My Sewing Space

Every once in awhile I feel like I want something "different" in my closet. Generally I'm not super trendy, but from time to time an odd trend appeals to me. This time it was culottes. I had a piece of black wool in my stash that was too lightweight for pants. Using it for a skirt was an option, but that would have left a good sized remnant that would be too big to toss and too small to do much else with. Since it was lightweight and had some good drape, I thought it could work for culottes. Plus, stash fabric seems "free" to me, so if it was a total bust not much was lost. There are quite a few patterns for culottes available now. The one I chose was  Vogue 9091 . I prefer a yoke to a regular waistband. Views A and B are considered culottes and View C is considered pants. I chose to make View C, but shortened it by five inches. I also added a lining, but those are the only real changes. This is not a complicated pattern. The pleats are deep and gett...

My older daughter does not always sit appropriately when she wears a skirt or dress. She doesn't loooove skirts and dresses like my younger daughter does, so when she wears one, it's usually to church or another setting with a dressy/formal feel. To say that she does not appreciate my reminders to sit appropriately is quite an understatement. When it was time to make her new Easter duds, I gave her some choices. I told her I didn't want to continue on with the reminder/scowl exchanges anymore so she could have a new dress if she would sit appropriately or she could have pants. To my surprise, she chose pants. And I think it was a good choice! I wanted to only work with stash fabric, so we came up with this combination. The blouse/jacket (pattern:  Oliver + S Music Class Blouse ) is one of those notorious linen-look fabrics with an all-over embroidery pattern including a scalloped border. The photos aren't great, so you can't see the texture of the embroidery. ...

Ah, I'm back.  After some sewing for me and then a two-week vacation, I'm happy to be back to blogging. I have a bit of a backlog of projects to show you and I think I'll go in the order that I made them. A few months ago, I saw this dress in the Boden catalog. I really liked the style and the combination of the large and small print and set out to make my own version. I initially purchased New Look 6867 and figured I would alter the midriff band to be straighter and narrower and make it go around the back, but then I saw Butterick 5212 .  It already had those issues taken care of, so I bought it. On a trip to Fabricland I found coordinating prints that I liked and I was so eager to get this dress put together that I didn't trace the pattern or make any sort of muslin - both things I do very regularly. After checking the finished garment measurements, I cut a 12 with no changes.  Since I have a hard time being totally reckless (with fabric anyway) I did baste th...

I'm not really sure why it took me so long to finish this jacket.  I didn't find it all that inspiring even though I was pretty sure I would like the end result.  Anyway, here it is... My thoughts about the beginning of the jacket and pattern pictures are posted here .  There are a lot of seams with a lot of topstitching on this jacket.  I used regular thread with the triple-straight stitch for the topstitching.  My machine doesn't really like heavy-duty thread so this seems like the best option for me.  Getting nice straight topstitching on the corduroy was difficult.  If I was stitching in the same direction as the wales, the stitching either "fell" into the troughs or looked very crooked and messy if I wasn't stitching exactly parallel to the wales.  If I was stitching across the wales, the presser foot tended to slide one way or the other with the nap. The lining is a poly stretch satin that is pretty wild.  It might even be objecti...

I feel like I don't have too much left to say about the jacket. I've been going on and on about it for awhile now. The cap of the sleeve has some issues. I found there to be a lot of ease in these sleeve caps. Other reviewers didn't note this as a problem, so it might have just been me struggling to set them in properly. I love the seams in the back. Nice details. I really like topstitching - the way it looks, not always doing it. It looks like I could have made the back smaller at the waist, but I like how it feels when wearing it. The pockets are too small to be useful. This was obvious from the pattern piece, but I didn't bother to change them. Useful or not, they are a nice detail. I used Connie Long's instructions in Easy Guide to Sewing Linings to draft a lining for the jacket. The front lining pieces consist of a yoke and a lower front piece. There is no vertical seam and no pleat as there is in the jacket. The back lining pieces are the same as the jacket ...