A summery skirt

This little flounced skirt was made with a TNT skirt pattern I developed last summer. (Inspired by Ungaro) I didn’t know I was frankenpatterning a TNT skirt when I made the Ungaro knock-off, but this is one that I could easily make over and over again.

This time, I made it in a bit of stashed cotton broadcloth, black with a silver pattern that looks a bit like a night sky. I bought it when the galaxy prints were dominating the runway. It’s evocative of those galaxy prints without being too specific — and I think that vagueness means it won’t become dated as quickly. Prints do become dated fast.

Here’s a crop of the print, tiny silver pinpoints on a black background. It almost looks mottled.

In any case, I whipped this one out pretty quickly as part of the June stash challenge. I sewed 30 yards for that challenge and have loads of new things to show you, which I had planned to do long before now. Things have been more than a little hectic here the past few weeks as we’ve had everything from problems at work to a gas leak in the house. So I’m just now looking around and saying, “Where was I?” I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post! Gosh, I’ve probably already worn this skirt four times since I finished sewing it.

This time, I didn’t underline the fabric. It’s a light broadcloth, but I wanted to keep it light. In the other two versions I made of this pattern, I underlined both and was very happy with the results. The Ungaro knock-off was underlined with a batiste which provided just enough body to let the quilting cotton hang smoothly and have a bit of movement. The other version is a mid-calf skirt with no flounce, and I underlined that one with some white shirting. I wanted that skirt to have a stiffer hand, and the shirting gave me just the bell shape I wanted.

If you look in the photo of this black and silver version, you can see that it hangs in loose, soft waves. If I had underlined it, those waves would not be as fluid. For this particular fabric, which has a bit of edge from the silver and black color scheme, I thought a little softness would be the right choice for balance. I didn’t want this to look stiff or hard.

So this one is a win. Honestly, most of the garments I made for the June challenge were wins, and it was a lot of fun to dedicate a month to volume sewing. I can’t even believe how much I finished in just a month — but we can always do more than we think we can, if we just focus on the task, right?

Theresa

 

Summer Knitting

I love summer knitting. There. I said it. Whew! Just getting it out in the open like that makes me feel so light and free!

Knitting is usually all about the big, warm, cozy sweater, right? The wool cardigan, the bulky jacket, the stranded or cabled details that add extra warmth. Come spring, in knitting groups everywhere, people will start glaring at the rising mercury and muttering, “I don’t know, maybe some socks or a lace shawl until the weather breaks.” And it’s true that holding a blanket or heavy jumper on your lap in August doesn’t feel very nice.

But there’s so much more to summer knitting than socks and accessories. Don’t get me wrong — I’m an avid sock knitter, and I’ve knitted more hats and gloves over the years than any person could ever need. They’re fun little projects that factor high on the instant-reward scale (as instant as knitting ever gets, anyway). So I do get excited in the hot months about knitting little light bits of froth to drape around my neck or pop onto the ends of various limbs.

Even more than that, though, I love knitting tees and vests and tanks. And tiny little cardigans! They’re perfect for summer when the air conditioner is blasting arctic air all over your bare skin. And little skirts! I can’t wear skirts in Chicago’s frozen winter, but in the warmer months, skirts are the greatest thing ever. A warm breeze against bare legs? Yes, please!

Now that the weather is turning warmer, my knitting time is also turning to warm-weather items. First on the list is this Ankestrick cardigan in a laceweight that I just barely managed to start last summer.

Summerhill in Misti Alpaca Lace

That’s a top-down cardigan using the contiguous shoulder method that I’ve become so addicted to. It’s a great way to ensure a good fit. I find it better, generally, than a raglan in both fit and style, but that didn’t stop me from casting on this raglan cardigan a week or two ago.

Miette in Classic Elite Lush

That’s Andi Satterlund’s popular retro-style pattern, and the yarn has enough angora in it to make it seem even more retro. This is proving to be a quick knit so far, and it might end up living on the back of my chair at the family business through most of the summer. I don’t spend many hours there these days, but I spend enough to want a dedicated cardigan there. This might be it.

I’m eyeballing one, possibly two tunic/minidress things, another Elfe tee, and this extremely cool skirt — check it out.

Golfjes from Atalier Alfa

I’m so, so taken with Alfa’s patterns. She blows me away with the inventiveness of her stitches and style lines. That Golfjes stitch pattern makes my fingers itch to cast on. Doesn’t it kind of look like ripples on the surface of a busy lake? I’ve already picked out the yarn I’ll use, some Lorna’s Laces sock yarn in mostly black, gray, and cream, with just a slight touch of red here and there. (Colorways Pinstripe and Embers.) (We’re all shocked that I’m using black and gray, right? But there is SOME red in it!) The yarn is wound and ready to go, and I can’t imagine I’ll hold out much longer before casting this on. Knitting time has been precious, which is probably the only thing keeping this skirt off the needles right now. Every now and then, I see that project bag sitting all forlorn and patient in the drawer, and I coo, “Soon, my pretty, very very soon.”

What are you excited to knit this summer? Or do you put your needles away until the first frost in autumn?

Theresa

The Not-so-simple skirt

Okay. So, last year, I fell in love with a bit of silk taffeta at Fishman’s Fabrics, as you do. (If you’re ever able to go fabric shopping in Chicago, Fishman’s would be my first recommendation, and the Needle Shop would be my second. Amazing stock.) Take a look at this gorgeous stuff.

Gingham is hot right now, and this is a nicely weighted silk taffeta — light enough to rustle and swish, but stiff enough to support a good shape in a circle skirt. The taffeta has embroidered silk organza leaves, painted flowers, and beading in an allover pattern atop the gingham. It’s an unusual fabric, and I knew it struck just the right mix of evening and casual to be perfect to wear to the theater. So I snapped up three yards, and here is the first garment, using 1.5 yards of the length.

I used Simplicity 1200, a very simple three-quarter circle skirt with only three pieces — front, back, waistband.

This should have been a super easy skirt to make, but there were two complicating factors. First, my sewing machine hated the beading on this fabric. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with an embellished fabric, and I had a different machine the last time. (That was a gold sequined knit used to make play clothes for my then five-year-old niece, who is now fourteen. Been a while!) That old machine, a wrought iron Singer with a motor that could stitch through tree branches, wouldn’t have balked at a few tiny seed beads.

But now I have a new and wimpy Singer. It cries and shivers and looks for the nearest fainting couch if I ask it to sew through more than two layers of fleece. These beads? A tragedy of Sarah Bernhardt proportions.

I wanted to do French seams because of course I did. I love French seams. Why wouldn’t you use a lovely French seam on a weightless, swishy taffeta like this? But this meant sewing each seam twice, with a machine that pouts if you ask it to handle any extra thickness. So I had to painstakingly clear each seam allowance of all those teeny tiny seed beads.

Those beads were sewn in, which made the task much easier. I just inserted my seam ripper into the thread between the bead and the raw edge and slice the bead free. I had to be careful not to pick up any threads from the taffeta along the way, but this is a good taffeta, dense and smooth, so it was relatively easy to avoid that particular problem.

I’m still finding these tiny beads everywhere in my sewing room.

Under the sewing machine! Ack!

There were a few spots that French seams were impractical, such as at the zipper, so I used Hug Snug on those raw edges. You know about this stuff, right? It’s perfect for this kind of taffeta because it’s almost weightless and wasn’t going to create any drag on any of the seams. Plus it’s inexpensive and it comes in lots of pretty colors and the rolls are enormous. I get mine from Wawak. A lot of people want to use a two-step stitching process, but I find it works fine to just wrap the edges, pin it, and sew away.

Wrapping the raw edge of the hem in one step

You’ll notice I’m using a standard presser foot there. That’s because I already cleared that raw edge of the beads. But in other places, such as the waistband, I used a zipper foot. This was because not all the beads fell into a seam allowance and could not be cleared. The zipper foot provided fewer opportunities for my machine to scream and die and get all tangled up on itself as it encountered a bead — the feed dogs and the surface of the presser foot just could not navigate those beads smoothly. So a zipper foot has a smaller area of contact with the feed dogs, and this cut down on problems. I also very carefully marked every bead that was likely to come up against the presser foot, and I stitched very carefully when I came upon them.

Look closely where the point of the seam ripper is aimed. That bead is about to take a direct hit from the presser foot.

So, that was the first complication — all those beads required careful handling, and it could take as long as 30 minutes to clear a single seam of beads. Normally, on a similar fabric with no beads, I could have inset the zipper and finished the invisible zipper seam in that same 30 minutes. So this skirt was slow going, but worth it, I think.

The other problem I ran into was with the waistband piece. For some reason, it ended up about an inch shorter than the waistband circumference. That was a headscratcher. I checked the pattern pieces, and I don’t appear to have lopped off the end of the waistband during cutting, but it was definitely too short. So the pattern might have been misprinted? Don’t know. I checked the pattern reviews, and the only review of this pattern notes that the waistband is very tight. So it’s something in the pattern. This detail alone would prevent me using this pattern again. I didn’t want to tear apart the taffeta seams, so I added very small darts to the waistband to draw the waist in, with the result that the waist is even tighter than it would have already been. I normally cut my waistbands around 28 or 29 inches, depending on the fabric and width of the waistband, and this one is a nudge over 27″ in an unrelenting fabric. So I’m not best pleased by that, and it might end up being a little uncomfortable to wear, but I’ll just have to wear the high spanx under this skirt. Sigh. And no dessert at any pre-theater dinners!

In any case, I’m please with the skirt, and the remaining yard and a half will be some kind of top. I keep going back and forth between a princess seamed tee with a scoop neck (simple to make, which given the beads, might make a huge difference), and a corset type vest thing to wear over a blouse.  I think a corset in this fabric would be stunning, but those require such precise tailoring, and this might not be the fabric for that kind of project.

Have you ever worked with embellished fabrics? Did you develop any special techniques to handle them?

Theresa

Slowly getting it back together

Isn’t that lovely? That’s a silk taffeta with silk organza appliques, painted flowers, and sewn beads. Love it. This is about to become a 3/4 circle skirt. I started stitching it and then realized I was out of lightweight seam binding, so I’ve ordered a bit more and am stalking my poor mail carrier, Frank. Feel sorry for Frank. He has to cart a lot of packages for me.

So, this round of remodeling is all done but for some tile repairs in both bathrooms, and that means I was able to put my sewing room back together. Literally — honestly, literally — as the painting crew started carting their stuff out, my laptop screen exploded with a virus. Within one hour, the painters were gone and so was my laptop, to the repair shop, where it lived for six days.

This is why my blog has been quiet. Hectic life, quiet blog, right?

But there has been a little sewing progress. I hemmed this little summer tank dress, which has been lingering for far too long in my UFO pile.

New Look 6210

I made only minor alterations to this pattern, adding a little room in the bust and making the racer back a little more modest. Here, I’ll show you the racer back as altered.

You can see that the back armscyes from underarm to shoulder are slightly cut in, but not super cut in. I just thought that would be more comfortable. It’s not anything wrong with the pattern, just a personal preference.

I don’t wear many prints, and cutting this dress reminded me why that is. The fabric is a lovely rayon jersey from Mood (link), and the scale of the print plus the muted color palette were what drew my attention to it. Print scaling on a petite body can be a little tricky, but this one is so large that you almost can’t see the repeat. A trained eye will spot it, of course, but to most people, that will look like a pattern with no repeat. I liked that, and it turns out to look pretty good on my 5’3″ frame. (I’ll be sure to update with a modeled shot when the weather permits me to wear this.)

In any case, I wanted to take advantage of the scale of that pattern to make it look like a no-repeater, but I also wanted to make sure that none of the curves were hitting me in awkward spots. So I spent a lot of time fussing with the placement of the pattern pieces until I found something that would work. I swear, cutting prints is more work than sewing them, but in this case, it was worth all the tinkering and shifting a quarter-inch this way or that. I’m very happy with the way the pattern swirls around my torso. This is a fitted dress, and the curved lines accentuate the fit rather than fighting it.

A couple weeks back, I sewed a very large cardigan/jacket thing with a sweater knit also from Mood (link). I had just enough of this fabric leftover to make a quickie skirt. I lined it in some nylon tricot (also called lingerie knit) that I had in my stash. That worked out well. The knit is a wool (a bit sticky but not itchy) with metallic lurex threads spun into the yarn that give it a silvery halo. I don’t think I gave you a good look at this fabric before, but here it is.

You can just see how the silver threads add to the overall stickiness of the fabric, right? So lining it was the right move, especially given that this is a heavy knit skirt, suitable for winter wear, that would really need tights with it. We all know what happens when you don’t have a slippery layer between a sticky skirt and a pair of tights. Hellooooooo, good china!

I doubt I’ll wear the skirt very often, but what the heck. I had just enough length for it, and given the choice between whipping up a quick skirt and either tossing or storing the leftovers, I’ll take the skirt. Even if I only wear it once or twice a year, it’s still better than no skirt at all!

What do you do with your leftovers and scraps?

Theresa

One skirt, finally hemmed

I’ve been resisting hemming this skirt because it posed a small dilemma. This is McCall’s 5523, a fitted, no-waistband skirt with a side zip and inset details at the back of the knee.

I chose the view worn by the model. This view has an angled, curved inset, like so.

Please ignore the fact that this skirt needs ironing. When I’m feeling less frustrated with this project, I’m sure I’ll be delighted to iron and wear it. In any case, you can see the way the chevron-shaped inset provides a bit of flounce there. It’s cut like a flounce (curved along the bottom edge) rather than like a ruffle (which would be straight along the bottom edge, and gathered at the top). This means the bottom edge is longer than the top edge, much like the diameter of a circle as a circle grows larger.

Now, here’s the problem. I shortened this skirt in the pattern so that it would hit right around the bottom of my kneecap. Or so I thought. After I sewed it and added the lining and finished the zip and overcast the raw seam edges, I realized it was still around two inches too long. The hem would hit at a strange spot on my leg, one that would make my calves look like elephant legs. We all have that one bad hem length, the one that makes our legs look sort of trunk-like rather than shapely. I fussed and fooled with pinning that skirt hem, a quarter inch, then another quarter inch, until my legs looked curved again. And that took a hem several inches deep.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, but because of the way the flared inset is flounced, not ruffled, that also took a lot of the flounce out of the inset. So I had a decision to make:

• Option 1: Lose some of the flounce, or
• Option 2: Take the skirt apart, including lining and zipper, cut an inch or more off the top at the waist, reshape the side seams, draft and cut a new interior waistband piece, reattach the zipper and lining, and thus preserve the volume in the flounce.

Option 2 was the correct choice, and I knew it. But it’s a load of work for a skirt that’s in the wrong color to begin with, in a fabric that unravels if you blink at it, and for a skirt I’ll wear only once in a while.

I went with option 1.

Sigh.

It’s done now, but for the final ironing.

And the moral of this story — say it with me, kids–

Always make a muslin.

Theresa

Sunday status report

This is a thing I knit this week.

It’s not a throw rug, though the fabric is a bit ruggy because it’s knit from Noro Kureyon. It’s neither a blanket nor an antimacassar even though it’s draped on the back of the sofa. It’s draped there because all other work surfaces in my house have been given over to the upcoming holiday. Wrapping zones, baking zones, decorating zones — but not a “lay out your knitting for photography in an attractive manner” zone anywhere to be found.

Eventually, this will become a lanesplitter skirt, a Knitty pattern from about four years ago (link). But in order to finish it, I have to block it, and I don’t have an available surface for blocking right now. It will have to wait until the 27th, when all holiday madness will be history and my tables and counters can be reclaimed for regular usage.

At that point, I will make a nylon tricot lining for this skirt, too. The fabric is so coarse and ruggy that there’s no way I would wear it next to bare skin, and it would stick to tights in that weirdly inappropriate way that coarse fabrics stick to tights. So a lining it needs, and the fabric for the lining is on order.

I’ve also decided not to do a knitted waistband, which would be bulky and coarse and itchy and uncomfortable. Instead, I picked up a length of belt elastic and a black belt buckle. I’ll sew the belt right to the skirt as a waistband. It will be smoother and slimmer, and much, much easier to wear.

I’m also about halfway into a gathered pullover.

The body is knitted in the round to the armholes, then divided for the shoulders. I’m right at the point of division now, so a little further along than this picture shows. The cable for this sweater is simple and lovely.

That’s just the bottom half of the cable. With the top half knitted on, it forms a diamond-shaped medallion at the center front bodice. I’m using Sunday Knits Angelic 3-ply for this, yarn which was leftover from a shawl project. Here, I can show you the shawl, too, which I made a couple years ago and wear ALL THE TIME. This is one of the best things I’ve ever knit, a Carol Sunday pattern called Cambridge. Love this shawl.

When I bought the yarn for that shawl, I planned to do the largest size, and bought accordingly — plus a bit extra in case I wanted to knit a hat or gloves, too. I chose to knit the medium instead, and ended up with enough left over for a sweater. This is an angora-merino blend that is so soft and luxurious, yet so warm and cozy, that it will be perfect for the Gathering sweater.

This means I have a lot of half-finished knitting projects laying around here right now. I have a feeling the holiday break and most of January will be given over to finishing what I’ve already started.

Do you tend to work on one project at a time, or lots at once?

Theresa

Another type of skirt waistband alteration

A few weeks back, I showed you a method I use to reduce the waist on a simple straight skirt (link). Today I’ll show you how I made that same alteration on a skirt with a fitted yoke waist.

I recently sewed Vogue 8837 (link), a knit skirt with a shaped yoke and shirt-tail hem. When I was cutting this skirt, I was primarily concerned with the finished length of 33″ — as drafted, it would have come nearly to my ankles. I shortened it eight inches (link), and I could have sworn I checked the finished waist measurements on the pattern tissue before cutting.

Apparently not.

How does it even stay up? GIANT!

So, okay, I made a mistake and didn’t measure the waistband, sigh, bummer, etc. This is easy to fix, though. I I didn’t even have to remove the yoke to reshape it. This yoke is one large piece, folded over at the top so that the fabric is doubled. You can see the seam across the hips where the yoke joins the rest of the skirt. That’s almost exactly at the true hip, which on my petite frame is 7″ below true waist. So I started by detaching the folded-over portion of the yoke from the skirt (that’s the facing portion, the “private” side that touches the skin, not the “public” side that faces outward). I left the public side stitched in place.

Skirt waistband interior

You can see the stitching and seam allowances running horizontally on this picture. You can also see that the side seam of the yoke curves inward a bit — not nearly enough for someone with my hourglass, but it isn’t straight from hip to waist. What I needed to do was increase the shaping there to make it smaller through the waist. So I started by marking the point where I wanted the new waist curve to end up. It’s a little hard to see on that picture because the dressmaker’s ruler is clear with red markings, but the white chalk mark is 1.5″ in from the original waist point. It’s smack in the vertical middle of the waistband because when we fold the waist back over to stitch it down, that’s where the fold will be.

Next, I extended that dot into a dash of about 1″, or a half-inch extending on either side of the dot. The purpose of this little flat line portion is to smooth out the curve on the waistband. You know how some waistbands are rectangles and some are curved? I wanted the rectangular effect at the very top bit of the waistband, but I wanted the rest of it to curve.

Marking the flat/rectangular portion of the waistband

Then I used the curved portion of the ruler to extend this line to the hip seam and the top raw edge. This isn’t precise engineering. All you really have to do is find an angle that looks right — pay attention to the way the angle changes over the length of the ruler, because the curve will be steeper at one end than the other. I wanted it steeper as it approached the flat rectangle portion, so I flipped the curve around and positioned it until it looked about right, aiming for the point where the seam allowances at the side seam and the hem seam would cross.

Yeah, okay, that should do it

Then I flipped it around and used the same points on the ruler to draw the same arc from the waist to the stitched hem end. This is what the line looked like.

New stitching line marked in chalk

That sweet little line represents a 6″ reduction in the waist size — or, 1.5″ times four. Do you understand why it’s times four? There are two side seams, and each side seam consists of two pieces. So if we make this 1.5″ reduction on each of two pieces and two seams, that’s four reductions. We don’t have to do it this way. If we have a big belly or an extremely tiny back waist, we can shape the back and front waist yoke pieces in different ways to accommodate those body shapes. But in my case, this symmetrical shaping usually works pretty well.

While I’m thinking of different ways we can shape these yokes, I should mention that I considered adding darts instead of altering the side seams this dramatically. I thought I could trim the side seams a half inch and then do some half inch darts in the front and back and achieve the same reduction. With a different fabric, I might have done exactly this. But this particular ponte (from Mood — link) is heavy enough to be made into coats, and so I wanted to keep the seaming to a minimum. Thicker fabrics work better with fewer of these fine shaping details. In another fabric, though, I might have used darts to distribute the reduction around the circumference of the waist.

Next, I stitched on the chalk lines and trimmed away the extra fabric.

Hunka hunka burning red ponte knit

One thing that might be apparent from this picture is that the angle of that curve is pretty steep along the waist to the hip. And the angle from hip seam to hem is about as straight as any skirt gets. This meant that we shifted from steep angle to straight side seam right at that hip seam, and it made the crossing bit — where the side seam crosses the hip seam — want to stick out a little bit. So I ended up stitching a bit of an angle below the hip seam, too, just to smooth out the transition. It was only a tiny bit of stitching, but it made a big difference in the smoothness of the fit over the hips. That stitching line started about 1/2″ above the hip seam and extended down about a half inch below it.

After all the stitching was done, and the yoke was folded back over and restitched at the hip seam, this is the fit. I’m standing a little twisty to take the photo, but when I stand normally, that side seam does hang at the proper angle. I wanted to take a side view shot so you can see the shirt-tail hem effect at the knee, which was what drew me to this pattern in the first place.

The fit at the waist is ever so much better now! It will even stay up if I don’t hold it in place, much to the disappointment of the neighborhood perverts. I’ll trim the seam allowances to remove some of the bulk and give it one more intensive pressing, but this thing is basically ready to wear. It’s a heavy enough fabric to wear with some fleece tights and boots even on a cold day.

But can you imagine what it would look like if I hadn’t shortened it eight inches? Yikes. That would be bad.

These are the two main alterations (length and waist reduction) I have to make in about every skirt or pants pattern. Do you have standard alterations, too? Or is your fitting done on a project-by-project basis?

Theresa

Sewing Bee Round One — A-line Skirt

It’s been a slow week on the blog because I’ve been sick — not sick enough to stop doing All The Things, but sick enough to require naps (plural!) each day. My schedule is so tightly packed that adding naps can put me behind on all sorts of things, and in this case, the blog fell off my schedule. But I’m better now, and I have lots of good things to post over the next few days.

Starting with my round one entry into the Pattern Review Sewing Bee Contest.

The idea behind this contest is pretty simple. It runs for four weeks. In each week, a project is defined, rules are presented, and we have one week to sew the item and post the review. Each week, a winner is announced (with really amazing prizes!) and a percentage of entries are eliminated. Something like 340 people signed up for the contest, but only 141 people completed the first week project and posted the required review. As I write this, I don’t know if I will advance to the next round. The results will be posted sometime later today.

For this round, we were required to make a lined, A-line skirt with a zipper, waistband, and hem. This was a very simple project, in other words, and my first thought was that very few people would drop out on this round. A lined A-line skirt, under normal circumstances, is roughly one afternoon’s worth of work. You have side seams, maybe a center back seam, a zipper and waistband, some kind of closure for the top of the waistband, the lining, and the hems. It’s not complicated, and the fitting on such a project is usually moderate at best.

Because this style is so clean and minimal — something like a blank slate, really — I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do before I started work. I pored over my pattern collection and dug through every inch of my (not very extensive) fabric stash. Because my wardrobe is still so meager, I knew I wanted to make a basic, everyday sort of skirt, something that would be a real wardrobe builder rather than a statement piece. But I also know that a statement piece would be more likely to advance to the next round. Dilemma!

Here’s how I resolved that particular need to balance everyday wear-ability with enough pizzazz to (please, I hope) advance to the next round of this contest. I found a pattern in my stash, Simplicity 1322, that is an a-line skirt with a mock wrap front. Take a look at the line drawings.

I made view E, which has a front overlay piecing that is designed like a regular wrap skirt, but the whole thing is held together by the waistband. In other words, that vertical line down the front of the line drawing shows where the pieces overlay. I chose to use a very plain, but deliciously smooth and expensive-looking gray cotton sateen that I picked up from Mood (link to the fabric). I find that Mood’s basics, such as this sateen, tend to be reliably and consistently of a good overall quality. It has become my go-to place for this kind of fabric. I do have some local sources with decent basics, but their prices tend to be higher, so Mood is usually my first choice. I worry sometimes about ordering fabric without being able to handle it first, but while other online shops have disappointed me, Mood has not. Knock wood.

Because the sateen was so plain, I decided to add a bit of trim along the wrap front openings to give it just a touch of interest. My first thought was leather piping — I thought black leather would add a touch of toughness to a sweet a-line shape. (I love mixing a bit of grit with a bit of sugar in my outfits.)But I couldn’t find black leather piping anywhere I looked, and time was limited for this challenge, so I gave up the hunt and used a very tiny black cotton piping instead. It’s delicate, but it’s a nice touch. Here’s a shot of how it looks set into the seam. I took this picture when I was ironing the front overlay — the hem is on the right side of the photo, and the bottom edge of the fabric is the vertical edge of the front overlay piece. The black cotton piping provides just enough sharpness to make that line more evident, but it’s not so much to be obtrusive.

This skirt was unlined, so I had to add a lining. And that became the real challenge for this assignment.

Normally, a skirt lining is attached only at the waistband, and it hangs free from the waist to hem, except for maybe a bit of tacking along the zipper. That zipper tacking, by the way, serves a dual purpose — first, the zipper is a continuation of the waist opening, so it’s aesthetically pleasing to continue the seam along that opening, and second, as a matter of function, it keeps the lining from getting caught in the zipper teeth. It always shocks me to find ready-to-wear skirts with a lining left free along the zipper. This is one construction shortcut that makes me realize just how evil some garment manufacturers are — it’s as bad as this stupid current trend to eliminate hems. Rant, rant, rant, enough about that.

In this case, because the wrap front opening would move when I walk, I thought it made sense to attach the lining vertically along that opening. I chose a printed poly chiffon because I knew the lining would be momentarily visible, just in flashes, as I walk and move. But I wanted it to be clean and well-finished, not just flashy. So I really had to think through how to attach the lining to make this work. These are the steps I used.

1. French seams along the side seams of the lining, and along the center back up to the point where I expected the bottom of the zipper to hit. I had to use French seams because this is a poly chiffon lining, and chiffon just looks neater with this sort of seam.
2. Attach the piping to the vertical overlay seams, then attach the lining to the skirt fronts along these vertical seams.
3. Sew the side seams of the skirt.
4. Overlap the front overlay pieces and baste along the waist line to join the lining to the skirt. I stopped this basting an inch or so from the center back seam to make it easier to insert the zipper.
5. Insert the zipper into the skirt fabric.
6. Attach the waistband.
7. Sew the lining to the zipper.
8. Rolled hems. I had to hand-finish the lining hem where the lining was attached to the vertical front overlays. I had to pick enough of it clean from the skirt front and piping to be able to roll the hem, then I had to reattach the rolled hem to the overlay. This was a bit of a hassle, and I wish I’d thought to hem the lining before attaching it to the skirt on those vertical seams.

Here’s a view of how that skirt overlay looks when the piece moves to reveal the lining.

You can see how the bit of piping adds a nice clean edge to differentiate the printed lining and the main skirt fabric. Also, how fun is that print? Stars, you guys. I do love some stars. You can also see just a bit of clumsiness in the corner join where I had to pick apart that vertical seam, roll the hem on the lining, and reattach it to the skirt. It’s not dreadful, but it’s not perfect, either. I would call a do-over, except for one giant problem with the lining fabric. Check this out.

Could you die? Look at that mess. This fabric absolutely disintegrates along cut edges. Talk about crap. I bought this from Vogue Fabrics on Roosevelt Road (which is closing forever in a week), and while I loved the print, I HATED handling the fabric. Cutting chiffon is a bitch in any case, but I was prepared for that. What I was not prepared for was the way this textile simply could not hold itself together in any way. Handling it at all  meant that it would fray. A lot. Utter garbage fabric, and I bought plenty of it because I thought the print was so fun. (Am I the only one who has noticed the sharp fall-off in quality from Vogue Fabrics in recent years? Shopping there has become a treasure hunt — you have to sort through so much bad poly and rayon to find anything worth sewing. There are still some decent fabrics to be found there at reasonable prices, but you have to be so careful. I can’t imagine making the trip to the still-staying-open Evanston location all that often, given the way their stock has changed.)

Anyway, here is the finished skirt.

It’s very plain on the hanger, but you can see the piping along the overlay. You can’t see the lining at all when I’m just standing in the skirt, but when I walk, little flashes of stars pop up along the piped edge. It’s a fun effect, and I’m really pleased with how this skirt turned out. It will be a good everyday skirt, but it avoided being boring. And that adds a gray skirt to my wardrobe, so I can tick that off the wardrobe-building list.

Theresa

 

An Announcement and a Finished Skirt

First, the announcement.

::drumroll::

I’ve decided to participate in the Ralph Rucci Vogue 1419 coat sew-along sponsored by the McCall blog.

::cymbal crash::

Is that coat gorgeous or is that coat gorgeous? I’ve been a fan of Ralph Rucci from early days. He’s a man of ideas (“too many ideas” is a common criticism, in fact), he’s out of the Halston atelier (about as good a pedigree as any American designer can hope for), and he uses really interesting techniques to make his clothes. In this case, he’s cutting the coat pieces very creatively, adding some cool topstitching, and using a stiff-ish fabric to give the garment extra shape. Here, look at the line drawing, and you’ll see what I mean.

I can’t wait to sew this. I fell into a swoon the second I laid eyes on this pattern, and it seemed too good to be true when the McCall blog announced the sew-along for this coat. This week, we’re cutting the muslin and I think we’re supposed to start piecing it, but I’m already behind because a) my fabric had to be ordered and apparently is being shipped by ornery pack mule, and b) I have to make my Halloween costume first. More on that later.

So that’s the announcement. I haven’t posted a finished sewn item in a while because I’ve been cranking on that secret test knit (which I can’t show until the designer releases the pattern, alas). But I finished the test knit, which allowed me back into the sewing room, which meant I finally had time to finish this skirt.

This is a lighter-than-air cotton lawn, and I look forward to wearing it when warmer weather returns. In the meantime, let me encourage you to check out the print pattern placement on that waistband. Blow up the photo if you have to. I’m rather proud of that detail. The pattern placement for these seams ended up perfect thanks to a cutting technique my grandmother taught me (blogged here).  Check out this seam.

The straight part of the side seam — not bad, eh?

The hip curves disrupt the perfection of the pattern match, but that’s still pretty good

I’m glad to have that done, and I’m especially glad to be back in my sewing room. I missed it! I do love knitting, but I’m pretty faithless and want to knit, sew, and shop my way into a great wardrobe. This skirt (McCall’s 6608) is a good addition to the summer skirt collection.

 

 

The 90-minute skirt

I recently pulled on my go-to black skirt, only to discover it is entirely too big to wear. I should have realized this before I even tried to wear it — it’s a thrifted Banana Republic cotton sateen skirt in a size 10 rtw, and I’m currently wearing a size 6 for most rtw skirts. In fact, during my last shopping excursion, I even had to try on some 4s, though I ended up not buying any of them. In any case, into the donation bag went my size 10 black skirt, with my heartfelt thanks that it saw me through several months of dieting for a mere four dollars. I’ve bought very little clothing as I dieted, but that skirt was a real lifesaver on several occasions. Sometimes you just have to trade the running tights and yoga pants for something a little more polished, right?

So the upshot is, I needed a new all-purpose black skirt, and found a length of heavy cotton black ribbing in my stash. This fabric has been around long enough that I can no longer remember where I purchased it, but my best guess is Vogue Fabrics. I have a hazy memory of fingering some ribbed knits there some time ago.

Knits are a good choice for the moment. I’m about 8 pounds from goal weight — close enough to sew in my goal size, far enough that fit might change just a little bit between now and goal. But knits are pretty forgiving in the fit department, and a simple knit skirt with an elastic waistband will be easy enough to alter later, should the need arise.

I just happened to have this McCall’s pattern on hand for just such a skirt project. I chose View B, a straight-ish skirt with a 21″ length.

The only pattern alteration was to the waistband. I removed 4″ from the waist by tapering the pattern in one inch on either side from hip to waist, front and back. I did this to remove bulk from the waist area — this is a heavy ribbed fabric, and nobody likes the feeling of a lot of bulky fabric bunched up around the waist, right? Even so, there is plenty of room in the waist area, and I suspect I will use this modification even with lighter weight knits. (For a step-by-step of this super easy alteration, see this post.)

I chose to use a twin-needle topstitched hem, which is a little sporty, but this is a casual skirt so it works just fine. This is a little tricky to photograph on black fabric, but this picture kinda sorta shows the effect of the topstitched hem.

An unpressed hem! The horror!

From start to finish — cutting, stitching, fitting, and finishing — this skirt took an hour and a half. Nothing to it, really. I can already tell this will be one of those skirts I wear over and over in the fall: skirt, tights, boots, sweater, mix and match and repeat. It’s super comfortable and warm enough for a crisp fall day.

Not much hanger appeal! But I’m too lazy today to put on makeup and do the right sort of modeled pictures. Sorry! You can see from this picture that the waistband is pretty gathered despite the fact that I removed four inches from the waist. I’m so glad I did that. Can you imagine how gathered that would have to be with four more inches of fabric? This is why, before I cut any pattern, I measure the pattern pieces at the cross-back, bust, waist, hips, and length. These simple checks can help me tailor the garment on paper before my scissors get anywhere near the cloth. It’s surprising how often I have to reduce the waist on paper. My waist isn’t all that small, but I guess it’s smaller than the pattern companies expect it to be.

Do you do most of your fitting on the pattern or on the garment?

Theresa