Hitting the Pattern Sale

Joann had McCall patterns for 99 cents (rare--the sale is usually $1.99) and Vogues for $3.99 over the holiday weekend, so I undertook the epic journey by bus out to Seven Corners to stock up. My focus this year is on mindfulness when it comes to new fabric, which has cut my buying drastically (I am, however, hoping to lure Cidell into a visit to Fabric Mart's brick-and-mortar store eventually, at which point all bets are off.)

I am definitely happy with my restraint; looking at my over-full fabric shelves makes me feel a little panicky and the downward trend in their groaning overload must continue. However, I have never felt any such compunction when it comes to patterns, even though I have way WAY too many of those as well. Patterns are smaller, store more neatly, and are much easier to part with (I have a whole stack for Freecycle already pulled out). I don't feel weighed down by patterns as I do by fabric.

I love knits and I love knit patterns, so of course there were several of those in my basket. The Palmer/Pletsch basic tee on the upper right has a French dart. A friend with a large (to put it mildly) bust has asked me to help her come up with a basic tee pattern that she can make several of and I thought this might be a good place to start. I don't like that it's "semi-fitted" and neither will she (she is otherwise slim and if her clothes aren't fitted she looks much larger than she is due to her bust), but the marked lines on the pattern will help me with fitting.

If I ever find an animal print that I can stand (I have had several hints from the boyfriend that he would like to see me in animal print), the Vogue dress on the lower right will be the perfect pattern. I considered the ones that Fabric Mart just had on sale--I actually liked some of them--but I do not trust rayon knit and won't buy any that I can't feel first.

And the drapey, cowl-y top in the lower left is just fun.

I neither make nor wear jackets, but why should that stop me from buying jacket patterns? I do plan to make a suit at some point this year. My 12 year old interview suit is not cutting it anymore. It was sold as a suit, not separates, so the skirt was a wee bit tight to begin with (the ol' pear shape situation). It is now unbuttonable, and it's not comfortable to have it zipped all the way. This is fine if I don't take the jacket off, but come on.

And yet, that still doesn't explain me buying these patterns, because the replacement suit will be the conservative, plain, and uninteresting, unlike these jackets.

And of course, dresses. I really like the shape of the bodice on the vintage Vogue. I am very into the cut-on sleeve lately. This looks (of course, drawings can be very deceptive!) like it will have a nice shape over the shoulder.

The DKNY does not appeal to me much in the fancy satin fabric as shown, mostly because I do not need any more dress up dresses. However, when looking through the catalog I realized that it could be made in an everyday fabric for a flattering, sophisticated, but not fussy look. Must contemplate my stash.

I was drawn to the V neckline with collar on the Palmer/Pletsch shirtdress, though again the semi-fitted part of it gives me pause. I would want to tighten that up a bit. As it's a princess seam, it would be a cinch (do you see what I did there? har har).

I've been looking at the McCall with the drapey skirt for a while. It looks somewhat similar to my Drape Drape birthday dress, though actually looking at the pattern and instructions I saw that the drape skirt is actually an overlay, not the full skirt. I don't know that I have any plans for it, but I figured at 99 cents, it was less dangerous to my well-being than a candy bar.

I got obsessed with M6363, in the upper left corner, from the moment I saw it on Debbie Cook's blog, even though she determined that the pattern drafting was a bust. So it may be a blessing in disguise that this is only a plus size pattern and I'm going to have to use it as a model to draft my own. I bought it so that I could see how the front is drafted. It seems obvious that it's a slash and spread, but I don't know where exactly it is slashed and how much to spread.

I bought this silk jersey in 2007 from Mood Fabrics, along with an eyelet that I am sewing as we speak (well, not literally, but it is my current project). It is time to sew this Too Good to Use! I have been looking for the perfect pattern for over four years and it is time to decide. If I can get M6363 to work for me, it is exactly what I have been looking for. Doesn't break up the print too much, but has tummy disguise and some style.



Who knows when I will get to any of these projects, but there's nothing wrong with a little fantasy sewing, right? What are you fantasizing about?

Outfit of the Week: Orange and Navy

I made this blouse, McCall 5426, in the Summer of 2008 of souvenir fabric from Vietnam. I never wore it much, though, because I couldn't figure out what to match it with. It doesn't look great with gray, and I just cannot bring myself to wear orange and black together (it's just too Halloween--and I love Halloween!). Also, it gapes between the buttons. I finally sewed on snaps between them, but I think I have figured out the reason it gapes is that the self-facing for the placket is not sewn down on the inside, so it pulls open. I need to hand-stitch the placket facings to the underlining and I think it will solve the problem completely.

Last Fall I was walking down the street and saw a girl in a navy dress and orange shoes and she was an epiphany: orange and navy! They look great together.

So come Spring, I matched the blouse with 04-2008-108, which I made in the Spring of 2008 for my trip to Paris (I wore the skirt to visit Notre Dame and eat Berthillon ice cream). Obviously this photo is a few months old because I was still in tights.

The outfit doesn't entirely work, due to the belt and the shoes. I think they need to match. I wish I could find some comfortable gray shoes! But the orange and navy are spot on, I think, and with the addition of the navy I think the gray works too.

What are your epiphany color combos? I am planning a yellow and white blouse and not having a lot of success coming up with skirt ideas other than gray (although thinking about it, navy might work with that combo too).

McCall 6070, Double V Surplice Knit Dress (de Espana)

I picked up McCall 6070 last year because I was attracted to the casual breezy look of it. I'm not sure why I bought the pattern, as there is an almost identical view in Simplicity 3503, which I've already used to make my maxi dress. I guess I just like variety!

Samina asked about this fabric as the skirt to go with my ruched front top. It is a rayon knit that I bought in Barcelona in September 2009 while shopping with Paco! I love buying fabric as a souvenir, as it reminds me of the trip every time I wear the garment.

I did my usual small bust adjustment for a crossover front of shortening the crossover. In this instance, I'm not sure it was totally necessary. With both the front and back being equal V crossovers, the weight hangs evenly from the shoulders and keeps the bodice flat against the chest, unlike with a higher back neckline that can cause a top to ride forward, resulting in front gapeage. With this alteration on this dress, the center front of the skirt is a little shorter than the sides because of the shortened bodice. But no gaping, so I won't quibble.

I did *not* narrow the gathering area below the bust. It is the perfect amount of gather for my A cup, so I would think larger cups might want to consider slashing and spreading to add more room there.

Because the weight of the fabric holds the bodice flat against the chest, I did not use clear elastic in finishing the neckline as I normally would, just folded over and twin needled. In retrospect, I should have used the elastic--not to snug up the neckline, but to help support the weight of the dress. My rayon knit is rather thin and so I lined the midriff and skirt, which puts a lot of pressure on the bodice to carry the weight.

While this is better quality rayon knit than most (I have a whole rant of that for a later post), it is still rather wimpy with little strength and recovery. After a day of wearing, I realized that, with the progressive stretching of the rayon, after several wears the apex of the V was going to show my navel. So after the first wear I sewed ribbon "suspenders" in to support the weight. The suspenders are sewn to the midriff seam allowance (for maximum strength) and tacked to the shoulders to keep them in place. I haven't worn it with the suspenders yet, but a try-on showed that the shortening of the CF hem nearly disappeared and that the bodice felt much more secure than before. They do not create a line on the outside.

Because of limited fabric, I did a serger rolled hem on the skirt to preserve as much length as possible. However, the benefit of the rayon stretching is that I will eventually be able to put a regular hem in (the skirt is already about an inch longer than when it was finished a couple weeks ago). Looking on the bright side here, people.

For swayback, I shortened the waistline edge of the back skirt by about an inch at center front, tapering to nothing at the sides. I should have done something about the midriff and/or pleated the skirt lining rather than gathering, because the back fit is not gorgeous (doesn't hug the back but kind of hangs off the upper midriff seam), but it is not noticeable either.




This dress ended up exactly as I had hoped. It is cute with a little bit of style and also very comfortable to wear for summer. The downside of Super Special Souvenir Fabric is that if anything goes wrong with the project it is a little devastating. Luckily, there was nothing devastating about this! I left off the back tie, because that seemed to be just too casual for work, and I did not have any trouble with the shoulders falling off.

All photos are here and the pattern review is here.

This is Why We Finish Our Seam Allowances!!!!

I first developed my slapdash ways as teen rebellion when my mom was teaching me to sew. One of the things she insisted on that I absolutely loathed was that I had to finish all the edges. To this day, my mother does not own a serger as she fears the threading. So all those edges were finished with zigzagging. Zigzagging takes forever and is ugly to boot. So in my rebellion, when I sewed unsupervised I did NOT finish my edges. It was liberating.

I actually never had a garment fall apart, surprisingly, but at some point in my later teen years I came around to my mom's side and started finishing all edges, a habit that persists to this day--though I now blessedly have a serger. I might even go overboard in finishing my edges. I know that many people don't finish edges that are protected by lining but I do: both the fashion fabric and the lining have every edge serged. Unless I am doing a very narrow hem, the enclosed edge of the hem is serged. Every.edge.

You can imagine my annoyance, then, when after the sticky of some mango sticky rice I purchased a street fair leaked all over my backpack and I put it in the wash I pulled it out of the washing machine looking like this. Argh! Because the edges of the pocket bag had not been finished, they just disintegrated beyond the stitching line in the wash.

I was especially annoyed because only a couple weeks earlier I had finally gotten around to fixing the bottom. It had a rip in it from law school (let us note that I graduated from law school 10 years ago last month), from carrying sharp-edged binders in the same place and same way. The hole had finally gotten to the size where things were going to fall out of it. I cut a double layer of rectangles in the heaviest fabric I could find in stash, a linen(ish) tablecloth purchased at a thrift store several years ago. I stacked the rectangles and attached them to the seam allowances on the inside so the weight would be supported on the already proven seams rather than the hole-y bottom. Then I stitched around the hole to secure it to the fabric. Voila! Good as new.

Some might say I should have taken this as a sign to just get a new backpack, and I was tempted. This is not my every day backpack, a black affair that is more "professional" (lol). I commute on foot or by bike, grant me the backpack. But I use this backpack weekly for grocery shopping and other schlepping. It would be a justifiable purchase.

Nowadays, backpacks--like iPods--are available in a variety of colors to express your personality (I mean, so cute, right?). Back in the dinosaur age when I went to college, backpacks were like Model Ts: you could have any color you wanted, so long as it was forest green. (They might have also had black, but I'm pretty sure that is the extent of the choices available.)

This is actually not the first iteration of this backpack. Jansports have a lifetime guarantee, and I actually ripped an identical hole in the bottom of another backpack with the same binders in law school. I believe the original backpack was purchased for college. In law school I was too poor to buy a new backpack, so I used the lifetime guarantee to send old ripped backpack to Jansport (after trying unsuccessfully to fix it myself) and they sent me this one in return, basically the same as the old one, in the same forest green color.

I thought for a while about how it would be fun to have a cute backpack instead of a dinosaur-age non-self-expressing forest green one, but damn it, this backpack is perfectly good (other than the ripped bottom and shredded front pocket). The materials and workmanship (other than failing to finish seam allowances) are still in perfect condition--which is why Jansport offers a lifetime guarantee!

So I bit the bullet and took a couple of hours to fix the shredded pocket and zigzag every last exposed edge in the entire backpack. For the pocket, I first trimmed off all the shreds, then zigzagged the edges. Then I sewed the pocket edge back onto the backpack, approximately following the still-extant original stitching line. You can see in the lower right how much seam allowance was originally used for this operation--I lost nearly an inch in the shredding incident. It took time and patience but wasn't difficult.

And now it's as good as new! Or close enough for my taste. I am sure someday something irreparable will happen to the old forest green dinosaur and I will replace it with something self-expressing in the turquoise or floral family. But the old forest green dinosaur has lived to see another day, and will cart home groceries for years to come.

Consider this your PSA, when you find yourself mind-numbingly bored while finishing your seam allowances: Yes, it really does make a difference!

Burda 05-2011-107, Ruched Front Top

As Cidell and I discussed in our recent podcast, the May issue of BurdaStyle gave me hope for the future. Although it still provided a diverse selection of giant sacks, it also contained some clothing with actual fitting and great details. One that immediately caught my eye was this top, Burda 05-2011-107, as well as the dress version. I love me some ruching, it is great for a little bit of tummy disguise. I was in the mode of looking for top patterns for my trip and it immediately went into the mix.

While I like the twisted strap idea--I used it in the Vogue 8386 dress in my avatar--I wanted shoulder coverage in the tops I was making for the bike trip. I also was not keen on the back view of this pattern, which is a single piece V. I am not crazy about patterns that have only a separate upper bodice and skirt in the front and not in the back.

For the upper bodice and lower back I turned to BWOF 08-2007-105, which I have used several times as the base for other patterns, such as my knockoff of New Look 6729 and my adaptation of plus size Burda 04-2008-128. I pulled it into service once again here. So technically I should probably review this as the 2007 pattern, but the most distinctive feature is from the 05-2011-107 pattern so I'm going with it.

I used one of the wicking waffle weaves I bought from FFC ($3.95/yd). The fabrics came in two different textures, a thick cotton-y texture, like the green for my S4076 twist top, and a thin, slightly sheer version that I used here. Because it was slightly sheer, I fully lined the upper bodice. This was also an easy way to finish the neckline and armscyes. I raised the neckline on the original draft simply by sewing up the center front seam further than marked.

The instructions for the ruched lower part have you gather both center front edges separately and then sew the pieces together. It seemed like it would be a challenge to sew two gathered edges together, so instead I sewed the center front seam with ungathered edges. Once it was sewn, I put in gathering stitches on either side of the seam and gathered. That worked ok, but I couldn't get the seam to stay gathered. I tried zigzagging over it, but that did nothing. Then I hand-gathered, which was ok but still not very stable (if my gathering thread popped I'd be SOL) and the gathers wouldn't remain evenly distributed. My third method was the charm: cutting a length of elastic to the finished length I wanted and stretching the elastic while sewing it to the CF seam. I probably should have stuck with the method in the directions!

This fabric, though it is a jersey, is not very stretchy. I didn't really notice this until it was made, but you can see from the back that I really should have sized up. It is super tight over my large lats (need to do a broad back adjustment on knits, too). It is also much clingier than I would prefer at the waist, but if it is not well-fitted there the ruching will droop so I think showing waist lumps and bumps is what you get for disguising tummy lumps and bumps.

Something ended up weird about the bust on this top. Though I have used the pattern several times and not had any trouble with it hanging off the bust rather than gently cupping the area, here there was no cupping. I did a little bit of hand gathering under the bust to try to create some shape, but it is not a perfect solution. I'm not sure what I'd need to do in the future; maybe gather the upper bust piece before stitching to the lower bodice?

Although the fit of this top isn't perfect, I quite like it. It was as flattering (from the front) as I'd hoped, and has a great style. A pattern with a separate upper bodice was a great fit for the thin fabric; it would have been needlessly hot to double the entire top, and self-lining the upper bodice dealt with the sheerness factor nicely.

All photos are here and the pattern review is here.