Working on the blue coat (still)

Why does my life seem so busy and I am not even "gainfully employed outside the home"?

I have been working back on the blue coat since I finished the dresses but I still have not managed to finish it yet.

I finished putting the lining pieces together and then attached the lining to the coat.

Then I machine sewed seam tape to the hem and hand sewed the hem up. I am doing it this way because the lining hem is not going to be attached to the coat hem - it will float separately because of the pleat in the middle of the back. I have to press the heck out of it now and finish the lining hem. Next will be some top stitching and then the buttons and I'll be done.

Navy linen outfit

I have been picking away at the navy outfit. Once I am almost done an outfit, I tend to lose momentum because I start thinking about the next project. It is ever thus and therefore why I have my "rule" whereby I cannot start one project without completely finishing the one before.

I have got the skirt almost done. I put hangers on the facing because the other linen skirt kept falling off the hanger when I used wooden clothespins because it was extra long and extra heavy. i.e. I put hangers on it too. I have to hand sew around the zipper and hand sew the hem. All I have left is to machine sew the lining hem. Not too exciting - it's just a plain navy skirt.

Here is the back of the jacket before I pressed the hem.

And here is the benefit of pressing and clapping the hem. I have also added the two decorative buttons as detail to the back. All that is left is the front buttonholes and buttons.

Raw silk suit almost finished

Almost there! This is the point where I start thinking about the next project and if I didn't have my Rule, I'd end up with UFOs all over the place.

Here, I've pinned the jacket shut to simulate buttons. Everything is done except for the sleeve hems. Peter thought I might want to put seam binding along the bottoms of the sleeves and I plan to pin some there to see what it looks like. He may be right. You might notice that I have put a row of pins down the fronts, to hold the fabric up and keep it from buckling at the bottom edge. I may take a few loose stitches in the shoulders to prevent this from happening in the finished jacket.

The skirt is complete. I decided to cut a few pieces of bias from the satin and finish the skirt hem in it. I sewed the satin on by machine to the raw edge of the hem and then I folded the other raw edge under and hand sewed the hem to the skirt. And no one will ever see this.

Back to finishing the inside of the hem on the jacket. Before I could sew down the lining to the hem, I wanted to finish that tiny bit of raw fabric at the bottom edge of the facing. The Threads magazine suggests putting a bit of bias tape on it and in this photo, I have pinned the tape to the edge. I sewed it to the edge by machine before folding it over to encase the raw edge of the facing. By machine sewing, I also was able to catch the end of the piping cord in the stitching, thus anchoring it even more than I had already.

Then I folded the tape around the edge of the facing and tucked the end under and sewed it down by hand. You might want to make this photo larger to see the detail. For someone who is picky about finishing the insides of her garments, even this may be a bit much for me for future jackets. The piping is nice but I wonder if it's worth it, especially with the fuss at the bottom because f the fold in the lining for ease. If I do this again, I may have to eliminate that fold. But I like the bit of bias over the raw edge.

Here is the jacket on Rose, inside-out. The lining hem is pinned up to the jacket hem. I suppose it looks a little more relaxed, now that I've sewed it but I'm not convinced the piping is worth the trouble.

I think the jacket does need more of the piping fabric as an accent on the exterior. That's why I'm going to test it around the bottom edge of the sleeves when I hem them, and that's why I'm going to use it on the buttonholes. I can't use my automatic buttonholer anyway, because of the thick piping at the front edge of the jacket. So I'm going to do some machine zigzaging to make the fabric sturdy and then do a bound buttonhole with the floral fabric. And then I am going to make fairly large covered buttons using the floral fabric to cover them! I can't imagine this jacket with any other buttons - plastic, pink, gold or whatever. I think they have to be covered in the floral. So that's next, after I make the trek to Fabricland for the button forms.

Piping between the facing and the lining

Happy Easter all. It is nothing like Spring out there right now, at -11C or 13F. Brr! The sun is nice and bright, so at least there's that.

To put piping between the facing and the lining, I am using instructions from the March 2006 Number 123 issue of Threads Magazine (pages 77-80). You can go to www.threadsmagazine.com and look for specific issues but instead of giving you the article, they ask you to buy that issue. As it turns out, it's not too complicated but I had to make modifications and there was some confusion until I actually was turning the fabric in my hands. But I wouldn't have had the idea to do this if it weren't for Threads Magazine.

I'm putting these photos here so you can get the idea about how the magazine did the tutorial but you can't read what is written there so I don't think I'm violating copyright.

Here's what the jacket looks like at the moment. All the pieces are now together and I have even put the pockets on. I haven't quite finished the internal piping at the bottom but that's because I haven't sewed the hem which has to be done first.

Back to the beginning. First I had to attach the piping to the raw edge of the facing. That was pretty straightforward and I left a fair bit (about 2 inches from near the top of the jacket hem) at the bottom in case I needed it. I am also using a thinner cord for the piping. It is about a third of the thickness of the exterior piping cord.

The article suggests leaving the facing free at the bottom by a couple of inches and I have done that. And don't forget that you are only going to sew the piping to the lining and so you will keep the hems free.

Once I had the piping sewn on to the facing, I draped the jacket over Rose and draped the lining over it too. The lining in the photo just confuses things, sorry. But what I find interesting was how different the piping is, depending on what diagonal I cut it on. In the photo, the right side is dark pink and the left side is totally pale. There is a bit of this unevenness of colour around the collar - one side is slightly darker than the other - but I am glad that this amount of contrast is now on the inside of the jacket. I think I planned it that way. :)

Once the piping was on, I pinned and then sewed the lining to the facing. I had already assembled the lining with the sleeves and everything so it was just a matter of sewing it to the facing which was pretty straightforward.

I didn't sew the lining all the way to the bottom of the hem. In a regular lining, you are supposed to leave the bottom 6 inches free and sew it down later by hand. This is where the modifications and some confusion came in. In the Threads model, there does not appear to be that extra fold of fabric in the lining at the bottom. Because I had not modified my pattern, I still had the fold of fabric (for ease) that most lined jackets have and now I had to figure out what to do with it.

I fiddled around with keeping the fold free and sewing down to where I would be hand stitching the lining to the jacket but then I caught the very bottom of the lining in the machine stitching and realized that it wouldn't work that way and had to rip it out.

I left the lining sewed down to very near where the lining hem will be, but not to the very bottom. Then, I bent the piping off to the side, along the line of where I will be hand sewing and machine stitched it into place. I like the sturdiness of machine stitching, especially on loosely woven fabrics, and I wanted to also make sure the piping cord was well anchored by stitching.

Here, I've pinned the lining to where I will be sewing it and you can see how the fold will work now (at least, I can). This is where I realized that I cannot finish it yet until I have sewing the jacket hem, which has to be done by hand.

So the bottom edge of the piping is on hold while I finish the jacket hem. And then I will also show what the Threads magazine suggested for the tiny raw edge of the hem. Assuming it all falls into place!

Almost finished the brown outfit

Still working on the brown skirt and jacket.

The skirt is hemmed and completed now. I sewed seam binding around the skirt and then pinned up a fairly narrow hem. I let the skirt hang for a while and then turned up the lining hem to be about an inch shorter than the skirt and sewed it by machine. I sewed the skirt hem by hand.

I'm really pleased with how nicely this fabric handled. It raveled a fair but but didn't go crazy when I was handling the raw edges and in fact, folded over easily and smoothly and didn't even bunch up like some fabrics. I got it from the sale table - the please-take-this-away table - but it has behaved itself like expensive fabric. I flat felled the armhole because the inside of the jacket only has a partial lining. I started folding over the sleeve seam allowance, having trimmed the jacket seam allowance.

I went around the armhole very methodically, folding in tiny increments and pinning down the fold in preparation for sewing by machine. Once I was done, it looked very nice. Now I have to sew the edges of the partial lining by hand and then all I have left is to decide on the buttons.

Green suit continues

I have attached sleeves to both the jacket and the lining. I have added the collars too and am about to sew the lining to the jacket - big excitement! In the meantime, I needed some hand sewing to do while I watch Heroes so I added seam binding to the bottom edge of the skirt and turned it up 1 and 3/4 inches to give me a nice generous hem that stops right below the kneecap.

I take up one or two threads of the weave of the fabric at a time and move forward about 1/4 inch at a time (maybe 3/8) so the stitches are firm and sturdy but invisible on the right side.

Prior to this, I lined the skirt by sewing the lining to the top raw edge of the skirt, before attaching the facing. Here is the inside of the skirt, showing the lining on one side of the zipper and not on the other. I also decided to convert darts into ease (which concept I got years ago from my couture sewing book) and so the lining is eased also (i.e. ruffled a bit to fit into the skirt).