Category Archives: Sewing

March 16, 2011 · 5:08 pm

Measuring Patterns

Pattern measuring---Click through for full-size image

Before I forget, thanks EVERYONE for your wonderful comments on my blogiversary yesterday. It made for a completely warm and fuzzy day (in between wrangling children, appointments, and driving clear across town six times… and mine is not a small town :P)

One of the most interesting things I learned asking my mom about home-sewing in her youth was that the rise of the muslin is a comparatively recent event. I’m sure fine couturiers have always been making them, but when my mom was learning to sew, they were considered a waste of time and—worse—fabric.

Sew and Save by Madeleine Hunt (published 1953) seems to agree—I don’t think there’s a single mention of making a test garment in the entire book, despite a lot of emphasis on fit (and minimizing figure flaws, can’t have our flaws showing, ladies, 😉 ). Instead, they measured.

And measured and measured and measured.

The book has twelve full pages dedicated to measuring patterns, going over every common type of pattern at the time—princess seams, kimono sleeves, gored skirts, sleeves. I’m too lazy to scan them all right now, so I’m just including the ones that are relevant to me right

Pattern measuring---Princess Seam; click through for full size image

now, as I sit here trying to fit Built by Wendy’s “Fitted Jacket” pattern to me: Measuring an armhole princess seam. Sorry for the poor look of the scans, the browser (or at least, the one I use) does a craptacular job of shrinking B&W scans. If you click through for the full-size version they look fine.

So I should probably back up a bit. I want to use Wendy’s “Fitted Jacket Pattern” as the basis for my Springy Coat, which it is more-or-less perfect for, but I’ve never made any of Wendy’s patterns before. Stage one, of course, is picking my size.

So, scanning through her sizing chart, I settled on XS. I know, smokin’ the crack. But the bust and hip measurements were both right. Shoulder and waist measurements are in the small-to-medium range (typical for me).

Built By Wendy Fitted Jacket pattern pieces

What I SHOULD have done was take out my handy-dandy tape measure and follow Madeleine Hunt’s advice (made extra-easy by the fact that the Wendy patterns don’t have seam-allowances.) It would have revealed to me that the 33″ bust and 26″ waist on the pattern chart is the actual size of the pattern pieces. As in, without wearing ease.

So, yeah, the pattern’s a mite small. I will throw up the initial muslin shots for your amusement. The top of the front is the only place where it closes. The rest varies from a wee bit too small to way too small (like 3″ too small at the waist).

Jacket bodice muslin, front view

The upper bust actually looks about right. Below there it gets… well, snug.

Muslin---side view

On the up side, the length of the armscye and the level of the waist (areas I often have to modify) feel about right. I’m a bit torn on the shoulders—I have a feeling they should be about 1.5cm wider, so that the seam falls about where the end of the seam-allowance is. I like where the princess seam falls, though.

Muslin---back view

The back fits fairly well, even with minimal swayback wrinkling (this won’t be an issue in my coat, but I imagine if I get this fitted I’ll want to use the pattern for other things, too. You may have noticed I have a thing for princess seams? The side-seam does tug to the back a little bit, although not much. I didn’t clip the seam-allowances at the underarm, which is contributing to the diagonal wrinkling on the side panels, as is my tugging on the front.

I now have two options, of course—start again with, say, a size S, or just grade up the pattern as traced. Since I’m happy with the lengths in this one, I’m tempted to just grade up–adding a slice of width to the CF and CB pieces could easily give me most of the width I need, both around and at the shoulders, and reducing the taper of the princess seams below the bust (equivalent of narrowing the dart there) can give me the rest. Also pulling out the big tissue sheets to trace is annoying.

So next step—sleeves. The sleeves as drafted are really slim, one piece with a symmetrical sleeve cap. I’d prefer an asymmetrical cap (I’m borderline on needing a forward shoulder adjustment) and a two piece. I’m torn on the slimness—I like the look and have pretty scrawny arms, but this is going to be a lined jacket, too. And yes, I have compared them to the sleeve I used for my winter coat (which is pretty darn slim) and it’s about 2″ narrower around.

… time to get measuring. 😉

In Me-Made March news,

I wore my fluttery cowl again, but it spent most of the day buried under the Kimono Lady Grey (boo hoo). It’s warm enough that I don’t really have an excuse for the wool pants, except that I wanted to make sure they got an airing this month.

 

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March 15, 2011 · 10:35 am

One year in Blogland

Happy Birthday, dear Blog!

Yup, the day is finally arrived! As I had alluded to last month, my blog is one year old today.

It’s a touch odd to go back and look at what I was doing this time last year; I don’t think I could have imagined how much my sewing would progress (particularly since I barely knew what I didn’t know…)

What I’ve done:

Sewing! While I’m still pretty haphazard about a lot of things, I have many, many more techniques under my belt. And I’ve made lots and lots of clothes, to the point where my me-made wardrobe is probably bigger than my RTW—certainly in my everyday clothes.

In particular, I’ve mastered (ok, attempted more than once:)

Fun projects

  • fly-front zippers
  • topstitching (and man were the first few attempts at this traumatizing!)
  • bound buttonholes
  • coat-making
  • pad-stitching and a few other tailoring techniques
  • my particular fitting issues (short upper body, swayback, long arms and legs)
  • linings
  • underlining and interlining
  • welt pockets (definitely not mastered, but at least attempted.)
  • knits! man I was scared of these…
  • interfacing
  • facings (and the nifty finishing-with-interfacing trick.
  • spending money on sewing: fabric, interfacing, notions, patterns… OK, maybe this isn’t a good thing to have mastered, but trying to sew without spending money on it really kinda sucks.
  • Stash. I definitely have a stash at this point. Not a humongous one, but not teeny-tiny, either. Confession: I love my stash. It gives me a warm feeling to have certain basic fabrics on hand, so that when/if the urge strikes I can whip up what I want on the spot.
  • I’ve had a lot of fun with photography, too (intermixed with plenty of boring, boring shots).

Quirky projects

What I haven’t done:

  • I haven’t done as much pattern-drafting as I had initially thought I would, although I have really enjoyed my forays into altering existing patterns.
  • invisible zippers
  • double-ended darts
  • lapped zippers
  • bagged lining
  • a little black dress. Everyone needs one, right?
  • most of these dresses.
  • mitred corners

Hmm, that list actually isn’t half-bad.

I’ll take this moment of navel-gazing to highlight a few things.

My first list of goals (some achieved, some not! 😉 )

My first posted project.

My first wadder! (well, my first blogged wadder)

My first wearable garment (for me, anyway)

My first comment

My “arrival” in the blogosphere. I really had no idea how to “promote” my blog, other than posting my projects

Plain projects

on Burdastyle and PatternReview. It wasn’t until I got that coveted link from the Selfish Seamstress back in August that I actually got a readership of more than a handful of people :). (To those of you who were there before—well, you just extra-rock!)

And lastly I’d like to thank you all, each and every one of you, who takes the time to stop here and poke through my ramblings. Your comments are one of the high points of my days, and the interaction, both here and on your own blogs, keeps me excited and motivated and itching to sew, design, create!

In celebration, I’m going to wear my circle-skirt/Ceylon blouse combo, despite the fact that I have nowhere to go except taking kids to the doctor’s office this afternoon:

Me Made March 15—one year of blogging!

All dressed up!

Ceylon Blouse
Casey Circle Skirt
Fluffy Petticoat
Oh, yeah, and a poorly-fitting knit tee underneath for warmth.

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March 14, 2011 · 6:29 pm

A springy little coat

Spring coat front

So I spent some time last night doodling. There was a lot of erasing, and a lot of other little doodles that fell by the wayside as this design emerged. But I think I’m happy with the details—I knew I wanted the empire waist and the princess seams and a thigh-length, but the rest was up in the air. I googled “empire waist coat” and looked through far too many inspiration options before I settled on the inverted box-pleats , high standing collar, and pleated cuffs.

I think I like the idea of the pleat at the upper CB, giving a bit more freedom of movement in what I want to be a fairly fitted garment. This is a spring coat—it won’t (in theory) need to accomodate the bulky sweaters of my winter coats.

So, all that remains is that piddly little problem of a pattern.

Erm.

Coat back

So I have two or three options, all of which promise to stretch my embryonic pattern-making skills to their limits. I have the Lady Grey pattern, which has the right seaming but the wrong kind of sleeve and the giant lapels; I have my Butterick winter coat pattern, which has the right sleeves (sorta) but shoulder rather than arm princess seams. Or, third option (and maybe the one I will go with), the princess-seam fitted jacket pattern from Built by Wendy coats and jackets. This has the right seams and the right sleeve, but I haven’t tried it before. Still, I have the book, I should use it, right?

Spring-coat, side

I’m assuming drafting an A-line skirt with a few pleats won’t be too terrible. Drafting the collar may be a bit more hit-and-miss, but should be good practice, right? 😉 …

The cuffs are stolen from (or at least inspired by) one of the variations on this pattern that my daughter didn’t choose for her version, though I think I will go with a box-pleat to match the rest of the coat.

I was debating a double-breasted front because, well, I love them, but this will be a spring coat and so often worn open, so I figured a single-breasted front would be better.

I’ve had this fabric probably since sometime last spring; it’s another thrift store mystery, a burlap-weave, quite crisp and rather scratchy. There’s also four or five metres of it, so if I really feel the need I can probably make a full muslin out of the fashion fabric (of course, if I don’t need to, I can make matching separates—it would make a fun skirt, or maybe even a shift-dress or something…

I took advantage of the weekend’s 50% off sale to pick up some Kasha lining for the coat—maybe a bit of overkill for the “spring” weight I’m going for, but I hate the thought of sewing with the regular linings. I still have to decide on underlining or not—I have a feeling it won’t be part of Sherry’s RTW techniques, but my fashion fabric, while heavy, is rather sheer due to its coarse weave. Well, I’m getting ahead of myself—first I need to pattern the dang thing.

I can do that in two weeks, right?

Also, whatever comes, don’t let me forget to add pockets!

Fabric! Right: lining; left: shell

In Me-Made March news,

the weather is gorgeous and I wore my Lady Grey! I was soo close to wearing a circle skirt out, but I just couldn’t commit to it at 6 in the morning (which felt like 5 since the time just changed… I could write a whole blog about how much I hate daylight savings time…)

Me-Made March, day 14

Czarina Coat (AKA Lady Grey)
JJ blouse
Long-sleeve T
Skinny jeans

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March 13, 2011 · 4:06 pm

Cowl Finale

Cowlneck the fourth

Well, for the moment. Like Steph, I think I’m done with this project. I’ve made four knit cowly tops this week, all but one of which are wearable. (And I have hopes of salvaging the fourth, possibly by stitching down the folds or something…)

This one was supposed to be the ultimate. And, to be honest, I think it looks kick-ass in the pictures. That is pretty much what I was going for.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

The biggest one, I think, is the most inevitable—the large cowl which permits those lovely underbust folds doesn’t, in fact, stay in place particularly well; any time I raise my arms or lean over, it comes untucked, creating a front that just looks, well, poofy. I have a feeling the original top would’ve had the same problem unless (as I half-suspect) the “underbust” folds in the photo are created by tugging down on the cowl, rather than falling naturally that way—in which case in the shirt as worn they wouldn’t even be there at all…

Completely my fault, on the other hand, are the hole I

A bit of a closer look

accidentally snipped in the front neckline while trimming the binding, the cowl facing that doesn’t fall nicely to the inside (I sewed it down a hair or two wrong on the inside), and the fact that the sleeves are sewed on with the wrong side of the fabric facing out. Fortunately the last is virtually undetectable—anyone looking that close is going to be much more struck by my wonky stitching. /sigh. I was trying to take my time with this last version, but I think my subconscious was against me.

For those of you who’ve been thoroughly confused with what I’ve been doing (and who’ve stuck with me despite it 😉 ) I made up a quick little diagram of the steps I took. The tricky part, again, is the details—how long and wide of a drape, how much to curl back the front pattern piece.

Pattern alteration---click image to see full size

And I think that’s enough of messing with cowls for, well, at least a couple of weeks…

After all, Sherry’s tailoring sewalong begins in just a few weeks, and I need to have a pattern of some kind ready for that. I think I’m going to try to create my own based on the Built By Wendy jacket book (which Ali just did a great overview of). I’m thinking princess-seamed bodice, empire waist with A-line below, thigh-length, maybe an inverted box pleat or two in the skirt portion… still haven’t decided on a collar or single- or double-breasted… anyway, I’m sure I’ll have a post on that in a day or two, anyway. But I will still have to muslin etc., and decide if I can make the sleeves two piece etc.

So much to sew, so little time… 😉

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March 12, 2011 · 6:27 pm

A qualified “meh”

Anthropologie knockoff v. 3

For this third iteration (see 1 and 2), I didn’t change much from the last; re-narrowed the neckline a wee bit, and lengthened the cowl portion so there would be more drape higher up.

This fabric is meh. The colour is drab,  it’s very, very thin, and worst of all it has very poor recovery; to get it to fit like anything other than a sack I took both sideseams in by over an inch. But it’s got great drape and cost about $1.50/m, which is about as good as it gets, at least around here.

For those of you who are insanely interested in the exact alterations, I think I’ve “curled back” the side seams/armscye too much. I needed to do it a bit more than in my first iteration to get the cowling to drape a little deeper, but not as much as I did. As usual, I overshot. I think there’s a sweet-spot somewhere between my pattern the first time and this iteration; mostly it looks good except that there’s some oddness in the folding of the pleats at the armpit; basically the first pleat is turning into a dart, which isn’t what I want. Solution? probably rotate the armscye back by the amount of that dart, and make up for the extra distance in cowl height.

Like my accessory?

Which sounds like gibberish typed out, but will hopefully remind me of what I’m trying to do… so I apologize to the rest of you for my opacity.

The other upside—this colour goes really well with my corset-waist circle skirt, which almost nothing else in my wardrobe does, and the corset-waist covers up the somewhat-more-meh lower portions of the top. Yay!

For honesty’s sake, I’ll include a shot of what I was wearing earlier in the day before I “finished” (for that unhemmed, threads hanging everwhere, value of finished)  the top. See? Not a good combo.

Previous outfit.

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March 10, 2011 · 9:48 pm

Temptation!

Curses. Just as I’m grappling with the fact that I really need to decrease the sewing-to-grad-school ratio in my life, I get not one, but two tantalizing sewalongs dangled in my face.

Peter, as you know (since everyone and their chihuahua reads MPB) has pencilled in a jeans sewalong for May. Now, obviously I’m in no need of more jeans for me—I have no less than five functional me-made pairs, plus the RTW, which I think is more pants than I’ve had at any one time since I was 12—but it would be an excellent place to tackle the terrifying prospect of sewing jeans for my husband. The only thing more frightening than the prospect of sewing jeans for him is the prospect of jeans shopping for him… well, that and the fact that it’s very, very hard to get him to model anything I make him…

And then, as if that weren’t enough, Sherry comes along offering a RTW tailoring

New book!

sewalong! Just days after I splurged and bought Coats and Jackets by Wendy. And washed the 5 m of off-white wool I found at VV ages ago… So now I’m sitting here doodling sketches of empire-waisted spring coats. So much inspiration… so hard to choose!

All this is in between madly running over alterations to the knock-off cowl pattern. Fortunately, when knocking off a $90 shirt, you can justify an awful lot of iterations of $3/yard jersey.

For the next version, I sacrificed some of my striped

Muslin #2... not as awesome as #1

knit (visible on the right here), as I was too impatient to wait for the weekend when I can get to Fabricland (which is allegedly having an awesome sale). This was a bad idea, as it doesn’t have the stretch and drape of the pink fabric. I’m not 100% convinced it’s wearable, although it’s not awful, but worse is that because the drape isn’t right I can’t really compare it to the first version. So I’m not going to dwell too terribly much on the results except to say that next time I’ll add back a bit of the width I took off the shoulders, to give me more room for deeper pleats.

Much happier with my first version… sigh…

Speaking of which, guess what I wore today?

Me-Made March, day 11

Fluttery cowl-neck
Ellen pants

Apparently my spring-like outfits have in fact brought on spring… and these white pants are now very, very muddy. 🙂

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March 9, 2011 · 8:25 am

It’s possible I may have overdone it…

Anthropologie original

This is all Steph’s fault. She tempted me. First by posting this luscious Anthropologie shirt on her blog, then by showing off her version of it.

Well, mostly. There was also this thin, drapey coral knit showing up in the clearance section at my local Fabricland. And the cardboard, no seam-allowance version of of my knit TNT that I made up over the weekend, which makes tracing out and altering the pattern a cinch.

Hmm. Maybe a little too much pleating? Also, I don't think my shoulders are always this lopsided.

I haven’t quite replicated the original (I think I may have overdone it a bit, however). But I think I am pretty close to how they shaped the pattern, requiring just a bit of tweaking on the exact length, width, and pleating of the drape.

I started by attempting to drape the pattern on my duct-tape double (wearing one of my Lydia tops so I could pin to it; this also helps since my DTD doesn’t really have all of my features. Like, oh, armpits). This wasn’t super helpful, since I wasn’t prepared to hack up all my precious $3 fabric for pattern pieces, but it did give me some broad parameters for the width of drape and length of pleated pieces I was looking for.

My pattern alterations

There was a lot of debate on Steph’s post about whether this kind of drape, combined with the fitted lower bodice, could be achieved without seaming. I, too, was sceptical. At this  point, I am going to officially change sides and say that it can, at least in a 4-way stretch knit.  Although the result creates some interesting grainlines.

Knockoff shirt

I started my slashes below the armscye, about on the level of my bust; I suspect that this is still a bit high, the original shirt looks like the drape begins a bit lower, on the level of the underbust (you wouln’t want it to go any lower than that, though, or you’d lose the fitted look of the bodice). I used wedge spreading for the bottom part, and used the draping as a reference to give me the depth of the drape (pink line) and the length to be pleated (blue line). The green line shows the piece of the upper front I transferred to the back of the pattern (there’s no shoulder seam, just the dropped seam you see in the front.

Back view.

Obviously I still haven’t quite nailed it—I think I have a bit too much fabric in the pleats (or perhaps my fabric’s just heavier), and the Anthropologie shirt’s pleats are arranged a little more thoughtfully than mine where they’re sewn to the shirt. I also need to remind myself that the anthropologie dummy in the photo has a much longer torso than I do… if I were to try on the same size shirt, I’m pretty sure the draping would begin about at my waist, and not give me that lovely shelf-bust illusion.

For those who are interested in the technicalities, here’s a quick closeup of the inside of the pleats:

Cowl pleating at front shoulder

You can see the inch-or-so facing folded over from the outside (on the left of the picture; the armscye seam is to the right. I stabilized the pleated seam with clear elastic, and sewed it on my regular machine for greater control (and ability to sew over the pins. Very slowly and carefully, I’ll add.). You can also see that I arranged my pleats regularly (each pleat was 2″)… the original has them clustered towards the neckline edge, and I’m not sure how deep and how many of them there are; it seems like they might be fewer, and deeper towards the armscye.

Flutter sleeve

I also drafted my first flutter sleeve; I’m not convinced this is the best look for this particular top; as a small-busted girl cowl necks work well for me, but this one is so bulky it visually moves me into large-bust territory, at which point my broad shoulders become something to be minimized, not enhanced with flutteries. So I think in future versions (can I really justify multiples of

Another view, just for kicks.

these?) I would stick with a narrow sleeve. I love flutter sleeves in general, though, so I’m sure I’ll use it in the future.

Incidentally, those bust-framing folds (in my shirt and in the original) are created by puling parts of the drape down below the bust. This works well enough for posing (especially on a cloth-covered dummy) but I suspect won’t really stay put in the general course of life.

Still, what a lot of fun! And a bit reassuring after my last attempted-cowl fiasco. You can see that it’s not finished—serger threads hanging everywhere—but I really wanted to just show it off. I’ll neaten it up later, and if the weather improves, I may even get to wear it for MMM!

Me-Made March Update:

Me-Made March, day 9

I’m thinking of this outfit as an invocation of spring. (Actually, it’s supposed to get above freezing here today. Hooray!)

JJ blouse
very plain tank-top
Ellen pants

Ok, now I’m going to go put on my sweater… and socks. 😦

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March 8, 2011 · 12:09 pm

Enabling

Me and my mommy.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention have probably heard a thing or two about my mom. She’s the owner of the Grand Old Dame, a reformed serial crafter, and was courteous enough to answer my nosy questions in a sewing interview. She’s also sorta the reason I started this blog, if only because last year at this time I was calling her up about once a week to yammer (for an hour or two) about my revamped sewing hobby, and, I was pretty sure, boring her silly. Also the long distance bills were racking up, but that’s beside the point…

Anyway, sometime (back in the fall? I really don’t know) she “discovered” my blog, and I gather has been enjoying it since (not to mention pimping it to her friends… thank you mom 😉 … thank you any of Mom’s friends who are reading… 😉 ). And the sewing phone-calls have gradually picked back up, laced with a liberal dose of style/fit/age/lifestyle angst (I’ll blame most of that on seasonal depression, though). Most of the conversations went something like this:

Mom: I love what you made.

MMM day 8... I'll just sneak this in here.

Me: Me, too! Except this and this and this.

Mom: Well, it doesn’t show in the photos. I don’t know, I just can’t find anything I want to wear. I go to the mall and nothing fits, and if it does fit it looks like it was made for a teenager or an old lady.

Me: Well, mom, you do have that kick-ass sewing machine…

Mom: yes, but I don’t have any time/money/energy for another hobby! Everything takes too much work! I want to go live under a bridge in Edinburgh!

Me: Well, you probably do need to simplify your life a bit… But I think running away to Edinburgh is probably a bit extreme. Ireland might be better… at least you could probably get your citizenship there*.

Mom: And you got such a good fit on that other thing you made…

Well, you get the idea.

And so it went, aside from occasional worries about my mother’s sanity.

And then, yesterday, I get a call from her. She sounds chipper. Excited. Upbeat.

Mom: Guess what I did?

Me: What did you do, mom? (oh god she bought plane tickets to Edinburgh…)

Mom: I downloaded and printed out the Burdastyle Franzi vest and Ellen pants, and I bought some wool blend fabric to make them up, and I ordered five patterns from Jalie, including the jeans!

Me: (swallow… gulp… sit down… let the shock wear off…) Wow, that’s awesome! You’re really going for it?

Mom: Yup, I am. Now tell me how to do a full bust adjustment!

Yup, apparently I have lured my mother back into the wild world of sewing (and the somewhat-new-to-her world of advanced fitting… hopefully she survives!). She’s still claiming she won’t become a sewing blogger, but with any luck she’ll let me showcase a project or two—and with a little more luck, the wonderfully helpful online sewing world, and maybe a helpful book or two, will help to get her past her old fitting issues. (I get my long legs, short torso, and rectangular shape from her, except that on her it’s even more exaggerated, plus she kept all the boobage in the family for herself. On the bright side, she doesn’t have my swayback).

Knittopia

In other enabling news, my Fabricland seems to be doing their spring cleaning, and there was a cornucopia of lovely (or at least, tolerable) knits in the clearance section, for no more than $3/m. Including this ivory sweatshirt knit on the left (typically $25/m or up!!! it’s stained, but I’m pretty sure whatever I can’t get out I can work around.) The three pieces on the right are also knit in the round, which is the best way to get knits in my opinion. And look at all those colours! Bright, soft, springlike… I know, you’re saying, am I reading the right blog? There’s even patterned pieces. Well, stripes. Stripes are almost a pattern. And either the solid blue or the solid coral would be perfect for knocking off Steph’s Anthropologie knockoff (apparently I have no creativity of my own at all these days…)

There’s plenty more enabling going on out there in internetland, but I think this enough for once post, don’t you? Oh, and if anyone has any advice for my mom on getting back into sewing, fitting, or the wonderful world of online sewing resources, do share! 🙂

*my mother, like approximate half of Canada, had an Irish grandfather, which is apparently good enough.

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March 7, 2011 · 9:06 am

Using up the Blue

Blue raglan-sleeve top. See below for the reason I look so irate.

After the stegosaurus shirt, I had just under 90 cm (one yard) of fabric left. Possibly I should’ve made it into something for one of the kids, since it’s a bit of a distinctive colour, but for whatever reason, I was determined to get one more long-sleeved shirt for me out of it. Wiggle as I might, I couldn’t quite get the Pattern Formerly Known as Lydia onto the available amount of fabric. I didn’t want to cop out and go with short sleeves, as this is a warm, wintry knit.

Fortunately, Lekala patterns came to my rescue once again; the raglan top pattern that I made before just fit, helped out by the fact that the pattern pieces are full-width, not to be cut on the fold. This was annoying when it was eating up all my printer paper, but with careful jiggling I was able to get it all in place.

So, I have another raglan top. As this is a much more stable knit (though without any redeeming factors like cotton, as far as I can tell), it fits considerably more, ah, sleekly, than the white version. Thus far I haven’t bothered with the ruching on the front; I kinda like the round neck (though it is pretty similar to the stegosaurus neckline, isn’t it?). We’ll see how boring I find the top after wearing it today.

Aww... no back ruffle. Plenty of wrinkles, though, as usual...

Really nothing to say about the construction. I did the seams all on the serger, which is really easy for the raglan construction, and twin-needled the sleeve and bottom hems. The top edge is just folded under around a narrow clear elastic and twin-needled as well. I have a Schmetz twin needle right now and I can’t tell if it’s just in my head but it really seems to me like the Schmetz needles (especially the twins) break a lot less readily than the Klasse (the other brand I have ready access to…) Oh, and you may have noticed you’re getting a glimpse of something other than my usual, draped-sheet photo background. This is the brightest corner of my kitchen (at least at 8:00 in the morning), and you are being “treated” to it because my darling children trashed the basement yesterday and my sheet is now in a limp little pile on the carpet, buried under an avalanche of… not even toys. Just stuff. Urg. I love my children. I love my children. I love my children. I…

Versatile Blogger Award

oh, yes, and before I forget, the amazing Magda passed on this “Versatile Blogger” award to me, and then the equally mind-blowing Oona Baloona did as well. And I want to thank them both very much, but I think I’m running out of interesting things to reveal, so I’m going to bail on spreading the meme and just point y’all to my previous exposees: Stylish Blogger and Beautiful Blogger.

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March 6, 2011 · 8:31 am

The Stegosaurus Ruffle strikes again.

Blue long-sleeve top

Nothing like a me-made month to get me off the fluffies and back on track making practical clothing. Today’s version being rather more successful than yesterday’s.

I made a couple more tweaks to my ever-evolving “Pattern formerly known as Lydia“. Since at this point I’ve altered the waist curve, the shoulder angle, the sleeve-cap, sleeve length, sleeve shape, and the neckline, I should probably give up on calling it a “Lydia“, and just call it my “Knit top TNT” or something equally generic. This time, I tweaked the sleeve-cap again, removing a bit more height, and attempted a seam-free swayback alteration, which creates much the same change in the angle of the back shoulders as Sherry’s method, except that… well, I dunno, I like the funky pivot-and-slide stuff. I then decided, on a whim (actually to optimize my pattern layout) to cut the back on a seam, so I took the opportunity there to add a teeny bit of shaping as well. If I decide to make the CB seam a regular feature, I can do a much more thorough swayback fix in the future.

No-seam swayback alteration. Yes, it affects only the shoulder.

Anyway.

My previous Lydias have been scoop-necked and plain. I didn’t want to just make another version in blue, so I decided to try a boatneck and a back ruffle, a nifty little feature I am blatantly stealing from Heather of Feathertysews. Thanks! I was a little hesitant about trying it in such a heavy fabric, but it actually worked out really well. Yay!

Flatlocked seam (open)

So, back to that CB seam. I didn’t really have enough room to add a seam-allowance, so I decided to try flatlocking the seam. This is a trick you can do with a serger, where you basically turn the needle thread tension way down. That way, after you serge the seam, you can basically pull it open so the ends of the fabric butt up right against each other. One side looks “serged,” the other side has these horizontal loops of thread—actually quite decorative; I have a RTW tee that features it (and I thought it was a super-cool feature when I bought it). It works best with a fairly beefy fabric, and I gather is used a lot in active wear, for butting fleeces and things like that. Here’s a better overview than mine… Since my knit is a fairly sturdy athletic/winter knit, I thought it would work, and after a certain amount of messing around (my serger’s tension settings are wonky at the best of times) I got it to work. I wasn’t too concerned with it being super-even, as my next step was to cover it with my little stegosaurus ruffle.

Ruffle closeup

I cut a piece of clear elastic just a little bit longer than my shirt back, and a strip of

my fabric about twice as long. I was originally planning to be quite scientific and match my ends, halves, quarters, etc., but it seemed like that would require too much stretching of the elastic, not to mention require more precision than I’m truly capable of. So I just held the elastic as taut as was comfortable, and slowly let it out as I stitched (a narrow zigzag) along the middle of the fabric strip, though both elastic and fabric. The result is that the strip isn’t gathered as evenly as it could be, but it doesn’t really show (and even if it does, I can’t see it 😉 ). Then, using the same narrow zig-zag, I stitched the ruffle overtop of my flat-locked seam.

Stegosaurus ruffle!

I used Sherry’s binding method here for the neck, which I attached in a C (that is , after sewing one shoulder but with the other one still open). It’s a wee bit gapy but I’m hoping that will go away in the wash. I didn’t include any clear elastic this time as the fabric is already fairly bulky… we’ll see if I regret that in the long run.

You can see that, although an improvement, my swayback alteration attempt was not enough to remove folding at the small of my back (the fact that the shirt is riding up on my belt isn’t helping, but I promise even when tugged down the problem persists). I’m happy to say the change in shoulder-angle doesn’t seem to create a problem, which I was worried about. If I try a CB seam again, I’ll do a real swayback tuck.

The further reduction of the sleeve cap seems to have hit a sweet spot (finally!); it went in (flat) essentially flawlessly, even on the serger.

I have to say, beefy, stable knits are such a dream to work with. I twin-needled the hems without needing to stabilize, with no problem at all.

Whew, I needed that after yesterday’s fiasco.

These posts will also double as my Me-Made March day 6 🙂

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