Wrap Dress with Applique

Last Sunday was Easter and that's a day when a lot of lovely dresses come out of the closet.  It was no exception for me.  I didn't make a new dress, but wore one originally made for an event last summer.

The dress started out as Simplicity 8137, a simple wrap dress.   I didn't like the sleeve, so I changed it out for a flutter sleeve -- a very full, short sleeve.  I also had to modify the dress to fit me.

 The dress is made of polyester-cotton broadcloth, which has very little stretch, so proper fitting is required.  This material has a couple of advantages for this project.  First, it's quite inexpensive and when a dress requires 5 yards of fabric, that starts to matter.  Also, it's a perfect material for embroidery and applique, something like the island inspired skirts I've been making. 

This dress is something of a mixed technique project.  It includes machine applique, hand guided applique and decorative stitching.  The basic design is a flowering vine that accents the main features of the dress, curling along the front and neck openings.  The vine itself is far to big for machine applique, so it's hand guided applique.  The skirt section and the top section of the vine are each a single piece of fabric, bonded to the blue fabric and then stitched with a close spaced zig-zag stitch.

The leaves and flowers are machine applique with embroidered accents.  Both designs are from Embroidery Library.  The leaf is here and the flower is here.  The colors for the flower were chosen to contrast nicely with the blue and the green and also to go with a bracelet I wanted to wear with the dress, which has lapis lazuli, peridot, and garnet.   Each of the leaves and flowers were individually placed.  The leaves have stems.  The flowers do not, so I added those before placing the flowers.

Finally, I added decorative stitching to the hem of the dress and the sleeves.  It's a built in decorative stitch on my machine.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine.

Raincoat Fix

I made a raincoat and blogged abut it here and here.   There's only one problem: the hood isn't quite long enough and the top of my head gets wet.  I decided the solution was to add a visor to the hood.  This will lengthen it and even keep the water out of my eyes.

The project started with a drawing of what I wanted the shape of the hood to be.  Because the visor will be symmetrical, it's only half of what I need.

I cut two of the visor shapes from the scraps of the raincoat fabric and two from sew-in interfacing.

All four pieces are sewn together to form a two-sided visor.  I tried using the seam tape on this again, but it didn't work well.

Finally, I opened the seam between the hood and the lining, inserted the visor, and sewed everything back together.  The seam isn't completely waterproof, but hopefully, that won't be too much of a problem.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine!

Fun with Fleece Part 2

It's definitely winter now, even here in the Tennessee Valley.  It's a great time for a fun, warm, and cozy coat.

I liked McCalls's 6800.   This pattern calls for wool coating material or something similar.  Fabric like that is not only quite expensive, it's a bit excessive for the fairly mild winters of northern Alabama.  I elected instead to use fleece.  Since fleece has mild tendency to stretch, I used a completely non-stretchy lining fabric, polyester satin, to help the coat maintain it's shape.

The particular version of the coat I made has an asymmetric hemline, a lot longer in the back than in the front.  That let's the lining show when you wear the coat, so I choose a purple lining, just for a fun flash of color as I walk.  I also found that the shape of the hem made getting in and out of cars while wearing the coat a whole lot easier.

 Winter can be a rather dreary season, so why not brighten up winter clothing with some cheerful embroidery?  I chose some Hungarian style florals from Embroidery Library.    The purple from the lining even appears in the design, although it's not prominent.

The skirt of the coat is quite full and the hem quite long, giving me space for lots or repetitions of the design.  Usually, I try to embroider pieces before sewing them together, but that wasn't possible for this design.  The entire body of the coat has to be assembled before the embroidery along the hem was done so that the designs could be evenly spaced.  Many of them are embroidered over a seam.

Smaller elements from the design along the hem brighten the lapel and the bottoms of the sleeves.

Come back next week for a Christmas themed project!

Raincoat Part 1

I live in Alabama and it does rain here.  I don't have a proper raincoat that fits and it seemed like the time to remedy that situation.  Besides, I found Vogue 1564 at the fabric store and it seemed like a very interesting pattern.

There's a very limited selection of fabrics available in my town, so I've been looking for online sources for fabrics.  An search for raincoat fabric turned up Fashion Fabrics Club out of St. Louis, Missouri.  I ordered a nylon fabric with a waterproof coating on the back.  The fabric as reasonably priced, arrived in a good amount of time, and was as described on the website.  I plan to use then for future purchases.

The coat does have a lining, fortunately, I had some suitable lining material left over from another project sitting in my stash.

Once I got the pattern home and started really looking at it, I discovered that it really wasn't going to create a really waterproof garment, just one that was most water resistant.  That might work fine if I was looking for something to keep off a list misting rain between the car and the grocery store, but I really did want something that could handle a heavy rain and keep me dry.  The fabric I bought is waterproof, so the challenge is to keep the seems and front opening from leaking.  The original pattern calls for latch closures -- 8 of them.  I did find some at my local store, but they were about $5 each.  Ouch!  Not only are they expensive, they don't keep out the rain very well.  Buttons aren't any better in terms of keeping water out.  Also, the welt pockets where the water can just run right down into the coat?  They have to go. 

I got this garment out of the closet as inspiration and a source of ideas.  This is the top for sailor's foul weather gear, more or less designed to keep you from getting more than just damp while in a car wash or a storm at sea.  One of the features of this coat is storm flaps protecting a zipper to close the front.  There's one flap on each side of the zipper and they close together with Velcro, completely covering the zipper.  The second feature is that the seams are taped on the backside with special seam sealing tape.  The original pattern called for flat felled seams, which does help with water intrusion, but a flat felled seam sealed with tape is waterproof.  After surveying the available options online I chose this heat-sealed tape.  It's designed for garments, not tents or packs.  The pockets on the foul weather gear are completely external.  You can get things in and out of them without compromising the waterproof integrity of the coat.  Finally, the sleeves have adjustable tabs with Velcro so they can be tightened around your arms and leak a lot less.  Fortunately, the original sleeves already have decorative tabs, which can be adjusted to a new purpose.

Now that the basic design is set and all the materials have been decided on an obtained, it's time to move on to making the garment while maintaining the waterproof integrity of  the fabric.  We'll take that up next week.

Spoiler alert: The day after I finished this coat, it rained about 2" and  I had errands to run around town.  That's a serious test of a raincoat and this one passed!

Fitting Jeans

Jeans are a wonderful wardrobe staple.  Everyone wears them: men, women, and children. They can be work pants or dressy pants.  They go with pretty much everything.

The challenge with jeans is that they have to fit.  For those of us who are pear-shaped, jeans that fit in the hips seem to be always too loose in the waist, sometimes by several inches.  On tighter fitting styles, the seat still seams to be somehow not right.  The good news is, all of this can be fixed with proper pattern modifications.

Basic sizing of jeans is accomplished by adding fabric to the side seams, hems, and top at the waistband.  However, for those of us with an especially curvy butt, that's just not enough.

The first thing to do is to add to the back of the pants at the crotch.  As seen with the line of pins here, make the center back seam longer and taper into the inseam.  I cut the back long the pattern or the pins, which ever was bigger.

The back yoke also needs modified for best fit.  Take fabric out of the center back seam, tapering to nothing at the yoke/back seam.  Add extra fabric to the top of the pants at the center back.  

Assemble the pants in a different order than the instructions call for.  First, put the zipper in the center front.  Skip the pockets, because fitting the jeans might change the pocket locations.  Sew the back yoke to the back.  Then, baste the side seams, inseams, and center back seam.  I like to use contrasting color thread to make the remove of the basting stitches easier. 

With the jeans basted together, try them on for fit and adjust the side seams and back part of the inseam as necessary.  Yes, even pear shaped women can get jeans that just fit, without being excessively baggy anywhere.

At this point, the jeans should fit well, so it's just a matter of adding all the special touches that make jeans special.  Come back next week for a discussion of pocket embroidery and top stitching.