Put the Blame on Anne, Boys, Put the Blame on Anne..

I have never been one for clothes made in animal print. UK readers will know of one of the longest running soap operas here - Coronation Street - and it used to have a character called Bet Lynch: big, bold, brassy, busty, peroxide hair piled on top of her head - she smoked and drank and spoke her mind, and yes, she wore animal prints. I don't watch, nor ever have, Coronation Street but everybody knows about Bet. This is what I associate with animal print - trash! There, I've said it!


Neither Dior, Burberry, Armani or Gucci or any other design house has managed to rid me of the horror of Bet.

Then, sweet and darling Anne at Prttynpnk starts a sort of sew-along thing and the theme is animal print! I like to please Anne, cause she's scary when she's annoyed so I tried my best. Here's my contribution to Jungle January 2013.

Way back in July last year, Anne unexpectedly gifted a genuine vintage Vogue pattern to me.

One piece dress. Slim skirt joins the bloused bodice at the waist-line. Left side front buttoned closing above released pleat. Oval neckline, below elbow or short kimono sleeves. Self tied or novelty belt.

Unfortunately a size 14 then is NOT a size 14 today - the pattern needed grading, 2" on the bust and 4" on the hips in order to fit little ol' me.  I put SWAP aside and brought out the tissue paper and got to work. I've been reading about the slash and spread method for enlarging patterns, but THIS IS VOGUE - you can't do that to a genuine vintage vogue - so I diligently set to work measuring and drawing and adding and folding, so that the original tissue is intact.

The instructions for the pattern are exquisite - lots of drawings and arrows - but this was not an easy make. Five bound buttonholes to hold the dress closed, darts in the back sleeves (lovely little detail), it's not a wrap but a pleated front, and of course, I made it even more difficult by lining it and adding pockets in the side seams. The facings have to be slashed after sewing in place to release the button holes - a really scary moment when everything you've sewn so far could be trashed.

Anyway, the dress is finished. I had to lighten the pics to show a bit of detail but our weather is so gloomy right now that even photos shot outside are dim.

 I love the wide neckline, the darts in the sleeves make for a shaped sleeve that bends easily with the natural lie of the arm, I like my pockets and the 5 buttons are surprisingly secure.

 The Fabric is a wool and poly mix from local store and sewed up a treat and creased excellently under steam but doesn't wrinkle when wearing. It's a dark grey with a fine pinstripe - very business like. I made another button belt to complete the dress.

But where are the animals, you cry?

Well, I wore my new shoes......(Clarkes 50% off) Does that count? No.....

I made a tie belt (scarf) and hankie for the vent pocket from satin leopard print. Does that count? Getting closer......

 Let's look inside....









Animal print used, sewn and worn. I contributed to Jungle January and my style integrity is intact. Everyone is happy and Anne won't be round to our house for a fight!

Go check out the more adventurous sewers than I on Anne's blog to see what wonderful and scary creations they are making - inspirational!










To add to your reading pleasure click here to watch and hear Rita singing - now that's a girl who could wear animal prints!

Thanks to SG (And RuthieK)

Holiday Clothes Part 1

I've read, followed and took gratuitous advice over the years from Stitchers' Guild but only recently have I started to join in, share and reply. There is an absolutely overwhelming amount of information on this sewing forum but the links, personal communication and support have been invaluable recently - mostly from Ann Rowley's Chanel jacket make. However, RuthieK started a new thread the other day about boiled wool and it reminded me about a dress I made for Christmas two years ago - before I started blogging. I can't, therefore, display "work in progress" pics but I can show you the final item and a few details. I didn't wear this dress at all last year, so bringing it out again this year almost made it feel like new.

Fabric is not quite white but a pale ivory and I was concerned that it was too thick for a dress preferring to be made into a coat or jacket. But for a winter dress it turned out fine.  The boiled wool was purchased at my local fabric shop - Craftswoman Fabrics - and cost an arm and an leg per metre! There's 2m used here. 

The pattern, I think, is McCall's 2401 - an easy, very basic dress with neck and sleeve variations. I wanted the v.expensive fabric to do the talking here, not the design. I like this simple dress as it has no cut-in-half waistline and can be as fitted or relaxed as you want. I made the V neck style but lengthened sleeves to 3/4 length.

Have I told you how much I love 3/4 sleeves? Shows off bangles and bling; don't have to push up when washing dishes and covers the upper arm - perfect in my book.

When making this dress, I seem to remember that it kept growing as I was sewing. I darted the fronts and back and then made bigger darts. With a bulky fabric, such big darts were not not going to be as svelte as I had envisaged. To over come the bulk, I sliced the darts open to within a hair's breadth of the ends and then topstitched the excess flat. This sort of created a design feature, while doing what I really wanted - smooth lines.

Boiled wool doesn't fray or unravel - a blessing but it does seem to stretch while working it. The neckline gapped and sagged when I kept trying the dress on, so there was nothing left to do but make more darts. I added four along the back edge, two long and two short and seemed to do the trick. If I remember correctly, there wasn't that much to take in, just enough to make the fit better.

The dress is fully lined in a slightly stretchy lining. For such a bulky fabric, it was see-through when worn and I still wear a slip underneath too.

Mince pie, anyone? (My Mum made these ones!)

The dress is still growing BTW. I love my food as evidenced by my womanly figure, and the frock fully accommodated my increasing midriff as the day progressed.

On the actual day - Christmas Day this year that is, I seem to remember more of this....

 .... and in reality, I think this is how I looked most of the day - no-one saw the dress until 7.00pm! And by then they were all dozing and sated and didn't really care.

 Come to that, neither did I.

Check my OCding

l Check Those Collars and Lapels 

Vivienne Westwood

The really irksome thing about checks is that they have a tendency to highlight wiggly seams, badly pressed edges and poor cutting out. One of the principle areas of irksomeness is around the neck - the lapels and collar; the other major location is the sleeves.

Of course the check/plaid can be used for effect too but the tailoring perfectionist aims for perfect matching - what else?

Let me try to explain about lapels first....

A perfectly turned back lapel made in check(plaid) has the vertical lines running parallel to the edge of the lapel. However, the facing, which IS the visible lapel is usually cut with the straight of grain but the lapel is cut an an angle (for the shape). Not making sense? No, I'm not explaining it very well.

I'm moving into the world of men's tailoring because this is where the art of matching in jackets originated. Some of the images have stripes which are easier to see what I mean but the same principal applies to checks,plaids and tartans. Our main concern here is with vertical lines; on the sleeves we concentrate on horizontals - but that's for another day. Now, look closely at the following photos.....

This is NOT good - compare the right and left lapels. The left is perfect but the right is skewed - do not spend your money on this kind of workmanship, or let your man spend his money on this.

This one IS good - see how the pin stripes are identical on both sides.

Source

This one is YSL ladies jacket  - perfect parallel checks, but what else would you expect for £800.

 This one is Ralph Lauren from DH's wardrobe and once again the vertical stripes run parallel to the edge of the lapel. He chose to not disclose the cost of this jacket to me! Here's me making my own and he goes off and buys Purple Label! Justice - what justice?

Here's a Viyella wool jacket for this season. £250! and lines that aren't straight. 

Hopefully by now you can see what has to be achieved on the lapels. Good grief! that's only the lapels I hear you cry!!!!

In my search for material for this post I came across the most amazing blogs - one of them is askandyaboutclothes (link below). I thought females were obsessive about clothes and stuff but read this forum! If any of you has dared read American Psycho - Patrick Bateman has nothing on these guys! This is where perfection of matching becomes obsessive.

AskAndy                                                                                     
 Can you spot what's wrong with this matching?

Now, here's my effort....

This is the lapel cut on the straight of grain - see how the orange stripe is two lines away from the edge at the top and tapers out towards the break point? This should be avoided (see above). It means making a new facing pattern so that the edge of the lapel is on the straight of grain and therefore following the vertical lines of the fabric.  Because the lapel is at an angle to the front of the jacket it is usually cut on a slight bias so we have to tilt the pattern piece slightly.

Here is the original pattern piece and the new facing. I used a book - Classic Tailoring Techniques - to help me and some advice from Claire Schaeffer in a Threads issue July 2009 No 143 to re-draft the facing. I'm almost sure both of these sources are copyrighted but you can maybe locate them. 

I love this quote from the book: " This is essential for a controlled, graceful lay of the fabric."

There's actually not too much out there on the interweb for redrafting of jacket front facings for use with check/plaid fabrics. So here goes.

Firstly, you need to redraw the front facing with a new grainline that runs parallel to the edge of the lapel.

Copy the original pattern piece but shift it so that it actually changes shape a little. The new piece is narrower on the inside edge but straight on the outside edge.

Now you have to shrink the excess fabric out with a steam iron to re-shape the facing - bit of guess work involved here I reckon, or black magic.

The two pieces, old on top and new underneath. You can see the angle of the outside edge has altered but it means that my lapels will have that sought after straight line.

So, here's the real thing just positioned not sewn in place yet, but you can see the orange stripe remains two lines away from the edge the whole way down - ie parallel to the edge of the lapel.

Now, if I can figure it out and do it, wouldn't you think that the RTW market could do the same?

If you are in the market for a RTW checked/plaid or striped jacket please make sure the checks/lines etc on the lapel follow the edges. It means someone has done just that little bit extra to produce a jacket that is worth paying money for.

Collar Matching

The other major location of problems is the back of the collar, once turned back into place the checks (or lines) on the collar should match the checks (or lines) on the back.

Source

Perfection, even if the stripes are a little bold!

DH's  R Lauren again - perfection!

This is my effort - what I can't figure out is this...

With a centre back seam how do you match the verticals exactly as in the R Lauren? On my jacket I've lost the vertical orange stripe completely because of the seam, but on the collar it's there.

The only thing I could come up with was to shrink the collar edge a bit to help make it fit the pattern on the back.

I hope you also noticed the sleeve matching with the horizontal stripes in all the examples - that's for another day. This is where I'm at at the moment - not so nice.

If you managed to read all the way to the end of this - very well done! If you're still interested in Matching-OCD check out the Sartorialist tailoring blog. Even if you're not, it's still a fascinating read.

Source

And when it all becomes too much - sod the matching and go for contrast!

Shopping

Shopping list 

See you soon. Ruth

4D Skirt

The D in this title is for denim, not the fourth dimension. I'm not manipulating the time-space continuum, but I'm trying. I'll keep you posted on my success with that! I had loads of half metre leftovers of denim fabric - it was taking up too much space in the stash box and not one piece was large enough for any one project - so I put them all together! I made a skirt using 4 different denims - rather like a patchwork but not as intricate. Vogue 1247 - Rachel Comey top and skirt - I've always loved this skirt and saw it made up beautifully by other sewers but there was NO WAY I was making it this length - that's just a big belt! I think everyone who has made this skirt has added extra length. The pattern lends itself easily to using different fabrics as the bottom half of the skirt is a separate piece. This was really an exercise in sewing - an experiment - practising some sewing skills and if it didn't turn out right that was OK.

I am happy to announce that my sewing skills have returned somewhat:

Zip? what zip?

 The front, left back yoke and one back skirt panel were cut from the pinstripe denim. I added 8" to the length and then ran out of fabric. The other back panel is cut from another denim and the remaining back skirt is from yet another. The waistband and hem extension are from the fourth denim. I added a back pocket to keep the patchworky feel of the skirt.

Seams line up

Here you can see all four denims and I had to cut the right back panel on the cross grain due to restrictions of available fabric.

The front of the skirt has concealed pockets in the horizontal seam but it looks like I'm wearing an apron from the front when I put my hands in - but this is one good fitting, comfortable workhorse of a skirt that was made right out of the pattern envelope with no adjustments (apart from the length).

I frayed the hem but was not too comfortable with the length so I added another 4" (10cm) strip of denim around the bottom and frayed this a little too. Better length for me and balances out the other denims.

 To stop the skirt hem fraying all the way to the waist I stitched a line 2cm from the edge of both hems. I'm hoping that is will fray a little more in the wash to give a "I've had this skirt for ages" look.

I've made the silk top from this pattern too ages ago and never got round to posting about it. As usual I mucked about with the pattern and removed the shoulder pleats and lengthened the sleeves. It is made with some Ana Sui silk and I adore it but it has never been warm enough here to wear solo.












The 4D skirt is worn today with V8817. I'm in the process of making three white T-shirts from this pattern. Once cut out they only take a couple of hours to sew up and have everything I desire in a T-shirt - scoop neckline, 3/4 length sleeves and fitted but not tight body.



It's sad to say but I suit A-line skirts. Boring!!!

Time for a quick cup of coffee before forging ahead with something else........