Spring=Yellow

It's already heating up here, mixed in with some frigid (for me) days in the 60s, so I'm making spring and summer tops right now. And really, who doesn't enjoy making yellow tops when it is still slightly grey outside? This is New Look 6179, made with a poly chiffon from Jo-Ann's. I bought this fabric last summer; for weeks, every time I went to Jo-Ann's I'd come across this fabric and think it was pretty. It finally went on the clearance rack (crazy!) and so I bought three or four yards. So glad I did--the shirt turned out really well and I still have enough leftover to make a nice summer dress that I might actually wear.

Sweet and simple.

Detail of the fabric--it has brown, dark grey, light grey, red, green, and blue in it. Hard to believe all those would look good together, but it works out nicely.

They've gone plaid!

Spring is arriving and J! is due for a new pair of shorts. His first pair, in brown plaid, are long gone--disintegrated at the seams, I think. That was back when I first started sewing and I'm pretty sure I made him a size Large. He wears a Small. Ha. The second pair--blue plaid with silver stripes--are his favorites. He really loves the silver stripes. He actually points them out to people. Those won't last much longer, I'm afraid.

So, here's the third pair. Green plaid with narrow yellow and blue stripes. I like how they turned out, although I'm not crazy about the piping. I'm also not so crazy about this pattern (Simplicity 3891) anymore. It's easy to make, but I don't like the patch pockets. I think I'll look around for a different pattern--maybe this Kwik Sew 3267. As far as I can tell, the Big 4 don't really make many patterns for men. What a shame, because J!'s a good sport and wears pretty much anything I make for him. I'm hoarding a few yards of some really hideous dinosaur fabric; it will make a great pair of shorts--perfect for his 29th birthday.

One other thing. All the big pattern companies make "Men and Boy" patterns, so that you can dress your son and partner up in the same clothes. This strikes me as very odd, although it makes sense from a marketing standpoint, I guess. I mean, I hardly ever see "Women and Girl" patterns--if you want to have matchy-matchy outfits with your daughter (or niece, or whatever) you have to buy two separate patterns. But for your partner and son, just one pattern will work. I didn't read carefully enough the first time I used this Simplicity pattern, though, and I cut the front short pieces from the "Men" sizes and the back pieces from the "Boy" sizes. That would have been a hilarious pair of shorts.

J! models his new shorts.

And the back.


I really need a "Man and Dog" pattern, so that J! and Tessa can wear the same outfits. Maybe if she's very good, she'll get a matching green plaid collar for her adoption day present.

Out of hand

Last summer I had finally amassed enough fabric that I couldn't keep stuffing it under my sewing table and hoping J! wouldn't notice. So I decided to get organized and I spent the entire weekend neatly folding all my fabric. Then I came up with a genius idea--I would place each piece of fabric and its scraps in a nice ziploc bag! That way I could keep everything together; when I wanted to use a particular kind of fabric I wouldn't have to go digging around to find the larger scraps.

It really was a brilliant idea, but unfortunately I wasn't just dumping the ziploc bags into bins. Had this been the case, my trip to Costco to purchase 117 ziploc bags would have been vindicated. Instead of bins, I decided to store my fabric in some hanging shelves in the closet--we had the shelves, the closet space and no bins, so it really wasn't much of a choice. Anyway, end result: ziploc bags sliding all over the place (usually onto the floor). Disaster.

Having spent a good amount of time organizing all the bags, though, I wasn't crazy about doing it all over again the next weekend, so I decided to live with it. Really, this just meant a lot of shoving and increasing frustration on my part, while the ziploc bags slowly got their revenge through passive resistance and slipperiness. Last weekend, though, I couldn't hide from my horrible organization anymore. Plus, I was tired of getting attacked by an avalanche of plastic everytime I opened the closet doors.

Ugh.

Two hours later, all the bags are gone, all my fabric is neatly folded and organized by shelf, and all the scraps are now in a wicker hamper we weren't using anyway. Should have done this months ago. Plus, as a bonus, I found three pieces of nice fabric I'd forgotten about. Sweet!

Ahhh. So much better.

Fashion Square Muslin

The original dress

The muslin

This is the muslin for the Fashion Square dress. This is actually the third muslin--the first one is now in pieces in various rooms around the apartment. Anyway, it only ever had two skirt panels, since I was mostly interested in fitting together the bodice pieces, so it wasn't exactly a looker. The second muslin was dismantled to provide the pattern pieces for the third. Forgot to take a picture of it before I attacked it with the seam ripper.

This isn't too bad for a muslin. The skirt panels still aren't quite right--they buckle out at the corners, although that isn't very obvious in the photo. The dress actually only has four skirt panels instead of five, as I originally thought it might. The bodice has six pieces: one center front panel, two side front panels, two side back panels, and one center back panel. This means it has a side zipper, which I like better than a zipper down the back. I need to modify the bust section--it is a bit higher than I wanted (although it also looks a lot higher on the dress model than it does on me) and doesn't have quite as much of a slope as the pictured version.

Perhaps it doesn't look it, but the dress sews up really, really quickly. The actual sewing of it is simple--it fits together a lot like a puzzle. The fitting has taken more time since the seams need to match up. A few additional thoughts:

- I lowered the waist a bit, but I'm not sure yet if I like it or not. I might leave it as is for the next muslin and see what it looks like in a patterned fabric.

- It is surprisingly comfortable to wear. Not terribly forgiving, though, except in the hips.

- I'm still not sure about whether or not to add a lining. I think not. Instead, I'll probably just make a slip, perhaps like this one. The taffeta trim on the slip will help the skirt flare out a bit, too.

- The skirt panels were deceptively difficult. I originally matched the curve of the bodice to the curve of the skirt panel.* That caused the skirt panels to lie flat and only flare out slightly at the seams, rather than along the center. I ended up flattening the curve on the skirt panel, and it worked. The skirt still doesn't flare out as much as in the photo, but the muslin fabric (at this point) has also lost some of its pizzazz; some of those seams are fairly perforated. I'll probably flatten the curve out even more on the next version in order to get more drape.

- Despite the awkwardness with the original skirt design, I built the pattern from the skirt up, rather than from the bust down. It worked out pretty easily--my hip measurement, divided by 4 (with additions for seam allowances) gave me the basic outline of the skirt and from there it was just a matter of drawing rough versions of the pattern pieces and trying them out.

*In true DIY fashion, I drafted the curves with the help of our dinner plates. J! came home to find the living room littered with plates of various sizes; the medium one worked best.

Check out those stillettos! (stilleti?)

Someone is selling this Vogue 4826 on eBay (size 18--bust 38). It's way too big for me, which is such a shame because there is so much to love about this dress: the layered scooped back, the pleats at the waist, that pretty pink but slightly spotted fabric. What's even better is that so much of the design of the dress is in the back; the front is quite plain, with the exception of the lovely shoulder detailing. This seems like the perfect dress for one of those high school romantic comedies, where the poor plain (read nerdy) girl gets picked up by the high school popular guy because of a bet. The girl gets a make-over and turns out to be stunning, of course. In my version of the story she could wear this dress to the prom as a metaphor for their relationship, so that when she dumps him on the dance floor he can contemplate her aweseomeness while she's walking away to rejoin the nerdy guy she really likes. Man, I'm such a sucker for outfits where what's going on in the front slinks its way around the sides and ends up on the back. I'm not entirely sure about those "released dart pleats" at the waist, though. Seems like you have to stand in that awkward "hips-jutting-forward" stance or else you look like you picked up a bustle in the Victorian Leftovers Department. Still, I'm very tempted to buy this pattern, just to see how the dress is put together. Maybe another project in the works.