Re-evaluating Plans

Today I re-evaluated my project list and decided to change some things around, mainly because I am realizing that I have skirts, I have dresses, I have pants, and I have jackets, but I have very few shirts. Just plain shirts.

I have also decided to not forge ahead on Butterick 5320, mainly because the reviews on the dress so far have mentioned that the collar is not ruffled so much as just pouffy. And "large pouffy bright pink collar" is the quickest path to "fashion don't" for me. So, the fuchsia fabric will be repurposed as a shirt, or even two shirts, since I have plenty of it.

To start, I wanted to make a casual shirt that I could just throw on and go for summer. I really loved the look of BWOF-04-2009-122, but as with a lot of BWOF shirts it was extremely low cut. It also appeared to be very short, and the last thing that I needed was to flash my spare tire at anyone.


So, I substituted another pattern. I had recently made a maxi dress from Simplicity 2642, which has a similar shape but the front bodice overlaps rather than being cut down to the empire line.


So, I made the top as instructed, but cut an alternate skirt for it at a length of just 15 inches. I used cotton gauze, same as the BWOF top, but in an unbleached cotton:


To dress it up a bit, I added a length of crocheted trim from my stash. I had just enough left for the neckline:


I need to toss the shirt in the wash so that that skirt returns to it's more crinkled state. When using cotton gauze, it is important to not really press it. Rather than pushing the iron across the fabric, be sure to just press it down and lift it to move onto the next area. Otherwise you will iron out all the natural crinkles.

I also spent some time going through my stash, determining what my needs were and what could stand to be sewn.

I certainly don't need any fabric for pants. I have a ridiculous amount on hand. Here is "the good stuff," starting at the left with an RPL from Gorgeous Fabrics, a wool herringbone, and two wool suitings:


Here is some of the lower-end stuff, two twills and two pinstriped poly suitings:


And finally, a number of pants-weight materials, including the white pique that I want to work on once I get my final fit issues worked out:


I also have a number of fabrics that would be suitable for shirts, most are stretch sateens:


I would like to make at least one into BWOF 04-2009-110:

And finally, I have a stack of charmeuse that will make some nice tunics:


I think that the zebra print will make up nicely as McCall 5708, which is a Hillary Duff pattern, but no one needs to know that, do they?


Fortunately the niece and nephew are camping with their grandparents through next weekend, so I should be able to get some sewing for myself in for a change!

Yeah, Baby!

I am SO close! I have nearly reached my goal of well-fitting pants.

If you remember, my last pair looked like this:


I had gotten rid of the gigantic bunch of fabric sagging beneath each butt cheek, but that revealed the wrinkles pointing up to each hip. To repair this, I extended the rear crotch curve, and scooped the back curve slightly more, turning the curve into a definite L-shape.

Here you can see the progression of the pattern. The green line is the most recent redraft, the red line is the original draft:


By turning the crotch curve into an L, and extending the curve to the inseam, I have managed to eliminate most of the wrinkles:


You can see I could probably a little bit more on that extension to spin those legs a little bit more. The front is still good:


I don't know what that crease is on the upper left hip, it probably has something to do with the fact that one second before the camera flashed, I was busy shoving a cat out of the picture with my foot.

I think one more muslin to refine this pattern, and I will be ready to cut into some really cute white pique that I picked up on sale at Hancock's. I also want to draft a lining since you know, white pants and all!

In the meantime, I have been slowed down slightly because I had to take a bit to play with my new toy:

An Interesting Observation...

Many of you have been following my progress in refining my "Tape Pants" pattern, and my efforts to create a pattern that is stylish, fits well, but still accomodates a little junk in the trunk, shall we say. One of my greatest fitting challenges is my round bottom. I know, that's a little TMI, but this post is about fitting pants, so you'll have to live with it!

Anyway, after extensively redesigning the crotch curve, adding height to the back, folding out tissue from below the butt-cheeks, adding tissue at the hip, and inserting and removing various wedges throughout, I wondered how much I had really changed the pattern from the commercial patterns that I had had difficulty with.

I pulled out a McCall's and a Vogue pattern and tried to align my pattern with the commercial pattern and found something very interesting.

1. My redraft is not drastically different in shape from the commercial patterns and

2. The "back" pattern piece that I drafted fit most closely with a size 22, and the front pattern piece fit most closely with a size 14.

Now to me, THAT was interesting. While I will not hesitate to morph between sizes in tracing off a dress, it had never occurred to me to use a separate size for the front and back of a pair of pants. But, it really does make a kind of sense. My measurements fall within a size 18 on "Big 4" patterns. But, the size 18 bunches up under the butt, and pulls and wrinkles in odd places, so even though it is adequate to go AROUND me, the size 18 is not in the correct proportions. With a 14 in front and a 22 in back, the measurements average to approximately those of an 18, but there is relatively more fabric in the back where I need it, rather than in the front where I do not.

I will be working on another version over the weekend, I will keep everyone posted as to my progress, but just wanted to share this little "a-ha!" moment with those of you that are also struggling with fit.

A New Convert to Sewing

Every time my niece and nephew are here, my nephew is constantly bopping in and out of the sewing room...messing with the iron, chopping up pieces of ribbon, organizing the buttons...and his answer is always "No, that's ok" when I ask him if he wants to make something. This weekend, though, I finally got him to sit down for a minute and I showed him how to make puppets out of fleece remnants. Using Butterick 4209, I showed him that in just a few minutes he could have a puppet to play with.


He was then VERY interested in sewing, requiring a trip to the fabric store for him to rat through the fleece remnants there, planning his next 5 puppets. His second attempt was a puppy. We made some small changes from the pattern, we use felt cut-outs for eyes and noses rather than goggle eyes and pom-poms (mainly because felt is what I had in the house), and we also sew as much by machine as possible rather than hand sewing puppy ears that could be yanked off by a rambunctious boy.

He isn't ready to sew by himself yet, so he sits on my lap and helps guide the fabric. Here he is working on his puppets:


Helping with the curves:


Stuffing for the head:


Waiting for the glue...it's SOOOO slow!


And here he is with his new buddies:


Overall, I think this is a great pattern that is super-easy to put together. It is a nice way for a little one like D. to get a taste of sewing, or a way for a child with more experience to work on a project for themselves. There is a good amount of hand-sewing involved, attaching the head, tail, collar, etc., and little ones definitely need assistance there. I think the greatest advantage of this pattern though is how quickly it comes together, and each step the kids can see exactly what they are making, where each piece goes, etc. It goes together so quickly, it keeps short attention spans focused and now he not only has some new toys, but will be proud to say "I made these!"

Tape Pants 2.0

Last week I wrote about my struggles to create a pants pattern that fits well. After some "investigation," I decided that the crotch curve was completely wrong. So, I completely redrew it and started over in my fitting attempts. Below are some comparative pictures.

Here are some early attempts at pants:



And here is my most recent attempt with the heavily altered back curve:


OK, yes, there are still wrinkles there, but they are DIFFERENT!

Now, instead of a huge wad of fabric under each butt-cheek, I have wrinkles pointing to my hips. THIS I can deal with! This is addressed in PFRP. I think, and someone correct me if I am wrong, that what I need to do is slightly scoop the back crotch curve and add some tissue to the inseam.

I know that it doesn't LOOK very different, but if you look closely that the most recent one, you can see that the wrinkles actually extend up over my butt-cheek, whereas they were all hanging up UNDER the butt-cheek before. Also, I don't have as MUCH fabric pooling on the back of the thighs.

I think that the reason that I was having so much trouble fitting these pants is because I had a myriad of problems going on, beginning with a crotch curve that was completely wrong, and then exacerbated by what is now visible. Now that I can actually SEE what is wrong, rather than just adding, adding, adding to the inseam, I can fix what is wrong.

I also have the front nearly worked out. Here is a pair made from the original pattern:


And here is the most recent pair:


This was fixed by adding some fabric at the side seams and straightening the front curve, not adding tissue to the inseam.

I am ready for one more muslin, and hopefully you will see some REAL progress!

More Cool Shirts for the Nephews

Lately I have been making some cute bowling-style shirts for my nephews, and I am especially proud of the latest.

I made this shirt for my nephew using Butterick 3475, which is just a plain short-sleeved shirt. I made the contrast strips in the front and the yoke in the back by just drawing a line on the pattern where I wanted the seam to be, and then just tracing the parts separately and adding seam allowances. It is the same way that I made the dragon shirt for my older nephew.

This shirt has kind of a long history. The Three Stooges fabric was initially purchased to make a diaper bag for my brother when my nephew was born (nearly 2 years ago). Then my cat, The Mad Pisser, went on his rampage of death in the dining room and also managed to defile a part of the fabric that had been cut for the diaper bag. I yelled a lot, and threw it away. I then went back to the fabric store to buy more of the fabric, but it was all gone. So, here I was, stuck with a diaper bag with no lid, and unable to get any more fabric.

So, it sat. And it sat. And it sat. Until yesterday. I took apart what was left of the diaper bag and used the fabric to make this shirt for my nephew, the infamous "Fat Baby."

Overall, I am very pleased with the way it turned out. I basically did the same that I have been for the shirts I make for my older nephew, just in a smaller size. Except these are so tiny they feel like making doll clothes!

I started out by putting together the front and back panels. For each I used french seams and then stitched them down, so from the outside it looks like topstitching or a flat-fell seam. I set the sleeves in flat, so I did a french seam there as well. I just pressed the seam towards the sleeve:


I also used black binding on the edges of the fabric, and at the collar. I did not snip the collar and tuck the edge under and handstitch. I decided to do as little handstitching as possible since this shirt is for a rambunctious and filthy little boy, so it will not lead an easy life.


Here is the finished shirt from the front:


And here it is from the back. I also used the stooges fabric on the underside of the collar:


I know that the yoke is rather large, but I wanted to use as much of the stooges fabric as possible.

Since I have started making these shirts for my nephews, I have been contacted by a couple of people to make them for their kids (moms of my nephew's friends, mainly). Since I make these shirts with french seams, binding, and with the contrast insets they are very time consuming. I always explain to people that when I make them for my nephews, it is a "labor of love" so to speak, that it doesn't matter that it is ridiculous to make custom shirts with couture-style finishes for dirty, careless little boys who bring their pants back for patches just weeks after I make them. I also explain that given the amount of time that I expend on each of these shirts, I would have to charge $200.00 apiece to cover the cost of my time. Normally the response is a surprised "Oh! I didn't realize. Never mind then!" But recently I had a reaction that made me call my brothers and tell them to never, ever give my contact information to anyone who asks about those shirts ever again. I got a call from a woman at my nephew's school, asking about the dragon shirt. I gave her my standard response, that they are too time consuming for me to make, and I would have to charge too much blah, blah, blah.

Her response was ridiculous! She got angry! And she told me that I was "completely insane" to think that I could get $200.00 for a child's shirt.

My reply was less than cordial, when I pointed out to her that I did not, in fact, believe that I could get that much money for a child's shirt, and if she would work on her listening skills she would have gleaned from our conversation that that was the reason that I DID NOT make these shirts for sale and, by the way, just how much did she expect to pay for fully custom handmade clothing?

Seriously, I do NOT understand how little people think of other people's time, do they think that I should make shirts that take $15.00 worth of materials and hours of work for $20.00? Go back to WalMart, lady.

The little dude appreciated it, though. Here he is showing me his new shirt:


Here he is showing me how much he loves cookies:



And here he is honking Daddy's nose, Stooges-style:


My mom, grandmother, and niece also stopped by today to see the new floor, and Sadie zeroed in the new sewing machine, and wanted to try it out immediately:


She just sewed lines on scrap for about half an hour...she loves the new machine, and asked if she could make her next project on it. She was even more excited when my grandmother told her that it was EXACTLY the same as the machine that her mother taught her to sew on!

Singer 99-13

Today I scored quite a prize on Craig's List. I found a Singer 99 in a bentwood case for just $20.00. Not only is the machine very pretty, with nice decals, but it also WORKS! And did I mention, $20.00??

According to this website where you can date your Singer machine, it was manufactured in 1926, Elizabeth New Jersey. I also am pretty sure that is is a 99 based on this site that will assist you in identifying your vintage Singer.

Another good site to check for information about vintage machines is Sew-Classic. Here is a Sew-Classic post about the 99, detailing the machine specs. It is a 3/4 size machine, and the head is made of cast iron. It is belt-driven, and uses low-shank feet and standard needles, although the needle must be inserted with the flat side to the right, so the needle is threaded from left to right.

Here are some photos:


Here is the machine with it's cover on:


Here is a close-up of some of the nice decals:


It looked so good, I threaded it up and tried to sew. Thanks to the Sew-Classic site I was able to download a manual and followed the threading diagram. It works great!