Shannon (my mother) and I have decided to end the dual-blogging setup and return to our individual blogs. We created this one with one idea in mind, but it shaped up a bit differently, and it makes more sense now to disperse.
She can be found at Five Gallon Bucket, and I’m now at Today is the Day. All our sewing and quilting archives have been transferred over.
See you there!
~Alice
Well, I’m back! What with school and all, I’ve hardly had time to sew, and it doesn’t help that both of my sewing machines are broken! I did make a Secret Santa present using the sewing machines in the costume shop, but other than that I haven’t been able to sew since I don’t know when. Now we’re in the middle of winter break, though, and I’ve been out in the country using my mom’s fancy Juki to make her an Alma blouse!
When Mother first bought this lawn, she described a fitted, vaguely medieval, possibly button-back blouse with 3/4-length sleeves. We decided that the Alma blouse had the right fit, and the sleeves were easily modified. It is also such a nice, versatile, modifiable pattern, and falls within both of our sizing ranges. I can’t wait to sew myself a version in white geometric-patterned cotton with a forest green yoke, or a little floaty summer blouse in lawn or voile with cap sleeves…
I cut a size 16, going by Mother’s upper bust measurement, and did a full bust adjustment. At first I added a total of three inches to the bust, but after the first muslin, I had to reduce the bust by an inch (interestingly, this happened with the last FBA I did as well–I’m really not sure why). I also did a forward shoulder adjustment of probably 1 1/4″.
I had a lot of trouble fitting the sleeves, and as you can see, they’re still not quite right. I narrowed the shoulders by about 5/8″, and put that fabric into the sleeve cap instead. I also did a full arm adjustment, and cut the sleeves on the bias. They fit a lot better in the lawn than they did in the poly-cotton sheet I was using for the muslin, and Mother can move her arms pretty freely, but I’m still not entirely satisfied. Sleeves are hard!
In addition to changing the sleeve length, I gave the sleeves a little notch that matched the neckline. I trimmed both sleeves and the neckline with some homemade burgundy bias tape.
I attempted to do a swayback adjustment because of the wrinkles in back. I don’t think I did it right, but there are fewer wrinkles than there were…
I used a regular zipper instead of an invisible one, for no particular reason. It is still pretty discreet. The belt shown here is the leftover burgundy bias tape.
I also made the skirt that Mother is wearing, which was last year’s Christmas present. It is something like a quarter circle, made out of something woven but stretchy from Fabric Depot. It matches the blouse perfectly!
I’m going home tomorrow with a borrowed sewing machine, to sew like mad until I leave for Ireland in a week! I’m hoping to make a shirtdress, two circle skirts, and to finish the Macaron I was sewing when my machine broke. And if I can accomplish all that, there’s a million other things I’d like to sew…but I’m trying to keep my to-do list short!
At last, I have photos of a finished object! Expect more coming soon! After a summer of sewing, I have quite the backlog in my closet, and mean to get them photographed ASAP, before I forget all the construction details.
This is, obviously, the Anna dress by By Hand London. Mother bought the pattern and had it shipped to me, which was quite exciting, since I rarely get the chance to make a pattern while the blogging world is so abuzz with it. I’m not much of a maxi girl (too short), but the short version is such a simple, versatile sort of dress!
I made it up in this cozy, soft corduroy from Fabricmart, with a fair bit of stretch (yikes, stretch!). The print is lovely, and reminds me a porcelain teacup, but I knew it had to be paired with very simple lines. The Anna dress is very simple, and a nice slim silhouette to boot. I’m very pleased with the overall look (and it goes smashingly with my blue beret, which I practically live in these days).
For sizing, I was a bit worried, as the smallest size is still a couple inches too big for my upper bust. I cut a size US 2 at the back, grading out to a size 4 at the waist. For the front, I cut a size 2 at the neck and shoulders, a size 6 at the bust, and a 4 at the waist, and took out half an inch horizontally a couple of inches above the bust. I cut a size 4 skirt.
I ended up sewing the side seams at 1 inch, to accommodate for the stretch. I also hemmed the sleeves shorter than the pattern called for, though I don’t know by how much. I’m pretty pleased with the sizing for the bust down, but it gapes something awful at the neck with regular movement, and the neckline is so wide as to be almost off-the-shoulders. I will definitely do some more alterations before I make my next one. I did make a muslin, but the neckline didn’t seem problematic.
My corduroy raveled dreadfully, and the only appropriate seam finish I could think of was french seams, so I french seamed it! They’re pretty bulky and don’t lay flat very well, but it’s not an issue while I’m wearing the dress. I bias bound the waistline seam and the back seam along the zipper with homemade bias tape from the teal sheet I used to make my shorts.
From the inside it looks like the waistline seam doesn’t match up. It does, though, I promise!
See? I didn’t have an invisible zip, so I just used a regular, hand-picked one. I like it.
At first I truly intended to match the stripes in this print, but somehow it didn’t happen. It mostly happened on the bodice, and I managed to get the front stripes lined up, but that’s about it. Luckily, the print is so busy, no one will notice.
Overall, I really like this dress! The stretch makes it so comfortable, and the corduroy’s really cozy. The fit issues are frustrating, but I’ll fix them for my next one, and they won’t stop me from wearing this one. I like the silhouette and the pleats-instead-of-darts (I used them on a couple of shirts I made this summer and I really like the look) and the boat neck! My current favorite t-shirt has a similar neckline.
I’m thinking of another Anna in lawn, perhaps with a slightly wider skirt for dancing. But in the meantime, my next project is a corduroy red-and-pink Macaron!
I just got the Anna dress pattern in the mail a couple of days ago, in time to join the sewalong! I’ve never done a sewalong, probably because I never buy new patterns, but I’ve NO idea how to do an FBA on this kind of bodice, so I’ll definitely need some guidance. I’m really excited to start, especially since I feel like I haven’t done any sewing in ages.
In other news, these last few days have been cool enough to break out knee socks and my fuzzy blue beret! It’s back to the high 70s today, but I’ve really enjoyed having a little taste of fall dressing.
The view from my couch.
This is Shannon, the elder in this blog collaboration. I haven’t blogged here (or anywhere) in so long, that in the meantime, flickr has totally changed! I am finding the new interface frustrating but I will prevail, and so here is a post. This process has taken enough energy that I am almost as pleased as if I spent hours in the studio. Here goes!
I took out a loan this summer to buy a new machine. I love my 1926 Singer 99 but I could not get it or any of my other machines to properly free motion quilt. After deliberating for months, literally, I made the decision to buy a Juki TL 2010q! (I did cry a tear or two when I boxed up the Singer.)
we are still in the courtship phase but so far I have been pretty much over the moon about my new helpmeet.
I did the right thing and made a sewing machine cover.
This was a block, or a slab, that I made during a practice session, and didn’t seem to correspond with any other ideas, so it went into this piece. I don’t totally love it or anything, but it is serving a necessary function.
detail of some of the not-great free motion quilting I did here:
so, you see.
Happier with this practice piece, in which I quilted around an existing lotus pattern on a scrap of weathered linen:
It seems to be all about the repetition, and I have been sitting down to draw on a regular basis (although not as much as I could be.)
One thing I am finding is that I do not yet have a signature style when it comes to piecing. Of course I don’t; I haven’t produced that much work within this discipline! But still, with my free time is so fractured, it would be nice to find my voice, somehow, miraculously and quickly. I didn’t come to this with that expectation, though, so I’m not disappointed!
The closest I have gotten so far to my vision of my quilting style is with the half square triangle psychedelic quilt top.
I am not sure how to quilt it so for now it reamins a top.
My studio is a shambles right now, but I had a sweet moment of organization and display earlier in the summer. a corner:
Next post will feature a scrappy trip around the world, modified, and in baby quilt form…
stay tuned!
Browsing EvaDress today, I found this gem:
Yes, that’s a bat costume from 1887. Yes, I bought it. No, I’ve never sewn a corset.
It takes about 20 yards of fabric (and you have to make a corset, AND a hoopskirt) so there’s no way this will be done by this Halloween (I’ll have to save up for a year for the fabric, not to mention learning the necessary skills), but I’ll definitely be wearing it next Halloween, and to any fancy dress balls I may attend in the future!
I could make this in black to be really traditional, but my favorite bat is the little brown bat, so I’m going to make it in brown, maybe with some fun variations in texture/shade.
I haven’t really done any historical sewing, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have picked the 1880s as the place to start, but this is just too good to pass up! Look at the bats on her shoes!
I scored this beautifully yellow corduroy today…
In the form of men’s pants!
I was costume shopping at JC Penney for the school’s fall mainstage production, and spotted these on the clearance rack for the low, low price of $1.97 (I told you it was low!). Now, my budget is tight, but all the more reason to snatch up fabric when I can get it cheap! Especially when it is yellow corduroy, so I bought it.
It’s a 40 waist, which is fairly large (the larger, the better, when buying garments for the fabric), but it is still definitely a limited amount of fabric. I’m not sure what to make out of it. Shorts? A skirt? The tiniest 70s a-line jumper for fall? Hmm…
I’ve been wanting shorts all summer, but I didn’t want to spend money on a store pair. Shorts are exactly the sort of them that I would spend an hour trying on and considering, and then decide that it wasn’t worth it and I would just do without. So the obvious solution is to make some. If I don’t like them, then at least they provided entertainment value, and I didn’t spend money on them.
These shorts are really more of a muslin or a practice piece for future pairs of shorts, but I did make them, they are my very first pair of shorts, and I do on occasion wear them, so I thought I’d share them here.
Disclaimer: they are very wrinkly. Also, you can see the line of my shirt tucked in. Oh well.
I took the pattern off my best-fitting non-stretchy pair of trousers, which I got secondhand somewhere and which are clearly hand-sewn! I love them, and they fit really well except for a bit of gaping in the back waistband. I tried to eliminate that gape with the shorts, but they still do, a bit, and they are dangerously low-rise… It looks fine in the picture, but it can be uncomfortable to wear.
The fabric is a teal poly-cotton bedsheet. I meant to use the wrong side, which is less shiny, but halfway through inserting the fly I realized that the shiny side was going to be showing, and I didn’t have the heart to take it out when everything was going so well.
The waistband doesn’t match up quite as well as I had hoped. I don’t entirely know how it worked in the original trouser pattern, but I think it needs to be longer. The fly’s a little narrow, too, but I do know what went wrong there.
The hem does an amusing flippy thing. Something about it not being quite even, perhaps. I’ve made another, modified pair, which I finished last night, and it’s not really an issue with them, so I’m not sure.
Something about wearing shiny teal short-shorts can be really tricky. I believe with the right circus-inspired styling (lace tights, blousy top, vest tall boots) they could be kind of fantastic, but usually I just wear a longer top so there’s, well, less teal.
Now that I know what a few of the pattern’s kinks are, I have plans for a cuffed pair in green wool for wearing over tights in the winter. It’s still the heat of summer, but I fear limited sewing time once school starts, so I’ll have to finish my summer sewing list in the next couple of weeks and move onto my fall/winter one (haha! dream on).
I made this dress a solid month or so ago, and it’s been waiting to be photographed along with a million other things (at least three), but it wasn’t until the light was starting to go this evening that I had the brilliant idea of tying my camera to my bike basket in lieu of a tripod. I have been really eager to talk about this pattern, because apparently, I would be one of the first sewing bloggers to do so. When I first began to admire this pattern from afar, I went looking for reviews, and I only found one, at Cotton Creek Sewing. I didn’t understand why the entire sewing blogosphere wasn’t full of Ashlands, it seemed such a simple, everyday dress.
Being poor, I didn’t buy it, but Mother did, and when she didn’t like it, she gave it to me. I was more than happy to take it off her hands, and made grand plans for the dozens of versions I would whip up in happy afternoons. In the end, I only made one, and I don’t have plans for another right now (though I still have the pattern, so you never know), because ultimately I found it a little disappointing.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s cute and wearable and an easy summer dress, it’s just not quite the paragon of pattern-drafting that I had hoped it would be. To begin with, the multitude of options is a bit baffling. Do you want the sleeveless bodice, or the one with sleeves, because they’re different pieces with different amounts of ease. Do I wear a C cup with sleeves, but a D cup without? Or D cups all round? Or C cups all round? Should I cut a size 4, C cup, or a size 2, D cup? Or a size 2, C cup? The amount of muslins required just to get the right size would be staggering. I did several tissue fittings and ended up cutting a size 2, D cup, and by this time I was frustrated enough that I didn’t even care if the finished dress fit, so I skipped a muslin and plunged on ahead.
Luckily, it fits. Well enough, anyway. The saga of fit is long and arduous, I’m always agonizing about it, and sometimes it’s nice to accept that the fit on a dress is not perfect and doesn’t need to be, and I can wear it anyway.
I did a tiny dart tuck in the back to accommodate the roll of my shoulders, and called it good. Also, I accidentally cut both back skirt pieces facing the same direction. I was cutting this dress out of the salvaged remains of last summer’s princess-seamed dress, which I wore all fall and winter and which ultimately, tragically, shrunk in the wash. This meant that I didn’t have nearly enough to re-cut a skirt piece, but I trimmed the back pieces down and sewed them without darts, and somehow it all worked out.
The Ashland dress has you do a lot of hand-sewing, and most of it before you’ve sewn up the side seams. This was nice because it forced me to take me time, and led to a nice clean finish, but I was terrified that the dress wasn’t even going to fit and it would all be a waste of time. I compounded issues by handpicking the zipper, since I didn’t have an invisible zip or brown thread, and didn’t want my stitching to show.
Inside front, self-faced and tidy.
Inside back. I also didn’t have a brown zipper, so I used a grey one. It’s all neutral, right?
Armhole binding. I didn’t have enough brown sprig for bias binding, so I used muslin. I tacked it down at various point along the armhole, but didn’t bother sewing it down all around.
This was the first time I handpicked a zipper properly, and it’s magical. It’s like it’s floating there without any stitching at all! I was so enchanted with prick-stitching, I went on to prick-stitch the entire hem.
The hem is nice and deep, and the skirt is very short. It felt like the most flattering length at the time. I’m not sure now that it wouldn’t benefit from an extra inch, and it would certainly make water fountains easier, but oh well.
The pattern calls for five buttons, but I only had three matching brown ones, and I didn’t want to make buttonholes anyway, so I sewed the front closed and stitched the buttons through both layers. My new zigzag machine may do buttonholes, but I haven’t figured out how quite yet.
I took this dress to the country fair, and it was comfy and cool, so I say it’s a win. I probably won’t be making dozens of Ashlands, though. Maybe another one, with a few modifications, if the right fabric comes along. I’m feeling more kindly disposed to it than I was before I started writing. Give me a year or so, and I might be really kindly disposed! In the meantime, I think it’s time for a new princess-seamed dress…
Also, you may notice that this is no longer the beautiful college campus, but in fact a pinkish house with hydrangeas! This is my new house, where I will live, hopefully, for the next couple of years! I still get to see the beautiful college every day, but now I have a patio, an herb garden, a kitchen that I only share with four other people, a sewing room, and I don’t have to shuffle in and out every couple of months and listen to people rapping upstairs every night. Hooray!
SIDEWALK STYLE, DIRT ROAD DIGS 