New Look 6071- a purple patch

 Ooh the sewing room is messy, isn't it!

It was "Paul Temple and the Lawrence Affair" today and a sudden urge to make a top. I chose this one to try out the pattern, New Look 6071, to see if I would risk the beautiful Liberty pattern jersey that I bought in November at Shaukat in London. It was £17 a metre! I know that's cheap for Liberty jersey, but it's a lot more than I usually pay for fabric! This fabric, on the other hand, was about £2 a metre from Abakhan in Preston. I bought 5 metres of it so I expect there'll be a few more practice garments with wavy purple checks.

I cut a straight size 12 although my measurements would probably have led me to the 14 but I like my tops to be close fitting. I made slightly narrower seam allowances at the low hip because it seemed to be getting stuck on my skirt and much wider seam allowances (I probably ran them in by about 2 inches) at the bottom of the sleeve so I now have nice tight sleeves (pet hate- flappy sleeves or anything falling over my hands). I did get slightly confused over the twisty bit but only because Paul Temple's wife Steve was being shot at and I wasn't concentrating on the instructions properly.

It is quite low cut and I would probably wear a camisole under it for work but it doesn't gape. I stretched the neckband facing much more than suggested to tighten up the edge and I'm pleased I did. Because this was just a practice, I didn't bother with twin needle hems- just zigzagged the edges after folding the hem in place.

The fabric has plenty of horizontal stretch but no vertical stretch AT ALL which made putting the sleeve in a little trickier than usual. I still did it flat and didn't gather the sleeve head but probably should have done but I really like the shape of it. I narrowed the shoulder by about half an inch- a standard adjustment for me.

Cheap and quick and wearable- what more can you ask?

This looks as though one sleeve is longer than the other- it isn't, I just constantly push my sleeves up!

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Starfish cushion

Back in the sewing room with Miss Marple trying to sort out who threw the body from the train and some old bits of stuff. I knitted a starfish in cream cotton in about 2004 and always intended to incorporate it into something but was never sure what. Then I found an old beige linen skirt that I only wore a couple of times in the early 1980s. It was a size 10 (as I was myself at the time) and cheap but a lovely heavy linen that moved well when I walked. Unfortunately it didn't respond well to laundry and came out, after its first wash, about three sizes smaller. It is now helping a starfish make a cushion.

I struggled to get strips wide enough to form the back as the gores are quite narrow 16" up, and the seam allowances on the zip are very very narrow and will probably not last for long but I'm happy with it. I decided to handstitch the zip in with some thick cotton thread and it was actually probably easier, if not necessarily quicker, than doing it on the machine. I have been reading/looking at a lot of Alabama Chanin things recently and I think I like the move away from automatic machining that it seems to be engendering in me. I know there aren't a lot of zips in her work, but if there were, I like to think they would look a bit like this!

 A couple of hours of playing and a free cushion. Looks quite good in my sewing room too!

Quilt for Sam

Yes, yes, I know... nearly a year since I've been here.  It's strange how sometimes things just stop happening. They fall off the radar and after a while you don't even miss them but then you dip a tentative toe back into the water with a view to taking the plunge. This post, then, is my wet toe. 

I'm not going to go into my eventful year. Bits of it may come up in future posts, and it isn't as if it was SO eventful that I didn't have the odd half an hour to devote to blogging. I'll just tell you about my latest project and see if it spurs me into putting on my water wings. 

Last year, for grandson #1's birthday in May, I promised to make him a quilt to go on his new bed. We drew a picture of it as we were eating in the pub and decided what colours it would be and the basic design of it. I lost the piece of paper, inevitably, and when we finally got around to choosing fabrics together (at Abakhan in Preston) he chose quite different fabrics from the colours we had originally talked about. That was probably in September. I duly preshrank the fabrics and then they sat accusingly in the sewing room waiting to be dealt with. The most fun part of quilting, I find, is choosing the fabrics and thinking about how you will put them together. Everything after that; the drawing round shapes, the cutting out, the stitching the elements together, the quilting, the binding, is tedium. Granted it's sometimes pleasant tedium- if you're in that mindset where a bit of mindless activity frees you up to think about other things whilst still being a bit productive- but sometimes, the unremitting repetition of sewing one triangle to another, in this case 108 of them, puts you off starting in the first place. Hence, a quilt that was supposed to be a birthday present in May 2013 was finally completed in January 2014. 

Once I'd started it, it actually went quite quickly. I devoted most of a weekend to it and squirrelled away in the sewing room, listening to Lord Peter Wimsey on the BBC Iplayer and emerging only for occasional sustaining snacks and cups of tea. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out and I just hope that my grandson is too!