Reversible jacket and other things

Other things first: My Dad wrote a book some years ago, about his time in Korea in the early 1950s. It is well written, nice clear prose, and interesting. What was especially poignant was the fact that when he was in Korea, he was only 24 years old. It is interesting to think back to when I was 24, and compare our life experiences. He has set up a website now, and will be posting reminiscences in the form of a blog. He can use some traffic, so here is the URL:
http://koreanwarmlbu.wordpress.com/
If any of my readers have a military connexion, you might be interested in the book. It also has U.S. military connexions, as he got some training at Fort Lewis in Washington (chapter 4). That chapter contains an intriguing anecdote about the recycled barrack box he was assigned and which now rests in my garage. In any event, I wanted to give old Dad a plug here, until he figures out how to increase his blog traffic. Go check it out!


Back to sewing! Here is the two-sided denim, all ironed and laid out. I have far more than I need for a jacket and I don't know what to do with the yard or so I have left over. Not a skirt - it is too quilted and bulky for that.

I am modifying this pattern.

I used the original to good effect on this jacket that I wore all over France in 2008. But since I wanted to make the jacket truly reversible, I needed to make some changes.

I wanted to have a one piece sleeve with no cuff. I also needed the front to be plain so I could turn it inside out. I pinned the two front pieces together so they wouldn't have a seam (or a pocket). I might still add a pocket later, but not until I try wearing it.

I thought I would use two colours of thread on top and bobbin but it turns out I can use just the pink successfully, due to all the quilting stitching.

Another reason for a one piece sleeve is to make the flat felling of the armscye easier and neater. Once that is done, I can sew up the entire underarm and side seam in one go and finish it neatly also.

I have decided to limit the amount of the other fabric that shows on each side. I could make the band around the front contrasty and have cuffs that turn up and such like but I think it is busy enough without that. I have the single sided selvages that I can use when I hem the bottom at the back or I could let the blue show more on the pink side. I believe I will wear the blue side out more of the time than the pink side but I don't know for sure. I have decided it is a lot more casual fabric that I remembered it being. Anyway, by modifying the pattern it is going together very quickly (fewer pieces) so I'm not investing tons of time in it.

Yet another blouse

In using up my stash, I seem to be gravitating towards shirts. Someone made a comment here not long ago, and their Blogger link led to a blog project called Never too many white shirts. While I've got my own issues, I happen to agree with the idea of "no such thing as too many white shirts". But this one is striped.

First of all, I was rummaging around my sewing room when my husband came by and snapped this picture of me. Silly. The tin man red hat on the far right is the funnel I use to refill my steam iron, perched on the water bottle. On the chair on the left is that gold silk still waiting to be cut. In woodworking, they say "measure twice cut once" and in sewing with expensive fabric, I say "think 20 times, cut once".

I got out ALL my blouse patterns and stared at them. I really liked that Calvin Klein pattern but it is dated with the gathered sleeves. On the other hand, it is a nice pattern and maybe it's not so bad with gathered sleeves. It comes with French cuffs too. I always liked the high neck band and the possibility of flipping the collar like in the photo, with a tiny cummerbund around the neck. That's dated too, I suppose. In the end, I chose the also old but not as dated Vogue 7332 on the right.

My fabric from the stash is quite a few years old now, a polyester (cringe) but with a bit of a texture to it. Bright white with navy and red pin stripes. I recall it being on sale (of course).

I'm making the B view with the stand-up collar. I've made it before so I know it works. I think it'll be a nice addition to my red or navy jackets and skirts.

I took the "risk" of cutting it out on folded double fabric. When I have stripes like this, I will often cut the pieces out one single layer at a time, to make sure nothing gets crooked or doesn't match. However, you can see through the fabric enough that you can see the stripes on the second (bottom) layer, so I straightened everything up properly and used lots and lots of pins to hold everything exactly in place and just cut.

So far so good. I've got the collar on. I think I will end up putting a single row of top stitching along the fronts, as the bands are just facings turned inside and the stitching will make them flatter. I might even sew a second row of stitching down the fronts, to hold the facings in place for the buttons and buttonholes. We shall see.

Belaboring the blue coat, and prom time

Okay, this time, it is taking me so long to blog because the coat was NOT speaking to me. I somehow did not want to be bothered cutting it out. And when I started, it kind of slid around on me and the selvages would not line up and behave and I felt discouraged. So I left it alone for a while and it mocked me from the sewing room every time I went by. So I kept on cutting it out, bit by bit, and now all the blue pieces are done and I even discovered I had enough lining in my stash to completely line it.

I did however, have to make the second shortest view (View B) because the skirt is wide enough that I couldn't overlap the pieces with the fabric that I had. I'm still going to make the pockets on the side seam, not the patch pockets.

In the meantime, I have promised my niece that I will make her prom dress and so today, we went looking for patterns. She had seen some nice dresses on the internet and leaned toward a one-shoulder style (no pun intended). Unfortunately, there were hardly any one-shoulder style patterns out there (in the books that we looked at). In the end, we bought two very different patterns and she is going to talk to her friends and think about which one she would prefer for the prom.

This one is cute and young and because it is short, she may be able to wear it somewhere else, later. We'd make the pink view bodice and band, with the yellow view bubble skirt.

It will take about 2.7 metres of fabric.

This one is much more sophisticated but I still think it wouldn't look too old on her, as long as she didn't make it in black (and she is not wanting black - we looked at some lovely turquoise silk charmeuse).

It will take 3.8 metres of fabric. Both dresses are fully lined so she can choose any fabric and not worry about revealing anything. The Vogue dress is much more structured and the midriff is all top-stitched. Plus it has the effect of two skirts and a small train.

I don't want to influence her one way or the other. This is a once in a lifetime event and she should be happy with her dress without feeling like she "should" choose one sort of style over another. It may even turn out that we will look at more patterns after I make the bodices in a muslin for fitting. This will be the first time I have made a muslin! Patterns generally fit me right out of the envelope so I never bother with a muslin. But sewing for someone else is a different proposition.

An experimental, two-sided top

So there I was, staring at everything in my sewing room, wondering what to do. I decided I had to put away some stuff first and packed up some patterns into their envelopes. As I picked up a few pattern pieces (Butterick 4056), I realized they had been left out because I thought I would make a few more easy little tops.

Back in the Fall, I had made three of these little pull-over tops in silk which are great for under any suit jacket. I remembered I had some small pieces of fabric left over from these shirts I made years before I started this blog. In those days, I was using a shirt pattern (McCall's 8053) that fitted very loosely, with long tails that you had to tuck in - way too loose for leaving outside of the pants or skirt. When I got this fabric that resembled silk (but was polyester and so washable with no ironing), I remember the store table had about a dozen beautiful jewel colours and all I got were two - a burnt orange and a pea green. When I went back after realizing how great the fabric was, it was all gone. Boo.

So I went to the stash and found a piece of orange and one of green, not enough to make a top out of each. But I imagined that I could use the front part of the pattern and cut and green side and an orange side and have a "reversible" top!

I found some green thread and some orange and loaded a bobbin with the green and put the orange on the top thread. It's such a simple top, there are only facings around the neck and they were easy.

I hemmed the facings by machine, with the matching thread on the outside (but forgot to take a picture of the hemmed facings).

Here's the top with the two sides stitched together, lying on the ironing board.

And here it is, with the neck facings on. I am going to stitch the hems all by hand, as I did for the silk tops. I haven't tried the top on, under a jacket, but I believe it may work. I hung it on the hanger with the "front" hanging down so you can see the "back" but when I wear it, it should be balanced so the "back" hides beneath the jacket. It's an experiment! Of course, I'm in no position to wear a suit jacket these days but it'll be ready for when I am. Looking at the final picture, I am reminded of the Go Fug Yourself girls: "ooh, shiny!"

A hat

I'm rummaging around my sewing room, looking for things to make, fabric for some more bags as the last set were pretty popular. I spied the messy purple fabric I made a coat from last year and remembered I thought I could make a tam out of it. This time, I have a pattern which includes a tam but I have it in my mind that a trilby style hat would work and I have a pattern for that too.

I'm using McCall's M5773 and decide to go with view F, the blue one with the brim. Actually, I really want to make view E in the red, using the red boiled wool from that jacket I recently finished. But I figure the purple wool will serve as a template and I can pitch it if I don't like it.

It's very simple and I use some cream coloured lining scraps I have for the inside.

I decide to interface one side of the brim, even though the pattern doesn't cal for it. This wool is very loose and I figure I can't go too wrong with interfacing.

I get the crown of the hat put together and try it on and it's HUGE. I think it's the fabric, more than the pattern, so I take up one half of the crown seams by another 5/8 inch and it seems to work better. I sew the interfaced brim to the outside of the hat.

I sew the lining to the other brim. Then I sew the hats together at the edge of the brims, leaving a small opening to turn them right side out. The hat sheds mightily each time I hold it.

After I turn the hat, I sew around the brim, first to seal the open edges together, then to add rigidity to it, with a line of stitching about 1/4 inch from the edge stitching and one around where the lining joins the brim, to keep the lining at bay. It's not brilliant but it's okay and gives me hope that the red one will look better. And now of course, I have "the ensemble", with the coat and the hat. Hmm. At any rate, it is covering up my bald chemo head and that's the main thing. You can just see that I am wearing a blue skull cap under the hat. When I have hair again, it will fit over the the hair too.

Little woolly jacket - we hope

First, cleaning up leftovers.

I had quite a bit of the navy linen blend left over so I decided to make a plain skirt. I had made a long, high-waisted skirt to match the short navy jacket. But like white shirts, I don't think you can ever have too many navy skirts. So I used the reliable, slightly below the waist, waistband-less skirt and hemmed it at the knee. This also allowed me to verify how much fabric I need to make one of these skirts, so I can get 0.8 metres of some plain wool to make a few more. I seem to have a lot of wacky jackets and print shirts so I need plain skirts to go with.

Next, a new jacket pattern.
In a previous post, I was warned in the comments against using this pattern. Marji said she and other people had ended up throwing out the jacket after they made it, due to problems under the arm.

I laid out the pattern pieces and overlaid them with tried-and-true pieces from other patterns. Nothing seemed too amiss. And since I had this piece of acrylic that I got as a remnant just sitting there in my stash, I decided to be reckless and make the new pattern.

I had exactly 1.1 metres of this acrylic stuff. I got the remnant thinking I would make a skirt but the more I looked at the loose weave, the less I liked the skirt idea. I decided to make the view with no collar at all and three-quarter sleeves and I just squeezed all the pattern pieces on to the fabric.

In the hopeful anticipation that the jacket will work, I cut each piece out in a single layer so that the houndstooth will match everywhere and be straight. I even cut the back out, which is normally on the fold, by cutting out one half and then folding the pattern piece over and cutting out the other half.

Rather than trying to match the notches, I cut out the front and back and side pieces with the bottoms lined up with a white stripe.

When I got one piece cut out, I laid it down on the fabric, right sides together and lined up all the stripes and pinned the pieces together and cut out the corresponding other piece, so they would be identical mirror image pieces. Now for the interfacing and lining and then we shall see if this thing goes together or not.

I has a ham!

Well that was the most thorough breast exam I've ever had. And the mammogram was the least objectionable. Those women know what they are doing. The only bad thing was that I got lost on the way and arrived 10 minutes late and in a positive lather. I kept apologizing for dripping sweat all over their machines. I loathe and detest whoever designed how the Queensway crosses Carling and splits Carling and all the other idiots who don't put visible numbers on their stupid buildings. I was also mad at myself for imagining the building when I heard the person tell me it was in a "small mall". I was envisioning a 4 or 6 plex but it turns out it is in a much larger place than that, which has an anchor grocery store for heaven's sake. Anyway, I rode sedately back to the Fabricland on the way home and got the seam binding I needed. I also escaped buying more fabric.

I got some nice, plain dark buttons for the navy linen blend jacket. Mostly matte with a little shine around the edges.

And I got a ham! I has a ham! Okay, it's a walrus with a bucket, but it cracks me up too. I have grown tired of pressing shoulders and other curvy bits inadequately on the sleeve board. Hmm, bad photo, but then, you know what a ham is. And if not, I'll be sure to show pix of me using it.

And I have acquired some more jacket patterns (Vogue V8146). I seem to be obsessed with detail on the back. It's similar to the linen jacket I just made but has no yoke and it's not pleated.

I have continued to muse about the red Chinese linen that a student who became a friend got me from China.

And now I think I have the right pattern (New Look 6619). I just have to decide whether to make the large collar or the smaller, stand-up one. I am leaning toward the large one because the fabric is already Chinese enough, without going for the look of the mandarin collar.

Piping for the raw silk

"I'm so excited!" I went shopping today for piping material and got so much more.

First of all, when I walked into the Fabricland, I saw that they had Vogue patterns on sale. I am still looking for the perfect jacket pattern (actually something more than that but that's another story) and I sat down and looked through the patterns. I ended up with three different patterns - one for a short, swingy jacket with back pleats, one for a reversible jacket that looked interesting and one for a dress that I had seen at A Dress A Day.

Then I went looking for that pink-and-white quilting cotton for the piping. I had it in my head that it would be just the two colours and a sufficiently large print that you couldn't tell what was going on once it was piping. But of course, once you start looking for something you imagine, it doesn't always appear. I was torn between a pink with a tiny yellow flower on it and some pink and white mottled stuff when the sales clerk told me there was some other stuff on sale. I went to look at it and there it was.

The best thing was that it didn't have a white background. I saw right away that the cream worked better with the silk which has quite a lot of yellow in it when you look at it closely.

In addition, I decided it was time I had a rotary cutting tool and a self-healing cutting mat and I got those too. I have two sized of piping cord because I'm going to use the smaller on the inside with the lining, as suggested by Threads magazine, which I will blog about as I do it.