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!

I

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! 

 

Vogue 8536 ish

The side. Obviously.

I'd spent several frustrating hours making a Marcy Tilton skirt (review to follow) and needed an instant gratification kind of project. On a recent visit to Abakhan in Preston I succumbed to the lure of a 15% off sale and a pink and black poly/viscose knit. I think it might be ponte but I'm not sure how ponte is defined. Anyway, it's a hefty, well-behaved kind of knit, with large circles in the middle and smaller ones at the borders. I paid £7.50 for 2 metres (although the cut was generous and I got about 2.5!) and cut it out as soon as it had gone through the washing machine. And had dried, obviously.
The top part is a T shirt pattern, Vogue 8536, which I've used before- I love the fit and the fakey FBA (a bit of stretching in the bust area and it's done!). I grafted it onto the bottom half of Vogue 9631 (which I can't find an image of anywhere on the internet! Maybe my copy is the only one that was sold!). It's a very basic tank dress with a fairly slim bottom half. I just matched up the waistlines and fudged a bit.
It was a pleasure to sew. I didn't really look at the instructions but I did edge stitch around the neck to hold the binding down. There's no way it would have stayed down without it. All done in an hour or so and I'm pleased with the way the sleeves match the part of the body that they are next to. I particularly like it from the side! I can see me wearing this A LOT for work. Or for slobbing around in at the weekend. It doesn't crease and dries really quickly.

The sewing machine The faraway, sad looking shot  with what looks like a big sucker thing about to take me to another dimension. I really must get the hang of the camera. 

Back

Front

It served its purpose as an easy project after the tedium of the skirt but there were leftovers so I had to make.......

Procrastination part 1 (there will be many more!)

I'm nearing the end of a teacher training course so I should be writing lesson plans and essays and evaluations and sorting out my files but instead I'm surrounded by my stash in piles on the floor because I suddenly just HAD to know what I had in the trunk. I'm making a spread sheet even!

I also seem to have developed a system of preshrinking them when I have a minute and from that point, they go into a huge green "pending" bag so I can just grab something from there and sew something, if I ever get a minute. Unfortunately, the green bag is now also bulging. Maybe I'll have to make things out of the thicker fabrics first, just to free up more space. I would take pictures of all this if I could find the instruction booklet that came with my camera so I could work out how to download images to my computer.

Actually I have done a bit of sewing this week (well some of it was last week, but it's certainly recent). I bought Simplicity 4076 a couple of weeks ago and had to make something from it straight away and join the ever-swelling ranks of pattern reviewers to love it. I made the first one from a piece of white cotton or polycotton interlock leftover from making baby shirts for my son (he's now 30- I don't throw things away) and then two days later made another from a damaged bit of stretchy stuff I bought at Abakhan for about £1.50. So, two tops for next to nothing! And I like them too! I bought a long sleeved top with a similar twist arrangement from Boden in their last sale for about £20 I think. And I like mine better. Unfortunately the damage on the second one is in the most obvious place (I will put pictures up when I can) but it's still wearable and wasn't noticeable by the person I asked. (Male, polite, not wearing his glasses and asked to look at my chest- what else would he say???)

I also made an eight-gore skirt out of some fabric leftover from making a roller blind in 1981. My stash goes back a long way. I'll write about that another day when I've had a cup of tea and dealt with all these piles on the floor. Revisiting my fabric is like getting reacquainted with old friends. But without the awkward conversations and embarrassment when you can't remember their children's names or where you know them from. Actually with fabric I usually DO know where I know them from!