Tag Archives: alteration

August 25, 2010 · 12:30 pm

Fall Re-fashion

Former capris

Is it still a re-fashion if it’s an alteration to a piece you already made, and never fully finished?

These are my first pair of Jalie jeans. I made them capri-length, but never got around to hemming them. But I have since made another pair of capris that I like better, and I had just enough of this denim left to piss me off (without being enough to do anything with unless I want to make another  Kasia with denim hip-inserts 😉 ), so I made panels and sewed them to the bottom and now I have a pair of (hopefully) interestingly-seamed full-length jeans. I may actually have hemmed

Crappy topstitching.

them a little short… we’ll see. I should probably re-do the topstitching (something went wrong with the bobbin-thread), but I may be too lazy too. It’s not like the rest of the jeans are a great piece of work to begin with. There’s a slight difference in colour between the jeans (which have been washed a few times) and the new fabric, but that’ll either fade or not… either way works. But they will be much more useful to me during Self-Stitched September as full-length pants than as capris.

I still want to make another proper full-length pair, though :).

How they would actually look

The back view

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August 17, 2010 · 2:54 pm

Buttonhole Elastic

Buttonhole Elastic

Because I’m not accomplishing much of anything today, here’s a random post on that miracle of modern children’s clothing… Buttonhole Elastic!

Now, I first met buttonhole elastic when I was pregnant with my second daughter. It featured prominently in the two pairs of maternity pants (real maternity pants! This was a Big Deal!) that I bought that pregnancy. As first impressions go, this was not a big win. The buttonhole elastic is threaded through the back of the waistband, emerging via a buttonhole somewhere around the front hip, where it attaches to a button. You can adjust which of the many buttonholes along the elastic is buttoned, and thus adjust the waistband.

Really it didn’t work so well. Partly because who really wants a bunchy, elasticized waistband at the back of their jeans, and mostly because you can make the waistband of maternity pants as adjustable as you want but when the waist is wider than the hips, the pants are still going to fall down. (I think the current trend for mat. pants is very long, wide knit panels at the top, reaching up almost to the underbust. I haven’t been pregnant in over seven years so I can’t comment on how any of these work, although it seems a lot nicer than having a jeans button poking through your shirt right at your swollen belly-button.)

But, a few years later I noticed them cropping up in the back of kids’ jeans.

Buttonhole elastic threaded through waistband

And it has found its niche!

Elasticized waistbands and kids go together at the best of times—comfort almost always trumps stylishness (for the younger set, anyway), and considering the range of widths vs. lengths in kids, as well as the rapid changes within an individual child, an adjustable waistband is a wonderfully practical idea. An additional bonus for my booty-licious older daughter is that the drawn-in waistband at the back provides better fit for her J-Lo-esque backside.

So when I first made her the Jalie Jeans, back in May, I purchased a ton of buttonhole elastic and made the buttonholes (and attached the buttons) before sewing on the waistband. Amazingly forethoughtful of me, seriously. And then she tried them on—and they fit pretty much perfectly as-is, so I never bothered installing the elastic.

Re-sized jeans!

Well, fast forward three months and, of course, jeans that were perfectly fitting in the spring are WAY too small. Fortunately, I have two daughters, so all that work is not for naught… but the seven-year-old is still a fair bit smaller.

Finally, the elastic comes into its own! These are size K jeans on a size I body (so two sizes too big)

Alright, she probably won’t be wearing them quite yet, as they are also WAY long. But if she

Rear view---elasticized waistband

wants to, she can 🙂

Now, back to tracing up the Size M pattern for the older daughter…

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August 16, 2010 · 7:34 am

Jacket Suckitude

The sleeves on this jacket are driving me nuts! Is it me? Is it the pattern? Is it my punishment from the fickle Sewing Gods for daring to try to make a—ulp—petite pattern?

Part of the problem comes from the shoulder seam, which runs well to the rear of my actual shoulder. Actually, the neck-side of it is perfect. But for some reason it angles backward at the outside. (I had noticed this in the muslin but thought it was due to me distributing the fullness of the sleeve cap poorly. Now I suspect that this is WHY the fullness was all concentrated to the back. Also the shoulder seemed a bit too wide, especially at the front, and I’ve now tightened the curve of the front princess seam a bit. I am dangerously close to the kind of billiard-ball alterations that turned my Lydia Disaster from a well-constructed top that didn’t happen to fit me into something suitable only for my 10-year-old’s scissors. But wool is considerably more forgiving of stitch-ripping than a cotton knit (I’ve now had sleeves basted in at least five separate times, by machine and by hand… I like by hand, it only takes about 2 snips to rip it all out). I’m hoping if I give up on the shoulder seam as a reference and mark my actual shoulder point, I’ll have some better luck. I hope so. I sure love this fabric.

Seriously, though, this is a pain. I have pretty easy-to-fit shoulders. They’re a little broad (not for this pattern though!) and square, but they’re straight and even. No forward-shoulder alterations here. And I’ve set in plenty of sleeves before, even in jackets, with none of these problems.

Man, I wish I had a dress-form.

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May 18, 2010 · 4:29 pm

Fit

Figuring out my body has been a long process, and not one I think I’m done with. When I was a teenager, I knew I had nice legs and a hot tummy; I couldn’t figure out why jeans that fit at my waist (this was before I had figured out low-rise) so often had flaps hanging loose at the hips. I was confused over whether I had a big waist or small hips. A lot of things just didn’t make sense.

It’s taken a while, but here’s where I am:

I have what you might call a “boy figure”. I’m slim, reasonably tall (5′ 7,” 120 lbs).  My bust is small—though still technically a B-cup—but my ribcage is fairly large and my shoulders are broad. My waist is large compared to the rest of my frame, and my hips are quite narrow. Paradoxically, my butt isn’t particularly flat (though it is, as my husband often reminds me, on the small side), and I stand with a slight swayback. My arms and legs are long for my height—I need at least a 33″ inseam in jeans, and mostly don’t wear long-sleeved shirts because they are always too short. I’ve been thrilled with the trend for hooded sweaters designed to cover the hand, with the loop in the cuff for your thumb, because they are actually long enough in the sleeve. And, since so much of my height is in the legs, my body is actually fairly short—almost petite. In particular, I’m short waisted—there’s only about an inch between the top of my hipbone and the bottom of my ribcage.

The back... still a bit of swayback puddle.

I’m thinking about this partly as I struggle with the thought of doing a swayback alteration with the JJ. There’s still some horizontal puddling across the back. BUT—is it because of the swayback alone, or is it exacerbated by the short waist? It doesn’t fold as obviously in the front, but it still seems improved a bit just by shortening. Except overall I like the length—so if I raised the waist I would then need to lengthen the hem. Weird! Does it matter?

I’m also a bit confounded over the swayback thing for the Jalie jeans project. Mostly with regard to the waistband (and the back yoke). A lot of the other people complain that they need a curved waistband because they have a big difference between hips and waist. I don’t have that at all—but I still do have a bit of swayback, and what little padding my bottom has is all squarely to the rear. I often do have trouble with jeans gaping right at the back waistline, and all the RTW I own have a curved waistband. So did most of the ones I was checking out in the mall the other day, too. So I’m really thinking a contour waistband is the way to go. I’m just not sure about how to draft the pattern. I can’t tell from looking at my existing pants how intense the curve is (and it seems to vary… some have the grain on the true bias on the front, some don’t make it all the way there). I guess either way they’re definitely not making a 90-degree turn  over the curve; at most a 45-degree one. I should probably start by measuring the length of the waistband on the pattern. Then decide how much curve, how much at the back should be straight (I can probably get some of that from my existing bands), that kind of thing. Then make a test waistband and see how it fits (and where on the hip… another thing I’m picky abou). Damn, I wish I could just go and get the fabric to start this. /sigh

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