Friday, October 31, 2014

A Cautionary Tale

I was so excited to finish my bloomers-in-progress last night--I bound the leg placket, stitched the gusset, gathered the leg opening and attached the cuff--and then I held them up in front of me and realized what I had done.

Ten points if you can spot the mistake.  In the end, nobody's going to see them but me--I wear them under my skirts in the winter to keep warm--so unless the reversed fastening is uncomfortable, I may just leave it this way.  Changing it means picking out all those stitches (including the gusset, ugh) and I'm not sure I want to go to all that trouble.  I just can't imagine how I finished the entire cuff without noticing.  

In other news, I got a roll of Kraft paper as big as my head!

It's strong but light and somewhat see-through, so hopefully it will streamline my pattern drafting process.  The roll came in a box twice its size and was so heavy I had actual trouble getting it up the stairs on my own.

I'm also working on a short coat/heavy jacket with a hood--more news on that later.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Quilt In Progress, In Progress



All the 12" blocks are done!  It's beginning to look like a real quilt although also strangely like the Minecraft-themed Halloween fabric we sell at work.  Up next: sashes (connector strips), cornerstones (connector blocks), borders, and then I can buy the batting and start putting it all together. Since the whole point of this project is working my way through my overflowing wool stash, it seemed unwise to buy a bed-sized piece of fluffy wool and then have to find a place to put it while I finished the rest of the quilt.




I've hit a wall on the cigarette pants--there's definitely too much room in the upper thigh, even though it was perfect in the muslin--???.  Oh well.  I keep coming back to it, slowly working my way through a step or two, testing out some possible solutions and then discarding them.  I have to remind myself that this is how lots of my favorite clothes started out, and that necessity is the mother of invention.  In the meantime, it's been very satisfying to do lots of small straight seams with no fitting, no curves, no geometry.  Sometimes you just want to sew a precise 1/4" seam allowance you know?