Fall Sewing - Sweatshirt

I'm not a big follower of fashion trends, but have you seen those sweatshirts in the magazines and catalogs made out of something nicer than sweatshirt fleece?  That's a trend that I think would work well for me. I want to be casual and comfy but I don't want to look like I just rolled out of bed.  It's a great project for fall, am I right?

I already had the perfect fabric in my stash, a polyester/rayon "sweater knit" in a black and white tweed. It's really terrycloth, which for some reason I didn't realize when I bought it. I love the look of it (and I already have a skirt made out of it) but I can't completely get over the feeling that I'm wearing a towel. By the way, I'm not sure there is really such a thing as tweed terrycloth, but that's what it looks like so that's what I'm calling it.

What I really needed was a chunky black ribbing to go with it. I found some great ribbing in brown and gray, but no black. I checked all my favorite online fabric sources and still no black.  Plan B turned out to be some black Ponte that I found on sale. I wasn't sure it would work for the neck edge. Would it hold the curved shape of the neckline or would it want to stand straight up? I pondered that problem for a long time, and also formulated plans C and D, before I finally just cut a sample and tested it. It seemed to work well enough so my ribbing problem was solved.

The next challenge was coming up with a pattern. I already have a self-drafted t-shirt pattern so that seemed like a good place to start. I love the raglan-sleeved sweatshirts I've seen in stores but I look terrible in raglan sleeves so that wasn't an option. Dropped shoulders are definitely much better on me so I measured across my shoulders to where I thought I wanted the sleeves to hit and extended the shoulders of my t-shirt pattern by 2 1/4".  I also lowered the sleeve cap by about that amount.

Sweatshirt pattern on top of t-shirt pattern: I extended the shoulder, lowered the underarm, lowered the neckline (but I wish I hadn't), and widened the bodice.  

I really had no idea how much ease I wanted in the sweatshirt so I took a trip to the mall and tried on a couple. I came up with some general measurements (at least 6" of ease, 14" upper sleeves, bottom band around my hipbones) and adjusted my pattern accordingly. The pattern seemed to come together really well. Almost too well. Could it really be that easy? At this point I started to feel a little panic. What if this project didn't turn out? What if I put in all this time and had nothing to show for it? What if I fail? These are the kinds of thoughts that have haunted me all my life and kept me from trying new things. Time to let go of that. For goodness sake, it's just a sweatshirt!

I finished the pattern and cut out the fabric. There was one more detail I wanted to add so it wouldn't be too plain. My plan was to sew a 6mm coverstitch along the shoulder and armscye seams, from the wrong side, with wooly nylon thread in the looper. This would give a thick black line of stitching on the right side to set off those seams. I tested the stitch, adjusted the tension, and kept testing, adjusting and practicing until it gave exactly the effect I wanted. Then I stitched the first shoulder seam. It started out great then something went wrong and the rest of the stitches were all loopy. Back to my test fabric (a piece of the sweatshirt fabric). Everything was great on the sample, but it would not work on the sweatshirt! There was no difference between the test piece and the sweatshirt, but apparently my machine could tell the difference and took great pleasure in thwarting my plans.

Ok, I'm smarter than a machine but I know when to fight for what I want and when to switch gears. Time to save my sanity and try something different. I switched to the narrower 3mm coverstitch, the stitching worked beautifully, and although I still would have preferred the wider stitch I love the finished effect.

The neckband went on easily. I should have cut the piece a little shorter but it's good enough that I'm not about to redo it. The sleeves turned out to be the perfect length.  I pinned the bottom band around my hips, decided where I wanted it to sit, and shortened the sweatshirt to that length. An easy and quick alteration to the original pattern.

The actual sewing time was really fast. Now that I have a pattern I could whip out a whole wardrobe of these things in no time! I learned a couple things that I'll take into account next time: 

1. The shoulder seams aren't quite in the right spot. I didn't notice on my t-shirts but the extended shoulders accentuate the problem. It doesn't bother me that much because a ready-to-wear sweatshirt would be the same or worse, but I'll fix the pattern for next time.  

2. Ponte doesn't make the best ribbing substitute. It's stiff and doesn't stretch a lot even though it contains spandex. If I push the sleeves up to my elbows I might just cut off my circulation. 

Despite the imperfections I love this sweatshirt! I'm looking forward to wearing it and to making a few more like it.

Two More T-shirts

It looks like I don't have much to show for all the time I've spent in my sewing room lately. I've been working hard, just not on things I'm going to share. Those "top secret" projects include some cleaning, organizing, planning and fitting. Not really secret, just not very interesting.

I did whip out a couple t-shirts a couple of weeks ago. I realized a few weeks ago that while I've been working on perfecting my fitted t-shirt pattern, tees have been getting looser. How did I miss that? I added some ease to my fitted t-shirt pattern and made a black tee out of the two XL Gap shirts I bought last spring. I also played with my sleeve pattern a little, making the sleeve wider and the sleeve cap lower. I didn't love the results so I won't use that sleeve pattern again. I cut the hem and sleeves hems along the existing t-shirt hems and cut down on the sewing time. It still didn't make up for the time I spent taking the shirts apart but it helped.  The black tee turned out really good. Not perfect, but certainly something I'll wear often.

I also made a pink tee from the new front and back patterns but with the previous version of the sleeve.  It's a keeper, and probably the last t-shirt I'll make until I start sewing for next spring. It's time to think about sweatshirts, long-sleeved shirts and jackets.

I think it's about time to have something to show for my sewing time. Hopefully I'll have a finished item of clothing within the next week.

Great Gatsby Costume

I've been working on a huge project.  Well, the mostly-finished product doesn't look that huge, but the process sure felt like it!  What is a mother supposed to do when her daughter says she just might die if she can't be Daisy Buchanan for Halloween?  Now, this isn't a grade school aged daughter throwing a bit of a tantrum, but a college student studying costume design who has just seen "The Great Gatsby" for the third time and is having a perfectly understandable emotional response to the amazing costumes in that movie.  If that mother is an over-achiever type with some sewing ability, who thinks she can do anything (with sometimes disastrous results) then she drops everything to make a Great Gatsby inspired dress for her daughter.

You would think that with the popularity of Downton Abbey and The Great Gatsby there would be all kinds of 1920's costume ideas all over Pinterest, but I really didn't have much luck there.  I found very predictable-looking flapper dresses, but that's not at all what I wanted.  I used to be a costume purist. If something was set in the 1920's I expected the costumes to be authentic to that time period.  I got over that last year on my field trip to New York City.  One of our stops was at a costume shop, where the owner talked about their design process.  He actually used the 1920's as an example, saying that the styles of the 20's were shocking for their time, but the boxy shapes might seem a little frumpy today.  If an audience is to get a feel for the mood of a show set in the 1920's, the costumes need to have enough modern influence that the audience can interpret them correctly.  Now that I understand that, I can truly appreciate the artistic genius of Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin.  They put more details into one movie than I've ever had in my brain in my entire life.  With that in mind, what I wanted was not an authentic 1920's dress, but a dress inspired by both the 20's and by "The Great Gatsby".

I decided I wanted a bias-cut dress so that it would be somewhat form-fitting, with seams mostly on the straight grain so it would be easier for me to sew.  This was my first general idea (and yes, I know I'm not an artist):

I generally hate dresses with a shorter hemline in front (aka mullet dresses) but for some reason it seemed like that's how this dress should be.  I had no idea what to do for the sleeves, I only knew there needed to be sleeves and I figured I'd slap a square piece of fabric on the shoulder, with one corner hanging down the arm, and see what happened.  

I have a duct tape "double" of my daughter so I draped this basic design on the form, first in paper then in rayon challis.  It turned out that my design lines wouldn't quite work right on my short-waisted daughter so I had to make some changes, but I kept the general idea.  This was the first attempt, sort of:

This is actually the back of the dress.  I put it on the dress form backwards because the front looked so horribly bad but I wanted to text a picture to my daughter.  The bodice looks basically the same either way, but the "mullet" hemline?  Well, it turned out looking more like a "pageboy" hemline.  My measurements made sense when I drafted the skirt pattern, but between the diagonal hip yoke and the effect of the bias the skirt ended up being nearly straight across in front, above the knee, then curving sharply down to the back where again it was almost straight across.  Epic fail, but at least it was an easy fix.  Luckily at this point in the process my daughter came home for a 2-week summer break so she could help with and try on the final product.

 We made some design changes, re-cut some pattern pieces, and added some trim, beads, and sequins.  There were small challenges along the way but we muddled our way through them.  My daughter made the headband that's hanging around the neck of the dressform.  She didn't finish the beading before she went back to school but I'm sure she'll be able to finish it before Halloween.  The dress is certainly not perfect, but I actually think it's beautiful, and it was really fun to be able to stretch my draping skills to the limit and to work together on a project with my daughter.