Finishing things up and a new jacket

I am making progress! I have made a pot of blueberry tea to have while I blog. Then I have to study some for this test I am taking on Monday. It may lead to a job as an adjudicator at a tribunal so keep your fingers crossed. Then I will finally have somewhere other than school whence I can wear all my fancy duds! (Hmm, that doesn't look right but my understanding is that "whence" means "to where" so it should be correct.) I'll alternate between studying and sewing to keep fresh at both.

First I took a photo of the two tops I finished. I haven't worn them yet but I have worn the cream silk one I made three times now! It works beautifully under a suit jacket and I can get warm at the front of the class without dying from dehydration.

I finally sewed a buttonhole on that checked jacket and finished it with the large, slightly sparkly gold button that won the contest. There is a sparkly gold thread that runs through the brown stripes in the check and I think the button goes well with the whole thing. Not having worn this yet, I will reserve judgment on the total effect.

I finished the wool skirt. As usual, I converted darts to ease - those are the wrinkles you see pinned into the skirt as it is attached to the facing. I also basted the lining to the skirt around the top before sewing it all to the facing. That's that line of stitching you see showing on the lining.

Because this is such nice fabric and I want the skirt to look polished, I sewed seam binding to the raw edge of the hem and hand sewed the hem up. The lining hem has not been sewed yet - that's the raw pinked edge you see.

Because the skirt is surprisingly heavy, I sewed hangar tabs to the facing. It makes the skirt hang like this and I have to iron it the morning I want to wear it, to get those drape marks out.

But if I hang it with clothespins like this, it falls off the hangar after a while.

In the meantime, I have been thinking about my old LL Bean barn jacket. I have had this great coat for over 15 years now and I used to wash it whenever the dog put her muddy paws on it so it got washed often. Now it has frayed around the pockets (which are lined at the edge with dark green corduroy),

and it has frayed on the sleeves where I used to turn up the cuffs, which are also lined at the bottom edge with the corduroy. I still think I can get some wear out of it so I am wondering if I should get some gimp or other braid and sew it over the broken bits?

That said, my next project is a new, cool weather jacket. I thought this pattern was so cute, but of course, I cannot imagine making a jacket that you wear outside in anything other than full length sleeves! Maybe someone meant for this jacket to be worn walking around the mall but if I was inside, it would be too hot and when I am outside, I want proper sleeves. So I am going to make it in the full sleeve but with the slash pocket of the other views (A and B). I have not decided on the buttons but I think I will be going for 6 of them, not 4, for better control in the wind. It is certainly not a jacket I would wear when it's minus 10C but I think with the right layers and accessories, I could wear it to minus 5C. I'll let you know later.

When you wear some kind of outer garment 9 months of the year, you want a selection and you want one of them to be red. I have some "boiled wool" in a nice bright red here, although I think it is mixed with some nylon. For a change, I didn't pre-wash it and so once a year, I will have to dry clean this. I think I was afraid the fabric would shrivel into weirdness so I decided to go for dry cleaning later. I also got some "fashion polyester" for the lining. Instead of getting "regular" lining, I saw this fun polka dot stuff on sale and thought it would be cute whenever I took the jacket off. I have not made this pattern before so I suppose I am risking a bit here but it is a coat and so it won't be fitted too closely and I think I can get away with not making a muslin - which I never make anyway. If it doesn't work for me, some lucky Sally Ann client will get a unique jacket!

Silk tops and wool skirt

Ten days since my last post. Hmm. I've been busy! But I haven't even finished those tops. So back to where I left off...

That silk I bought on sale was so narrow (how narrow was it?) that I had to cheat to get the tops cut out. I had only bought a metre of each colour, thinking that was enough. As you can see in this layout photo, there was no way I could get both the front and the back cut out on a fold. I thought I could fold each selvage into the middle and do it that way but it was just too narrow.

Even though I put the back seam right on the selvages, the sides overlapped by a few millimetres and I had to make them with a 3/8 seam allowance. Talk about cutting it close.

Here is the blue top, inside out, with the back up. You can see I didn't need to finish the centre back seam because the selvages are already finished. I zigzagged the other seams and trimmed them, although they are not trimmed yet in this photo.

Here I am, ironing the neck facing on the ham. It really is easier on something like a neckline or shoulder, to use the ham, instead of trying to iron it on a flat board. In this photo, I have already understitched the facing and all I need to do now, is iron it folded under.

Here's the ham from another angle. After this, I stitched the facing down to the shoulder seam by machine stitching in the ditch of the shoulder seam from the outside of the garment.

That was the end of the machine sewing. From here, to finish the tops, I have to hand stitch the hems. They are pinned up and ready to go. I generally save my hand sewing for sitting in front of the tv. These tops look awfully shiny and that pink one is very pink, but when I wear them, it will only be under jackets so all you will see is a little bit of the top at the neck.

Because I only have hand sewing left, I am not breaking My Rule by starting a new project upstairs in my sewing room! This is the beautiful wool I got at Darrell's sale. He only had the oatmeal colour left at the sale and I kicked myself when I discovered he had had two other colours - blue and green - as they would have made perfect, all-purpose serviceable skirts. Oh well.

I am making my tried and true, no-waistband, knee-length skirt with a small vent in the back. It will go with everything this Winter!

Silk top

While I was (still am) thinking about the buttons for the linen jacket, I made the silk top.

I used a modified Butterick 4056 pattern. I found when I made this top the first time, that it had a wide enough neckline that it didn't need a seam and a button at the neck opening in the back.

I could cut both the back and the front on the fold and modify the back neck facing. I decided I would use a facing and not just some self-bias tape because I thought the interfaced facing would give the neck more structure.

It's an extremely simple top, even with the facing. You can see a little bit, how there is a sheen to the right side of this beautiful silk, when you look at the facing here, contrasted with the top itself which is wrong side out on the table. I also finished the seams by sewing a simple zigzag stitch and trimming the excess material.

After only about an hour from start to almost finish, the top is done except for the hems. I have decided to hand sew the cap sleeve and bottom hems, to give a higher tone, a more couture finish, to the top. This lovely silk demands it. But I have to wait until it cools down because I don't want to stain the silk with my sweat.

A gold party blouse

Happy New Year's Eve! I am pleased that I can still sew quick-like-a-bunny. I found the GOLD fabric and ironed a tiny corner of it. The gold feels like plastic and I didn't know if the whole thing would melt or what. But it ironed like a dream. Turns out I had bought 3 whole metres of it so I had plenty for the top and now no idea what to do with the rest of it. What was I thinking?

Pushing pins through the fabric was another story - it felt like plastic then! I got out a new machine needle called a "sharp" and it must be dull now. But anyway, I cut out both the front and back on a fold and then I cut strips of cloth diagonally and sewed the strips together to make enough bias "tape" to go around the neck so I wouldn't even have to make facings. Then it was just a matter of sewing side seams and shoulder seams and hemming and I was done. I simply pressed open all the seams and didn't finish them at all - heresy for me - but the fabric doesn't ravel at all and doesn't need finishing.

A friend says it looks like "warrior woman"! I say, look at those boobs gleaming in the light! I plan to wear a smooth bra (I may have to take the black bra off my dummy) and maybe a smooth camisole under it and a jacket over it. What the heck - it's a party.

Comparing patterns and making a muslin

Since I just have hand sewing and the buttons to go on the brown jacket (and therefore I am not really breaking my rule), and since New Years Eve is Monday and I don't have anything to wear that I haven't worn already (we go to the same party every year), I decided to see if I could still sew "quick like a bunny". I also wanted to see if I had a pattern in my collection that would work for this shiny sort-of-knitty gold fabric I bought on a whim several years ago. I didn't think I wanted to make a regular blouse/shirt with the shiny gold fabric because I thought the structure of the collar and plackets wouldn't work. I have a lot of patterns and from many of them, I have only tried one view. I also have issues with shirts where the sleeves dig into my upper arms. I don't think my arms are fat necessarily but I have these issues. Anyway.

Here are the two patterns I wanted to compare. I have used the tank pattern on the Vogue Tamotsu #2454 many times. It is simple and fits. There are no facings (you cut some bias strips of fabric instead) and I can get it over my head so I don't even put the button opening at the back. I have only used the B view (the mauve tank with the neck gathers) in the Butterick pattern (#4056) once and it was fine. However, I have decided as the years go by that once one reaches a "certain age", slightly covered up is better than bare. So I wanted to see how the D view (the pink one) in the Butterick would work.
It has a round neck which is not very low and cap sleeves which cover a little but don't bind like set-in sleeves. I rummaged around and found some polyester (I don't know why I ever buy it) but in a pretty pale green colour. It also has these raised flowers printed on it which act like plastic when you iron it. Man! Polyester is annoying enough to iron but when you add sticky plastic flowers, it's a good thing I was treating this as a muslin.

I laid the Vogue tank pattern piece over the cap sleeve piece and saw that it should fit nicely. I cut two inches off the bottom of the Butterick pattern piece because I don't want to have to tuck in the blouse when I wear it.

I had a feeling that I would be able to pull this blouse on over my head but I made the back placket anyway. I was right and so I won't make the placket next time. This also means that I can cut the back out on the fold too and only have underarm and shoulder seams - so simple! I think I will just sew some buttons right to the placket and not even bother to make buttonholes for this green muslin top.

Here it is, almost finished. I sewed it up in just a couple of hours, including all the comparing and cutting out parts. I still have to machine sew the bottom hem, press the sleeve hems, sew on the buttons and re-press the neckline but that won't take long. I may even try to make bias strips instead of the facings that the pattern calls for and which I did make for the green top. Even though it is a muslin, I think I will try wearing it under a suit jacket to work at least once. Polyester and my body chemistry do not mix well so it may turn out that I will have "pit issues" wearing it. If that happens, I will wash it and put it in the give-away bag for the Sally Ann. But at least I know the pattern works.