in drafts, alongside the post on the Vader Dress and a number of other things I haven’t managed to blog.

So what am I doing?

Vogue 1094

Making Vogue 1094. Because no reason, except that this border-embroidered mesh (which really wanted to be a sari in another life) demanded it. Because I need another fluffy fifties dress SOOO badly. (The poor 70s, they are getting so neglected. I actually had someone at work say to me that I had a 50s-vintage style going on, and I was all like, well, the 50s are fun but really the 70s has my heart, and then I took stock of what I’ve actually been WEARING, and, well…)

I’m probably going to use some of the rest of it to make a gathered drape around the top rather than do the folded bias bands the pattern calls for. I love the drapes (even if they are a little strangely-constructed) but really, with this fabric, how can you not use the lace, um, EVERYWHERE?

When I went to trace the pattern, I found myself boiling it down to a mere three of the Voguety-million pattern pieces. Bodice front, bodice back, and skirt. For the skirt, it calls for six identical, tapered panels. There is a separate piece for the skirt lining, but on comparison the only difference was length. I knew I wanted to use one wide, gathered rectangle to make the most of my embroidered mesh, so I only traced the one.

For under my mesh, I found a gorgeous, two-toned taffeta that is mostly black with just a hint of blue. I wasn’t sure about the blue with the black overlay, but in and of itself I liked it better than any of the five other black taffetas I looked at, and the part where it was 70% off an already reasonable price didn’t hurt, either. It is, by the way, the hardest fabric to pin through that I’ve ever met.

Bodice front

The construction described for this dress is, well, odd. There’s a lot of handwork, not surprising, and the lining is more of an underlining—which suits me fine, I suppose, but as I said, I’m not using the lining bodice pieces, which don’t extend into the shoulder region. Yeah, I don’t really get it either. Although I’d be curious to try, at some point, just to see what it turned out like. Just not with this particular fabric. For this make, the fabric is totally boss.

Before tracing the bodice pieces, I pulled out my pieces from Project Drop Waist to compare. I wound up shortening only at the waist, and adding a centre back seam to make my swayback adjustment. We’ll see how the shoulders end up fitting—it’s pretty hard to gauge in this style. Other than that, and a little side-seam twiddling, I don’t THINK I need to do much. I suppose we’ll see if it fits.

Yesterday, when Stylish and I got together for our weekly Jacket Makings session, she made fleece pants (one can never have too many) and I worked on this. Since I didn’t have anything over there good for marking darts on dark fabric, I mostly worked on the skirt. Yes, we had a largely jacket-free Jacket Makings day.

Skirt

I cut the skirt panels from the taffeta and sliced off one entire side of my 4.4m of lacy yardage. I shortened the skirt by 2″, which puts the hem more at my knee than below it—which is where I like it, although it may throw off the overall proportions of the dress. So be it. I also narrowed the bottom flare of the pattern piece just a smidgeon, because it was SO CLOSE to fitting double on my taffeta and it would save so much fabric. Not that I know what I’m going to do with an extra metre of blue-black taffeta, mind you.

Hem interior—braid on right, taffeta on left.

I also got the pattern-recommended 3.5 m of horsehair braid. Which brings me to my biggest irk so far. Recall that I shortened the pattern, and that I narrowed the skirt slightly, all of which would have narrowed the hem. I still wound up being short about 15″ of braid. ARGH! WTF? Should I have stretched the horsehair more? I know it’s flexible stuff, but somehow that seems like a bad idea. If I’d been at home, I probably would’ve had a remnant somewhere I could splice in, but as I was at Stylish’s, I didn’t, so I settled for splicing in a piece of the taffeta, cut on the bias. Probably some interfacing would’ve been helpful, but I was irate and didn’t think of it until just now when I was typing this. It doesn’t show on the outside, and I suspect that the small, slightly-more-flexible part of the hem won’t be at all noticeable once all the gathering is said and done, but still. I’m annoyed.

So the skirt is pretty much ready to be gathered on to the bodice, which leaves me with the scary part of the dress-making—the bodice. I guess I’d better go pull up my big girl panties and find my tracing wheel…

(And did I mention that there’s about three metres of the other edge of the mesh fabric, with the same lace border, left? can we say skirt?)

9 Comments

Filed under Sewing

Tagged as 50s, in progress, Vogue 1094

November 11, 2013 · 2:05 pm

The Body

My mother has struck again. It’s that murky stretch between my birthday and Christmas, so a present can be justified, right? Actually, it’s Stylish’s birthday today. She can’t have this one, although I might share…

The Body. With mop.

Anyway. My mom found it at a flea market. My mom informs me that it should be called “Judy,” but they have been calling it “The body.” I kinda like that.

It has the usual adjustments—bust, waist, hip, waist length. With a fair bit of twiddling, I was able to get them all where they should, perhaps, be. Note how the gap between the pieces goes from narrow at the top to wide at the waist to narrow again at the bottom. I still don’t think the details of the shape are terribly close.

The bust.

Especially the bust. That odd, pointy bust is, well, not anything like mine. Adding a bra helps.

With bra. No way on earth my hips do that flare.

The biggest thing that will bother me, I think, is that it doesn’t have a swayback. So my swayback adjustments will always look a bit odd.

Clothed

On the other hand, my clothes mostly (aside from the swayback) seem to fit her. I tried on the Star Wars dress, arguably the most precisely-fitted thing I own, and it worked quite well, although the photo turned out a bit blurry as the light in the multi-purpose room isn’t great.

It fits!

In other news, it’s Remembrance Day. Between this present and Stylish’s birthday, I don’t really feel like I’ve been properly observant; I didn’t even manage to get a poppy this year, which kills me. Anyway, in lieu of actually doing anything substantial, I’ll point you back to this post (scroll down to get to the Remembrance Day part), and just say: Lest We Forget.

And, thank you, Mom.

9 Comments

Filed under Sewing

Tagged as dress form, Remembrance Day