2023 Review

My big sewing project this year was setting up a new sewing room. I have done this before, but then covid meant everyone in the house needed a private office (and I wasn't sewing much) so the sewing room got packed up and turned into my mother’s office. When I began spending more time sewing again, the temporary arrangement of taking over the kitchen table with my sewing machine became less practical, so we rearranged once more and now I have my own room.

Unlike last time, I am now in a furniture owning stage of life. Instead of just moving the old coming-apart cupboards back upstairs, I bought new (matching) cupboards and sewing desk, and everything got sorted. Embroidery stuff is now in a drawer, not a random hatbox; the beads are in the sewing room rather than downstairs with children's crafts; some horrible fabric that definitely won't come in handy one day has been got rid of; and my sewing books are in my sewing room. It's going to take a while to get used to where everything is but it is all consolidated and ordered and I am very pleased.

As far as actual sewing goes, I started the year with a pyjama set. I reused my contour pants pattern and traced new patterns from bought pyjamas.

Then I christened the new sewing room with a Midnights themed outfit to wear to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie.

I ended the year with a spur-of-the-moment jewellery project, recreating the body chain worn by Sleep Token's backup singers at their Wembley concert.

Source

 I took some patterning lessons, the fruit of which should come into play next year.

Also, I finished another Bayeux scene (and started on the next one).

Back in my Sewing Era

After spending a few months sorting and setting up a sewing room I wanted to make something straight away. That week, the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie was announced for international release. I enjoyed the album-themed Eras tour outfit videos that were going round all year and daydreaming up my own options. So now I had a sewing room, an event, a bandwagon to jump on and, of course, a deadline. The deadline was, naturally, the next weekend.

While I am a Reputation girl, every other concert I go to is a Wear Black concert (as is my taste in clothes generally). I wanted to take advantage of Eras as an opportunity to do something a bit different, so I took inspiration from some Midnights looks. 

What made everything fall into place was remembering the white velour coat I made ages ago. Also, because of setting up the sewing room, I had just sorted, re-folded and re-stored my entire stash, so a perfect blue-with-purple-sparkles chiffon came instantly to mind. And I had lots of drapey gold leftover from my gold 30s dress. All I needed to buy was the zip.

For patterns, I started with the lining pattern from my asymmetrical mini skirt and raised the waistline by tracing another skirt that fit well at the height I wanted.

First mock-up fit perfectly, and I think this newly modified pattern has inadvertently fixed a problem I was having with an upcoming project. I flatlined the chiffon, bound the waist, and did a single fold hem to minimise bulk.

For the top I used Knitwit 3900, one of my mum's patterns from the 80s. She used it for me when I was 12 so I knew how it was likely to turn out, and I knew to lengthen it significantly (which ended up being only just enough). I did try to adapt a pattern of my own but succeeded only in wasting one of the two days I had for this. The cowl top I ended up with isn't quite what I had in my head but did the job fine.

All in all – happy with the outfit, happy with the new sewing setup, happy to get back into sewing, (and happy to discover that the trick to enjoying Folklore is to turn it up loud).

2021 Review

If you find yourself losing interest in a long-term hobby, you may be growing and exploring new parts of life, or you may need to see an endocrinologist. For me it was the latter and, now that I am much healthier, the motivation to sew has returned. (And I'm still fitting in songwriting alongside.) Last year, my sewing room was sacrificed to a combination of disinterest and the need for everyone to simultaneously be on private zoom calls, so now a sewing project begins with commandeering the kitchen table.
Here are the dishes for the year:

Appetiser
A simple cotton knit t-shirt, garnished with painted butterfly.

Entrée
Miniskirt with asymmetrical yoke and pleat variations.

Main
Gold chiffon evening gown, 1930s style. Includes bias cut, ruching and 2.5 circles in the skirt.

Dessert
A refreshingly symmetrical selection of contour pants in black and black & red, with coordinating crop top.

For Pairing
Like everyone else who owns a sewing machine, I made a stack of masks this year. I thought I was going to say that "I made masks in a variety of colours to match different outfits" but when I photographed them I realised that of the 6, 2 are gold and 3 are purple, so 'variety' might be too strong a word. But I couldn't wear a light gold mask with a dark gold dress – it would clash.

Palette Cleansers
I have a purple A-Line skirt that I made in a sewing class in 2016 that I have never worn. I like the colour but the cut did nothing for me. I remade it into a pencil skirt, a style that does work for me, and am much happier with it now. (I've even worn it!) The dotted lines on the before picture are where I threadmarked my new seam lines. Thread marking was my number one sewing discovery of the year. I haven't thrown out my chalk, but it's tempting.

I also mended a bought skirt with flawed fabric by adding some flowers to cover the holes that appeared after the first wash.

I did some more embroidery too.

Legging it

Back in Ye Olde Days, Blu-ray was the format of the future. One of the selling points was that you could be watching a movie, decide you wanted the character's coat and, in a couple of clicks of the remote, be directed to the website it could be purchased from. I don't know if this ever actually happened – I never came across it. Fortunately, sewing can do the same thing for any medium. I was reading Batman: White Knight and decided I wanted Harley Quinn's pants. And in only a couple of (hundred) clicks of the sewing machine, I have them.

To figure out how to approach the pattern I flicked through Patternmaking for Fashion Design to see if it had anything similar and found a pretty much exact match ('Contour Pant'), with instructions.

I was prepared for adapting this pattern to be an ordeal. I am a skirt-wearer generally, in part because it is nigh impossible to find pants that I find comfortable, and I have in the past caused a sewing teacher to give up while trying to fit a pants pattern on me.

I first started with Butterick 4297 and traced the pieces, adjusted the lengths, cut each piece down the middles on the colour-block line, and traced the shaping line from crotch-level to knee on both the back pieces, on the new seam edges.
 
Then I looked at the pieces, at the picture and at me; and remembered I had used the pattern before and it was uncomfortable; I thought about how non-stretchy my fabric is… and came to the conclusion that this was not going to work.

I returned to the pattern stash and selected Simplicity 7930 from my mum's collection, a 70s outfit I have admired my whole life, and started over with it. Unlike the first pattern, this did not have the waist marked, so I left the lengths for later, but I had enough information to approximate the knee. Using this, I traced the shaping curve I had developed on the first pattern onto the inside back piece because I didn’t feel like figuring it out again.

I tried to figure out where to put the curve on my remaining quarter (the side back), which looked very thin. I measured it and measured me and measured everything once more and came to the conclusion that there was no possible way this could fit me. By this point, I was sick of this whole patternmaking thing, so I measured the side back piece from my Butterick attempt, found it was about the right width, and decided I would just use it instead. The shaping was already done too.

At the time I was thinking to myself that this had to be a terrible decision, but it's pants for me, so fitting's going to be an awful process anyway, so I may as well start here. I made my first mock-up in some leftover scuba knit (not pictured). When I put them on, I was absolutely shocked to discover it fit right first go, looked good, and didn't appear to need any changes.

So, I guess the lesson here is that if you are having trouble with a garment try combining patterns that are different sizes, from different decades, and for different fabric types, and the garment will get so confused it will just, forget to be difficult?

The only changes necessary were to raise the Butterick waistline to match the Simplicity one which hit exactly right in the back; to lower the Simplicity waistline in the front, where it didn't hit exactly right; and to shorten the leg length.

I had made a top out of red Ponte earlier in the year and I wanted to use the leftovers, so I tried to find a black to match. The top was supposed to be a simple project, but fitting the technically-stretch-but-very-solid Ponte knit nearly made me give up. I ended up adding princess seams to my standard knit pattern by draping it on myself.

The thread marked lines are from the draping and were averaged for the chalk lines (plus seam allowance) I actually cut.

Unfortunately, the red is unusually thick, so I had to settle for a thinner black that is less nice, but it did the job. Neither are very stretchy so I made a full mock-up out of the black before cutting into the little red I had. This mock-up fit just as well as my first, stretchier one. I had planned to take it apart and replace the centre panels with the red, but ended up deciding that a new pair of nicely fitted black pants wasn't a bad move. I had just enough length of black to cut pieces for the colour-blocked pair.

The construction for these pants was all straightforward. Pressing out the seam allowances is very important to how the pants fit, and I still find myself trying to make them lie flat them while wearing. I top-stitched the crotch seam using a twin needle to imitate the lines in the drawing. The waist is bound in the red fabric, also with twin-needle top-stitching.

30 Carats

I did eventually wear my gold 30s dress to my friend's 30th birthday party, and again to our Christmas eve church service, because at Christmas it just seems right to dress a bit fancier. This post will mostly be photos, with the odd note. Construction details are here and here.

I experimented with creating a set for the photoshoot, rather than trying to find a spot in my house, and it worked so well – much more conducive to creativity. The portrait on the wall is of my grandmother as a child in the 30s.

I think I got pretty close to my original design, but it wouldn't hurt if the hip ruching stood out a little more.

For going out, I wore the dress with a white velour coat I made, maybe 10 years ago. It is not at all historical, but the shape and general impression were inspired by a coat in a Lucille Ball movie. I had used pearl clip-on earrings as a fake clasp and found that I could also use them to clip the coat to my neckline, so it would stay where it was most flattering.

Given the timey times we live in, a matching mask is a must for any fashionable outfit. I adapted my standard mask pattern to have ruching to match the dress.

... Is very gold

Let me explain what's going on here:
a)    This is the front skirt. At least, the thin wedge is. The stretched hexagon it's attached to is the ruched waistband
b)    Lining for the ruched front
c)    Back skirt
d)    Ruched front
e)    Unruched front
f )    Back

Everything is angled for bias, which gets a bit awkward once you've corrupted a pattern so much the grainline is more of a grain-angle.

The semi-circle is only there as a guide for the moment. I had done a test layout of the circles and estimated that they might take 8m which suddenly made my generous 10m of chiffon look positively constricting. The line across the fabric is marking out the 2m point so I didn't go much past it. My estimate ended up being exaggerated, so fear not, I didn't run out of fabric at this time.

I sewed the dress together before cutting the circle just in case something went wrong and I needed to re-cut a piece or two, because, if I really needed to, I could probably manage with slightly less than 2.5 circles in the skirt.

The back and unruched front pieces serve as a kind of foundation, and the other pieces are sewn onto them rather than meeting at seam allowances. I found the mere thought of trying to chalk this fabric distressing, so decided to try basting my guideline instead. This worked wonderfully and is a technique I will absolutely be using on future projects. I sewed through my paper patterns and fabric pieces on the marked lines with long stitches and then cut the stitches so I could remove the paper while leaving the thread in the fabric.

Here is the ruching sewn to the lining with tacking to show where that should meet the other front.

Figuring out the sewing order was a puzzle in its own right. The back top and back skirt went together fine – this seam is hidden under the ruching. To join the fronts, I bound the edge of the unruched side and placed it over the ruching. I then hand-sewed them together, with a row of stitches on each edge of the binding. It seemed easier and neater than trying to control it through the machine.

The next step was the long side seam on the skirt. I finished the edges of the waist ruching with Hong Kong binding so it was ready to be draped into place. The front skirt has a small slit in the seam allowance so it can fold out of the seam once it reaches the ruching. The unruched bodice also goes in this seam.

Pause again for another interlude of handsewing to attach the waist ruching. This time the easiest way was on the dressform. Then, finally, the second side seam could be sewn.

Then I cut and sewed the 5 semi-circles and embarked on handsewing the roughly 13m of rolled hem.