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.