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.

All that glitters…

When I design dresses, I usually start my drawing on top of a person outline I copied from a how-to-draw book: a basic, standing straight, facing the front, 7 heads tall, two heads wide kinda deal. At some point (probably in a high school textiles class) I was given a page of 'fashion figures', outlines of wispy ladies leaning this way and that, with legs at least a third longer that your average human. I do not understand these. One of the great woes of art is that the thing you end up with never quite reaches the glory of what you imagined – so why would you start your design even further in the realm of the impossible?

Even so, one day I thought I'd try out these figures, and drew myself a 1930s style evening dress.

I decided I didn't like the figure but I did like the dress, and thereon kept an eye out for gold lamé. I eventually found a Very Shiny gold chiffon while shopping in Cabramatta. I knew I would need a lot, but at $4 per metre I could afford to give myself a good margin. I bought 10 metres of fabric and a coordinating thread and Hong Kong binding – a dark khaki that disappeared into the gold perfectly.

Time Passed. This year, the dress filtered to the top of the 'potential project' pile in my mind. A couple of friends had weddings coming up, which a floor length bright gold dress would be Wildly Inappropriate for, but I was also invited to a 30th birthday at a speakeasy-style bar and that made a good goal for a 1930s dress.

I started with a couple of decisions, one being to omit the cape so I could wear a jacket. The other was to make the waist ruching part of the skirt piece instead of a separate sash – mostly to make the patternmaking more interesting.

To make the pattern, I first tried to drape the kind of look I wanted onto my dress form, but that didn't get me what I wanted. Then, I decided to do an initial flat pattern and drape from there. Of course, when making a woven evening gown, the obvious starting point is a pattern for a knit pyjama top (what?) – but it worked.

My steps were:

1. Making a tunic with the right fit
2. Dividing the front into the two panels
3. Expanding the smaller panel to allow for ruching

I started by doing cut and spread. Given that I wanted the ruching to lead back to the shoulder seam, I ended up with very fine cuts. This didn't give enough ruching, so after experimenting some more with the mock-up, I lengthened the pattern at some points down the body.

 

For the skirt, I started with Style 1353. I cut a back and a front, and mirrored the top halves to be all across the hips while allowing sufficient fabric for shaping later. I also left a lot of fabric above where the pattern ends on the front piece to use for the ruching. Once mocked-up, I took the skirt side seam in a fair bit, as this part of the dress is meant to be not so flowy.

 

Then I took it apart and updated my pattern. The back and front ruching sections are on the front skirt pattern, so the ruching goes around without a seam, while the skirt does have a seam.

The flowy part of the skirt I mocked up in miniature so I could see how the circle pieces would behave without using huge amounts of fabric. There are two of these spirals to go along the diagonal edges of the skirt and a semicircle between them on the long side.

With all my pieces worked out, it's time to cut.