2014-01-31

January results

  • 2 projects done: boiled wool pullover and crushed taffeta bag
  • 4 old things selected to donate: olive green knit Vogue tunic (pilling, too big); bright blue Donna Karan/Vogue doubleknit coat with attached scarf collar (too big, and not my color); aubergine wool knit Kwik-Sew tunic (too big, huge annoying neckline, scratchy); gray rayon knit draped Butterick top (too big, saggy, front is double and takes too long to dry)
  • Fabric stash: 6.87 yards out, 4.22 yards in
  • Fabric stash inventory rechecked and lingerie supply stash inventoried
  • Basic pattern drafted using the Müller & Sohn system
  • Linen/silk dress drafted from the basic pattern, fitted, and partially completed
  • Part of the work done on relining the navy wool coat

2014-01-30

February planning

Here's what might be on:
  • Finishing the LWD.
  • Patternreview Inspired by the Movies contest: I thought I probably wouldn't enter this, but I have an idea for some black wool crepe that's in stash. I have to decide if this would be something I would want and use immediately enough for it to justify the opportunity cost, because there are also other things I'd like to have.
  • Starting another boiled wool project, around the second half of the month.
  • Working over my fitting shells a bit more and getting to the point of trying a set-in sleeve.
For some of these I really need to get more pattern paper.

Other than that, I took a break from sewing today and worked on getting some of my stash fabrics organized, deleting a few things from inventory that I don't actually have anymore. Now the stats should be up to date for next month, so I'll be able to track what I use up more easily.

2014-01-29

More LWD

I finished pressing the lining and did the first step in attaching it to the neckline and armholes. It now occurs to me that since the dress has a vent, it would make no sense for the lining to be free-hanging, so it will have a jump pleat. I'm really looking forward to being done sewing this silk crepe. Probably it would be easier if I had a proper straight-stitch needle plate.

2014-01-28

LWD progress

I've got the lining sewn together; now I need to finish pressing all the seams, and sew it in. It will be edge-to-edge, so it'll go in just like a combined armhole/neck facing. I haven't decided whether it should be free-hanging or not, and I haven't been able to find my Easy Guide to Sewing Linings to see if it has anything to say on this. If I continue not finding it, I may go with a jump pleat.

2014-01-27

Comparing a couple of measurement charts

Here are some things I've noticed in comparing size charts for women's ("misses'") patterns:
  • Burda gives you a lot more information than the Big4, if you find their more detailed measurement chart (I haven't found one for the short sizes, though, only the regular and tall ones). You get bust depth, front waist length, back width, bicep circumference, neck circumference, and shoulder width.
  • The only measurement the Big4 give you that Burda doesn't is the high bust circumference.
  • The Big4 seem to have a proportionally smaller waist and slightly smaller hip. (However, I suspect they make up for it with lots more waist ease.)
  • I've also got some size charts excerpted in the Müller & Sohn books; these seem to have slightly larger waist and hips than Burda, longer bust depth, and narrower back.
These are all only measurement charts and don't say anything about how much ease the respective companies put in to their patterns (where applicable). It'd be nice if the Big4 would give out more of the same measurements that Burda does.

2014-01-26

WIPs

I've cut out the lining for the LWD/fitting shell dress. I used 2 yards 5" of silk crepe from stash. IIRC this was from the old Denver Fabrics. It's a very nice fabric, although I've been trying to avoid silk for the last few years, not being a big fan of any of the cleaning options for it.

On the old coat I'm relining, I got all the lining hems done. There are still a few more things to do. I'm noticing the underarms of the coat have been worked over a lot. If I still had any of the fabric I could've put in gussets to replace the worn areas.

I'm setting a new goal, too: for any project I finish, get rid of at least 1 item and ideally 2. I'm very much on track with this so far.

2014-01-25

Dress-to-fitting-shell alterations (note to self)

Alterations I'd already done in the base pattern:
  1. The back seam is meant to go in by 2cm at the waist, tapering to nothing up at the neckline, but continuing straight down from the waist to the hem. I let all of this out, i.e. I made a completely straight back seam.
  2. The front waist dart is meant to continue down from the waist, so it continues to take skirt width out all the way to the hem. I changed it into a fisheye dart instead because it seemed I needed more room there in the hip circumference. I also reshaped this dart so its maximum intake was a bit above the waist.
  3. I reshaped the hip curve, making it into more of an S-curve.
Alterations to the dress pattern (not design changes):
  1. 1cm length-only FBA as shown in Müller.
  2. Added 1cm at the CB hem, curving up to 0 at the side seam.
Alterations to the dress, after having cut and sewn:
  1. Take in the back neck "darts" 1/4" (each leg), tapering this down to nothing quite a ways down the back (re-measure where exactly).
  2. Take in the front neck "darts" 1/4", tapering to nothing at 1 3/4" below the finished edge (recheck this). Surprisingly, this seems to be needed to keep the front of the dress up, so that it doesn't collapse inward further down.
  3. Let out 1/4" on each middle back-center back seam from the hem, up to the full hip mark, then tapering to nothing at the waist (recheck shaping).
  4. Take in 1/4" on side seams from hem up to high hip.
I have not had to tighten up the armholes; it looks like raising the bottoms of them 1cm was enough, and they still sit flat to the figure.

What I expect to transfer back to the fitting shell:
  1. Something accomplishing dress alteration #3. This could go in a side-back seam, or it could be pivoted in if flare at the hem is acceptable. For a fitting shell with a waist seam, there doesn't have to be any such compromise.
  2. If #1, then also dress alteration #4.
  3. Maybe the back length adjustment (dress pattern alteration #2). See how it goes with the hem.
  4. Maybe not the FBA. Depends on what's worn under it. I'm not sure the extra length was really needed (see dress alteration #2).

2014-01-24

Vogue 8347 preview

I haven't done a review yet, but here's the Vogue bag I made earlier in the month:


In other news, the white dress is coming along, needing some of the alterations I would have expected. I still need to tighten up the front neckline; after that, I think the whole thing can be given a more thorough press and I can move on to the hem and lining.

2014-01-22

LWD pattern

Now that I have a bit of a fitting shell, I'm going to test it in some sort of real fabric.

I'd been thinking about doing the Little White Dress contest on PatternReview, mainly as an excuse for/side effect of all this fitting shell drafting. I have more white and ivory fabrics in my stash than I want anyway, and very little actual muslin. So the thought was to test the fitting shell in one of those fabrics, and ideally have it turn out at least presentable enough to wear, if not to become one of my favorite things in my closet. Hopefully it'll use up just the right amount of a silk/linen blend I have in stash.

I got sidetracked briefly and considered using the fitting shell specs to alter Butterick 5894, which is one of the few very basic, sleeveless, fitted, straight dress patterns I currently have. But then I reminded myself that that wouldn't accomplish my goal of testing my fitting shell; I'd just end up with a white dress that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise. Big whoop.

So I decided to apply that double-princess-seam idea to my fitting shell instead. Here's my modified pattern:

By making one seam go into the neckline and the other into the armhole, I'll have places to tighten those up as necessary, as well as being able to tweak the waist and hip fit easily. Also, this avoids darts, which I've found were a real pain to press out on the very firmly woven silk/linen blend fabric I have in mind. At the same time, it's close enough to the original fitting shell pattern that I think I'll still get a decent idea of how that fits in at least one "real" fabric.

2014-01-20

Fitting the fitting shell

I've copied off separate bodice and skirt pieces from the fitting shell. Before I go further, here's how I adjusted the fit after drafting.
  • The basic pattern is supposed to have a very long front waist dart, from (below) the bust, to the greatest intake at the waist, curving to a smaller intake at the hip, then continuing straight down to the hem. The book says that this continuation can be reduced or left off if necessary. I just turned this into a normal, hip-length fisheye dart, and also reduced the intake. The smallest part is now actually above the marked waistline.
  • I made the hip curves at the side seams much flatter, and they actually continue almost straight for 2-3cm below the waistline, so it's more of an S-curve than a normal hip curve. If I compare my new fitting shell to my old one, I used to think my waistline was about that much lower than I have it on this pattern. Maybe it was. Now, I have bone structure and "other structure" that is keeping my waist higher up. Before, maybe that bone structure was obscured and/or I had more "other structure" going on higher up. Or maybe I just placed the waist too low before — I could definitely see that happening with the way I worked with the fitting shell pattern at the time.
  • I lengthened the centermost back waist darts by about 2cm at the bottom.
  • I dropped the front neckline by a little over 1cm, and widened it slightly at the sides.
  • When tracing off the separate skirt pieces, I slid in 1cm of width, half centered on each dart (increasing the dart intake to keep the waist size the same). I haven't yet tested the fit to decide whether this was a good idea or whether I'd have do something to the side seams as a result.
I'm considering doing a (probably length-only) FBA, too, or at least making a version of the bodice pattern that has one. My paper supply is getting low, though, so I might not want to go nuts with different variants right now.

Comparing this to my old fitting shell, it's surprising how much narrower it looks, especially in the bodice and the width across the armhole. I don't know how much of this is an ease difference vs. a size difference.

2014-01-19

Progress on the fitting shell

I've finished the torso of the fitting shell, more or less.

It might've been better if I'd added some to the back hip area, as it might be pulling in a little in front. That would've required either creating a back princess seam, or creating a hinge and swinging the side seam out toward the hem, if one does it according to the instructions. I didn't really want to do the former on the dress fitting shell; as for the latter, I don't really want flare but I could see possibly avoiding this by using a second hinge to make the side seam straight again below the full hip. In any case, it'll be very straightforward to add width right where it's needed when I copy off a version with a waist seam.

It's interesting to me that the Müller system starts without a waist seam; all of the American fitting shells I've seen have waist seams and you are then told to stick the pieces together (with different tradeoffs for the different ways to do this) if you want a sheath dress. I'm going to have a look at my books later and see which option might best correspond to the inverse of this process.

2014-01-18

Fitting shell type 1: Müller/Hofenbitzer

I could use a new set of fitting shells. Last time (2007) I started with a Butterick fitting shell pattern which, in the size I used at the time, probably started off too big in the upper torso, and I was never convinced that I'd got the armholes, shoulders, and upper back quite right. They are now just too big overall and probably don't fit my posture anymore either. Likewise, I drafted trousers using the Minott method, but they are also now too big, and I'm not sure I placed the waist at its real height in that draft.

So I've been looking through these. (I should mention, the Armstrong was in this stack just for completeness because it does very briefly mention taking measurements from a real human, but that isn't anywhere near being the focus of that book. The duct-taped book is a used copy of Jan Minott's Fitting Commercial Patterns.)

What I spend the big bucks on.

In theory I'd like to have drafts from several or all of them to compare to each other. Really, I might be obsessed enough to try it. But for now I'm working on the one in Müller & Sohn's Kleider und Blusen.

I almost started with Guido Hofenbitzer's Maßschnitte und Passform (new late last year) instead. Both of these books create similar styles of basic patterns (with no waist seam to start, unlike the usual American style). They cover certain figure/posture variations and how you can draft a basic pattern differently from the start to address them.

M&P seems less densely written; for one thing, I think it tends to use less of the sentence-structure variation that can make German harder for a non-native speaker (such as myself) to read. It also covers trousers in the same volume, as well as a bigger selection of possible figure variations. This is where I ran into trouble: you have to compare your balance of front and back measurements to an ideal. Then, by using these comparisons and observing the person being measured, you decide what variations (or combinations thereof) are causing the differences from the ideal, and by what amounts different areas will need to be adjusted. I played around with these calculations for quite a while, but eventually felt like I was wandering off into the weeds; in any case, I didn't think I should necessarily trust my measurement set that far in the first place. So I decided to go back to K&B, just get a first draft done and see how well it worked. I hope to come back to M&P later and maybe at least reverse-engineer how my fit issues would have been classified.

2014-01-17

January

A bit belatedly, here's what I intend(ed) to do this month.
As I've mentioned, I hope to get 2 projects done each month. Since I didn't think this through much before the new year, I didn't really have a plan for the first two, so they had to be simple.
  1. Project 1: done (Kwik-Sew 3121 layering pullover; used up a piece of boiled wool, and a zipper that happened to match)
  2. Project 2: done (Vogue 8347 bag; used up crushed taffeta left over from a dress done last month)
  3. Start on February's Project 1: in progress. This is intended to work for the PatternReview "little white dress" contest, more as a side effect than anything. I don't particularly need such a dress, but given that it actually needs to be kind of boring a clean "background" piece, and I have more white fabric in stash than I want, my intention is to use it as a second mockup of a new (dress) fitting shell I'm working on. Well, not necessarily of the fitting shell directly — I'll change it up slightly — but the general fit should be similar. The first mockup is in progress and seems to be going reasonably well. I've drafted it from Müller & Sohn's Kleider und Blusen. More on this later.
  4. Think about/ideally decide on February's Project 2. PR has an "inspired by the movies" contest starting up next, but nothing springs to mind as something I'd want to do for that, so I'm probably going to skip it. Maybe I'll sew up some more warm fabric.

2014-01-16

Relining this old coat

Several years ago (8? 10?), with that much less of a skillset, I made New Look 6686: Pendleton wool coating on the outside, acetate for the lining. Well, if you know about acetate you can see where this is going: parts of the lining turned to shreds, particularly since the coat is very long and its hem got exposed to snow.

So, a few years ago I removed the body of the lining and cut a new one in some other (non-acetate) synthetic satin. I've forgotten what it is, because I bought it at Fleishman's in Philadelphia, which makes it a few years old now. Yup, I cut and made the new lining that long ago and the coat's been hanging around unlined the whole time, in my too-short coat wardrobe with its hem getting squashed on the floor. I've started ironing out those wrinkles but it's going to take some more work.

Finally I got around to sewing the lining in the other day. While I was at it I added a hanging loop at the back neck. I hadn't been set on replacing the pockets — they were in surprisingly decent shape as far as the integrity of the fabric itself — but in the end I decided to do so, because the acetate had turned purple (the coat itself is a dark navy).

I'm going to let this hang on the dress form for a while before checking the relative lengths of the hems. I suspect the CB seam may have stretched. I did repair the hem as some of the catchstitching was gone, though I probably should've put that off until after checking for growth... oh well.
Besides all that there's the issue of how wearable this coat really is. The pattern certainly has a 90s feel to it, what with all the volume and the shoulder pads. The armholes — underarm dolman seams, really — are very low, which is unhelpful if you need to do any significant reaching, as that pulls the entire torso of the coat upward and the belt eventually ends up at Urkel level, where it inevitably loosens. I've mended the underarm seams a couple times, despite having originally reinforced them as the pattern directed. The bottom part of coat has some sort of fading or staining going on (from road salt, I guess?) that has created a subtle lighter brownish spotted pattern. It might be nice if it looked intentional. I could cut the coat to the shorter length and thereby remove all or most of the affected area, but given the impracticality of the cut in the upper body, I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Anyway, I do plan to finish the lining hems and see if this ends up getting worn.

2014-01-15

2014

Goals:
  1. Get two projects done per month, whenever reasonably possible. (There is probably going to be upheaval around the middle of the year that will interfere with this, but it might be possible to do knitting projects instead during that time.)
  2. End up with new fitting shells/slopers/blocks. In the process it'd be interesting to compare patterns from different brands or methods.
  3. Do some PatternReview/other contests, but only if I can (a) learn something new or (b) make something I'm confident I'll use.
  4. Keep the fabric stash inventory up to date. 
  5. Don't sew stash just for the sake of sewing stash. 
  6. Allocate stash fabric I don't like to mockups, or get rid of it.
  7. Keep a swatch book of finished projects, to be used for accessory shopping.
  8. Don't finish sewing things before they're properly fitted.

2014-01-14

What's this blog thing doing here?

This is meant to be yet another sewing blog, mostly. The plan is to document process more than results, so that the intermediate stages can seem (to me, anyway) more like accomplishments in themselves. I've been on PatternReview for some time, and when I do have finished objects that seem relevant, I expect I'll continue to post them there. Long-term works in progress, half-baked ideas, partial book reviews and comparisons, theorizing, and experimental projects are the sorts of things that will go here.