It came!

I made my first auction purchase from Trademe last week (I made one other purchase a few months ago, but that was accepting a fixed price offer - this was the stessful kind!) and today my purchase came! I got this very pretty parcel in the mail:

After cutting into one very well wrapped parcel (no stray raindrops were going to get into this) I got to this:
I like Winifred Aldrich's books. And now I have editions of the whole family. Oops, glare on the books.

Being me, I got the fourth edition out of the library last weekend so that I could compare the two and see if my very own (insert "Mine, all mine!" evil genius type hand-rubbing cackle here) copy is missing anything important.

The Baby trench part 7: Hems and stuff.

So where had I got to? Oh yes, topstitching the armhole seam. I decided to get clever here and instead of just binding the seam as intended I'd use binding to cover the seam allowances and still topstitch them. I wanted a lot of topstitching on this coat, and the armhole seam needed it, in my opinion.

And here it is. Much better than not done I think. Not sure about those puckers in the sleeve - I swear they weren't there when I sewed it in!

On the inside it looks like this. I was a bit generous when I applied the binding, so there was just a bit too much and it went a little wonky in places. I can live with it. That's what you get for making stuff up as you go along! This had to be pinned on the inside and sewn from the outside, removing pins as I went. I really made it hard for myself, so next time (hell yeah there'll be a next time!) I'll do a bit of thinking first. It helps, I find. (Oh, and I'm showing you the tidiest bit of course. There is some way wonkier binding on the other sleeve!)

And on to the hem. Another thing better thought about before you start. It would have saved my any number of headaches if I'd done some prep work before I got here, but again, that's what you get when you make stuff up as you go along.

I did a very cheaty hem. The outer fabric is very thin, and could use a bit of support. The lining is comparitively much bulkier and needed to be minimised. So I cut away 4cm from the bottom of the lining (my hem allowance) and folded the hem up over it - stabilised and beefed up hem, smooth and lump free. Since the lining was hanging very slightly below the outer fabric (due to turn of cloth at the upper end of the coat) there was a built in ease allowance of just a smidge to prevent the lining pulling up the outer. If they'd been level before I trimmed the lining I'd have trimmed less. The lining needs to be just a bit longer than the outer.

Here's the lining cut away.

Here's the facing folded back and sewn to give a clean front edge.

And then it got fun - I had to work the lining under the facing and make everything lie flat. If I'd worked out what I was doing before I did it I could have done some preliminary pressing which would have made the whole job a lot easier. I also had to go back and edgestitch the front facing. That was almost impossible with sleeves already in!

It looks so innocent doesn't it? All neat and flat and tidy. Yeah, there were a few curses uttered to get it like that! At some point I topstitched the front egde too. Obviously after I took this pic.

I hate making excuses, but by this point I was pretty over it. I had an utterly crap nights sleep last night with both twins playing up - on (fortunately) rare occasions they set each other off and it is Bloody Horrible. Last night was one of those nights. I didn't get to sleep till just after 4am. So now that you all feel nice and sorry for me, here's my sewn hem from the inside (before pressing). Again, vanity decrees that I show the best bit!

Which gets me to the so-nearly-finished-I-can-taste-it! point - only buttons to go!!!

I was showing David my progress last night. He is always pretty interested in what I'm doing, and can follow quite well when I rabbit on about some obscure point or other, but I try not to inflict my enthusiasm on him too much. So I haven't given him chapter and verse on this coat (saved that for here). So he hasn't really seen it that much. When I showed it to him last night (after I'd sewn on the 2nd sleeve and topstitched both of them) he said "That's Isabella's size isn't it?" Um, yeah. We might not be selling this one! I tried it on her very quickly this morning and it fits just as a size 2 should - still a bit big on her, but wearable. Might have to make another one.....

The Bayby trench part 6: Lining

Ok, so now I'm on to the lining. I needed to cut the sleeves from satin because I didn't have enough of the plaid cotton, but I like satin lined sleeves anyway as it is so much easier to slide them on over clothing. Dealing with a small child this is even more necessary!

To create a pattern for the sleeve lining I folded up the hem allowance on the pattern pieces and traced the stitching line with a dotted line, then added seam allowance and drew that with a solid line. Thanks to the sunlight on my desk it's hard to see the folded up allowance on the larger piece, but it does show up on the smaller one.

When pinning the pattern to the fabric I just overlapped the two pieces along their seamlines and folded up the bottom to my new marked cutting line. Couldn't be easier!

Here's where it gets interesting. I have long been a fan of sewing the sleeve seam, sewing the lining seam, and then joining them in the round. I knew it gives a flatter finish, but hadn't thought about why till last night when I stumbled across two brilliant blog posts regarding dominant seams. One from the ever-informative Fashion Incubator and one from The Bitchin' Stitch . I have always preferred to sew my seams the way Kathleen does it, but seeing her examples was still an eye opener!

Anyway, sewing small tubes together can be fiddly so I've figured out a method that works well for me. Simple really, I place my pins perpendicular to the seam on the outside, and sew on the inside (since that little tube won't fit over my free arm.) The pins don't catch on the inside of the tube as I'm sewing it this way, and I just find it easier. If anyone has a better idea, I would dearly love them to share!



When finished and pressed the sleeve looks like this. Nice and smooth and flat.

On to the lining for the body. I cut the back lining from the same pattern as the coat, so it needs to have a bit chopped out for the facing. To do this I marked a new cutting line on the opposite side of the stitching line on the facing piece, folded carefully along it and pinned it in place on the back. I don't bother trying to pin the folded up edge flat, because around a curve this gets fiddly. I just crease on the line and let it stand up. Then I just cut around it, following the creased line, starting at the folded edge (on the left). The fabric there is the pleat allowance for the back.

Dominant seams come into play here too. I'd joined my facings before attaching the lining and ended up edgestitching the back facing after I'd sewn the lining to it to help it sit nice and flat.

I'm ignoring the bottom edge of the facing/lining and hem for the moment while I move on to the sleeves. I have a lot of layers of fabric at the sleeve seam, so I basted each edge first. Why make life hard when a couple of extra minutes will ensure each layer stays where it should?

In a coat for myself I'd have sewn the sleeve (without the lining) to the body of the coat and then slipstitched the sleeve lining over it for a perfect finish, but this is a coat for a two year old. I'm going to bind the armhole seam, which will look lovely, but is easy and quicker to do.

And here's the bit I was dying to get to - one set-in sleeve means I can almost see how the coat is going to look!

After I set in the other sleeve I still have quite a lot of finishing to do - the wrinkly looking neck edge is bothering me, but won't be topstitched till I've organised the hem.

But it's getting there!

Beangirl, you ask if I sleep. The answer for last night is "No, not really" but that was thanks to one small person who thought that midnight till 3.45am was playtime. I'm so used to nights like this that I can carry on sewing regardless. I'm too tired to do the vacuuming though.

Baby trench part 5: The collar

Now that I've got the embellishment sorted I've been steaming away on the baby trench! Today's mission was the collar. I used the same folding trick described in this post to give the turn-of-cloth allowance to the upper collar. (Why does my camera focus so much better on this type of photo than one looking directly down I wonder?)

See those dark dots on my fingernail? I hit myself with a hammer as I was hammering in domes on something. What makes it irritating is that it was THE SAME DAY as I'd cleaned the last of the last one out of the same fingernail. I may not be accurate, but at least I'm consistent ;-)

Just before I forget to mention it, I interfaced only one piece of the upper collar so it stays softer, but both pieces of the collar stand to give it the needed support. I used a nice soft interfacing, because I really don't want this ending up feeling like cardboard!

After the upper collar was sewn I sewed it into the stand. Since the stand was to be inserted between the body of the coat and the facing I topstitched it at this point. Look how nice and wrinkly it looks - if I'd stuck with my original draft it would have been a flat one piece collar. This lovely shapely two piece one gives me great satisfaction.

Next up was sewing the shoulder seams. Since the flaps are lined with a fairly bulky fabric I trimmed that away in the seam allowance after I'd stitched the shoulder seams but before I'd topstitched them. (And another lovely sharp photo. I clearly need to have words with my camera)

To attach the collar I like to pin a lot, and perpendicular to the seam so that I can sew very close to the pins, over them if necessary. It makes sewing a convex curve to a concave one more controllable I think.

I usually sew the collar to the body of the coat first, then sew the facing to that. Since the curves have been anchored together I can use fewer pins and place them parallel to the seam. I sew this from the body side of the coat, sewing right over my first line of stitching.

A quick check to make sure I don't have any puckers in my seam.....

And on to clipping the concave curves (and a bit of the collar's convex curve too) so everything will lie smoothly. I always offset my clips as it helps give a smoother curve when turned, and there's always at least one layer of seam allowance in any given spot. You can see the clips offset in this photo.

By this time my sister was about to arrive for a visit, so sewing was over for the day. I tossed the coat on a hanger so I could get the first glimpse of how it will look when finished.

I am so happy with my proper collar!

Since I took this photo I've sewn on the belt loops, made the belt, and sewn and topstitched the side seams (I like topstitched side seams). But there is no way my camera will play nicely at night, so that's all for today folks!

Baby trench part 4: Lining pattern and embellishment.

I seem to be on a bit of a roll at the moment! After mulling over embellishment options for weeks I found the answer in a book I already own. So I'm out of excuses for procrastination! I needed to make the lining patterns so that I could cut the front and back lining pieces so that I could see how much I had left, since I wanted to use the same lining to line the front and back flaps. Just for a tiny extra pop if anyone peeps.

My photos are terrible - my camera is pretty basic, and doesn't like to focus under artificial light, and I was doing this yesterday evening. This one is the best I could do to illustrate making the front lining pattern. It's very straightforward anyway, so it's no big deal.

First I folded the front pattern piece on it's fold line, and lay tracing paper (good old cheap lunch wrap from the supermarket) over it. I just traced around the front, excluding the facing. I am always very careful to trace the stitching line, not the cutting line, and remember to add seam allowance to this edge. Anyone like to guess why I am now so careful about this step?

After adding it's seam allowance and cutting it out, here it is. I cheated for the back and just used the existing pattern piece. It will be strategically trimmed during construction.

Having cut these pieces from my chosen lining I was able to cut linings for the flaps from the scraps, which was handy since I'd embellished them already. I used exactly the same technique explained in this post and this post.

I'm annoyed with how the colour looks in these photos. The fabric is much more sandy than grey, and the contrasting fabric is the same burgundy I used on the external facings on my pleated dress.
I also made up the front pockets and sewed them on. When laid out as they will be when constructed, the front looks a little like this:

Still lots to do, but I'm liking how it's looking so far. I did draft this one in Isabella's size, just in case....

Baby trench part 3: Assembling the sleeve.

For some reason I've been avoiding the baby trench. Probably because I know I want to add something to one of the front flaps, but I'm not yet sure what I want that to be. Since flap assembly is pretty close to the top of the construction order, that leaves me a bit stuck. So I decided to make the sleeves and post a Lesson-I-Learnt-The-Hard-Way-Many-Years-Ago for the benefit of anyone else who might need it! (Being almost entirely self-taught, most of what I now know was learnt the hard way.)

So, sleeves. I'd added a purely decorative back seam at the drafting stage, so step one was to sew front and back sleeve together and topstitch the seam. Then I added carriers for the sleeve belts. This very crappy photo (sorry, I didn't realise how fuzzy it was till I'd moved on about four steps) shows the carriers sewn on, and you can still just see the chalk lines I'd drawn on to position them. The hem is folded up to give an idea of the proportions of the finished sleeve.

Now for the lesson bit. If you insert the sleeve belt and anchor it at the raw edges of the seams while flat, when you sew the seam and turn the sleeve right side out, it will look like this:

Not the end of the world, and if you want a bit of pulling in there to slightly bring the sleeve in, then that's fine. I, however, being way too particular about these things, want it to sit flat when the sleeve is finished.

To do that is very simple. I anchored it at one end and folded over the seam allowance as though the seam had been sewn, and held it with a bulldog clip (I don't want to do any unnecessary pinning of this coated fabric). Then I folded the sleeve and wriggled the belt so that it sat flat, and did the same thing for the other seam allowance. As shown in this photo the belt is now sitting flat, as it will be on the finished sleeve.

(Please also note how I shaped the seam so that it will line up with itself when the sleeve is sewn. After I'd drafted the pattern and cut the pieces I realised that that was totally unnecessary - the seam has no shaping and doesn't have to line up with itself, so it could have been straight all the way to the edge. DOH! I do make work for myself sometimes. Lets just pretend that it is actually a Very Important Mark Of Quality that this seam does this shall we? Thanks for your cooperation.)

When you open the sleeve out flat you can just see the required excess length in the belt as a bump in the middle. Because I like to be sure about things, I anchor the other end as well before sewing the sleeve seam.

And when the sleeve seam is sewn and the sleeve is turned right side out and the hem is folded up, it looks like this:

Not a big deal, but it satisfies my "Everything Just Sew" anal nature!


Now I have a feeling I wll be unable to focus on anything else till the book I just bought from Trademe arrives - I got a copy the the third edition of Winifred Aldrich's Metric Patterncutting for Womenswear for $20! I already have the latest edition of her childrenswear book and the 2nd edition of her menswear book, but no womenswear ones. I know she's up to the 5th ed of this book but they're all worth having, so I am Very Happy Indeed, and now will have to wait probably till late week for my internet payment to show up the the seller to post the book to me. Naturally this means I will be unable to concentrate on anything else in the meantime!

In which I change my blog's title to "Dear Beangirl...."

I am enormously, immeasurably flattered by anyone who says they Must Have one of my designs. So, since I was going to draft it again anyway (I find drafting easier than grading a lot of the time), I photographed the process. With very-slightly-malicious intent. Can't WAIT to see yours made up Beangirl.

But before we get to that, here's the obligatory shot of my-latest-creation. It's exactly the same pattern as the blue one from a couple of posts ago, which my aunt has taken back to England for her god daughter. (So now I'm international!) I like these rather rustic colours. I may add buttons to the front yoke.

Anyway, on to the patternmaking. This dress (the one in my previous post, not the one above) is based on a bodice block. (For the record, this is a size 80 flat body block from my favourite book)
The basic block is lengthened to desired finished length, which I decided would be 5cm below the knee.

1cm is trimmed off armhole and neckline edges. I wanted it to be suitable to wear something under, or not.

A cut line for the side pleats is drawn in. I placed this exactly half way along the shoulder line, and perpendicular to it till that line was about 6cm away from the CF, (No science to this, just my choices) then ran it parallel to the CF.

A second cut line was marked in about where I thought it should go - closer to the side seam, roughly equal distance from the first cut line.

After cutting the first line to completely separate the pieces, and the second leaving a tiny hinge, I taped them to a new piece of paper. I drew a new CF line angled so that it was 5cm from the paper's edge at the top, and 6cm at the bottom. The original CF was placed on this line.

I then drew a line angled from the waistline (on the working pattern, not the new paper) by 5 degrees (which I'd worked out by measuring the angle the waistline had shifted to on the first piece) and spread the pieces by 11cm. Taping down the 2nd piece at that point I just swung out the third by a bit to give it a nice line.

At this point it looks like this:

Unfortunately some of my lines are pretty faint and hard to see in this photo. Sorry about that.

After taking off the working pattern pieces and adding seam allowances and such, the finished pattern piece looks like this.

This is for the back, but the front is exactly the same - I made the front by tracing the back, swapping the neckline for the right one and raising the point to which the middle pleat is sewn. (I was going to photograph the facings as I drafted them, but my camera batteries died and I couldn't, but facings are pretty straightforward anyway.)

So there you go Beangirl, have at it!

Not as simple as it looks

This is one of those designs that is very simple - clean lines, sharp contrast, nicely balanced (I think), not fussy. But what is very simple when made up is not necessarily simple to execute. Glossing over the DOH! moment I had when drafting (centre front pleat drafted on fold. Side pleats drafted flat. Um, yeah, we're pretending that it was always supposed to look like two big everted [is everted the opposite of inverted?] pleats rather than three inverted box pleats.)


Getting back to the point, this design is exactly what I had in mind. However I didn't want to put in a centre back seam, making the easy peasy facing application method impossible. No amount of staring blankly at the dress was going to come up with an easy method to clean finish the edges, so I had to twist and turn and fiddle to acheive the desired result. Then I had to stare blankly for a bit longer to decide how best to clean finish the back neck slit. The answer was to use a binding strip to face the edges - simple and solid. (Sometimes I think it would be nice to just make something from a pattern - someone else already figured out how to put the pieces together!)


On the bright side stitching down the lower edge of the facing was a joy - lovely crisp cotton which held a finger-press so well that all I had to do was clip into the inset corners and finger press around the curves and pin them into place. No running a gathering stitch around the edge, not even a press needed - just finger press and pin!

The next lot of blank staring came when I had to decide on embellishment. It needed something to balance the burgundy facing, but since it's unlined I didn't want anything too fussy on the inside. I thought of a spiral of a strip of ruffle, and looked for my rolled hem foot. It is MIA, and I almost went nuts looking for it. I wonder if I gave it to a friend thinking I wouldn't use it? Can't imagine why I would, since I'd tried it and knew it worked, and I like baby hems on light fabrics. Nothing else was sparking any ideas, so eventually I gave up and hit the net to blog surf. Somewhere I saw a dress decorated with dozens of appliqued spirals - perfect! The geometric shape works much better with the lines of this dress than the organic shape of a flower would have, in my opinion.

So, the end result is a dress which I like very very much. It is unfussy, striking, and very much to my taste. Much easier to envision than produce! I deliberately drafted it too small for Isabella so I wouldn't be tempted to keep it. Then I drafted it in her size, because she needs one too!

Beangirl, this one's for you!

See, I told you I have a very messy house! This was taken on a good-ish day - you can see most of the floor.
I'm officially jealous of your weather - it's about the same temperature here, and it sure isn't going to get any hotter! Our hottest summer days just barely get into low 30s. I think I'll just console myself with the thought that temps in the 40s are too hot to do anything. Expect snide remarks if you ever complain about the heat ;-)

Oh, and I forgot to mention that we pay someone to come in and clean our bathroom once a week. David suggested it when the twins were tiny and I literally couldn't find the time to do it. Of course once the twins were a little bigger and napping regularly I very quickly decided that if I did have the time I could think of plenty of ways I'd rather spend it than cleaning the bathroom. He is quite happy to keep it going, so who am I to argue?

I do make a distinction between mess and dirt though. Untidyness I can live with. Grime is another story!

Baby trench part 2, the RIGHT collar this time.

This is another illustration of why I call this blog Everything Just Sew. If it isn't "just so" it will drive me insane and MUST be redone, regardless of the time and effort involved, even if no one else IN THE ENTIRE WORLD will notice what I did. In this case, the collar of my baby trench coat.

The basic one piece collar I'd drafted was nagging at me. I could see it in my head, and it looked wrong to me (bear in mind that I've only seen this in my head - I have yet to sew any of this coat together!) So despite the fact that hardly anyone would notice or care, I redrafted a proper two piece stand and fall collar. I feel so much better now! Here's the process, following instructions found in Winifred Aldrich's Metric Pattern Cutting for Menswear. My copy (bought on a bargain table - SCORE!) is the 2nd edition.

Firstly I traced my original collar since the two piece one I wanted is based on the same style of collar. The darker line in the picture below is the original collar, and the lighter line (pretty hard to see, sorry) shows the new collar size, and the stand. Since most drafting is based on measurements you plug into a formula it was easy to use these instructions for my new collar. I did have to scale back where they gave a measurement of 4.5cm for width of the stand - obviously too big for a size 2!

Next step is to cut the pieces apart and slash them vertically to open up the outer edge of the collar and close up the top edge of the stand. Again I scaled back the overlaps and spreads to match the scale of much smaller pattern pieces.

This was not something I was prepared to construct without trying first, so I cut a quick mock up of the collar pieces from some scrap fabric I had to hand, sewed them together, and pinned it to the pinned together fronts and back of the coat.

Since nothing is sewn, clipped, pressed etc it was impossible to get it to sit nicely to photograph, but when I held it and manipulated the pieces with my fingers I could see that it will sit nicely and look how I want. So now I feel like the coat can progress. Right after I get to Spotlight for thread.

Beangirl, I can't WAIT to see your girls' summer dresses! Is it still snowing over there? And to those who wonder how I get any sewing done with five children, two of them very small, well, it's simple. I have a very messy house ;-)

In which I am procrastinating again

I have been procrastinating on the baby trench since my last post for a couple of fairly pathetic reasons. One is laziness - I had to haul the (lightweight aluminium) ladder inside and go up into the roof space to find the fabric I wanted for lining. Annoyingly once I got around to it I found that the fabric was down in the house after all, but there isn't enough so I'll line the sleeves in satin which I like to do anyway. For which I have to make another trip into the roof. The other reason is reasonable - I was not sure about the design. I had a nasty nagging feeling that the collar wasn't right. I know I decided to simplify it, but I'm pretty good at visualising a finished design, and to me the collar just looked wrong. The reason that this is pathetic is that I know exactly what I am going to do about this, and it isn't going to be hard.



While I was considering the best way of making my collar look right, (ie, procrastinating on actually DOING it) I got inspired to make a new dress. Well, two new dresses, based on the same pattern.

Exhibit a)



Exhibit b)

These have been hanging next to my desk (which is in our living room) since I made them, where they have garnered a few oohs and ahhs, which is always nice. The most satisfying was from my aunt, who is visiting from the UK at the moment. It was her gift of 40 pounds for my last birthday that enabled me to buy my beloved drafting book. While I thanked her at the time, and told her what I got and what I was going to do with it, it was really nice to show her the end result, and just how much appreciated the gift was, and how useful the book is!

Another very nice response was from a very lovely lady who was visiting with her daughter to collect a dress I'd altered for the daughter. This was the same dress I was in the middle of making when the twins arrived, and finishing it was a bit of a mission, but for lovely people it's worth it. Anyway, they have a friend with a daughter about to turn one, and commissioned one of my designs for her - cool! (Interestingly, the same design chosen by my sister's friend a couple of months ago, and one of very very few for which I had more of the same fabric.) It's this one, the same design as the one I photographed on Isabella.

I really will get back to the baby trench very soon. Apart from anything else my WIPs (Work In Progress) box of cut and ready to sew garments is getting a bit full....