Tag: Black

Convocation Dress

Another event just happened. We opened the academic year yet again. This time, I had a dress that barely had any back. But it was too cold so I wore the magic Shrug? over it to keep warm.

It all started when I was looking for a pattern that would make a nice dress and would be interesting. So I searched through all my stash and found Knipmode November 2015 which contained dresses 7 and 10. I combined the sleeves from 10 with the body from 7. This was possible since dresses 7 through 11 all had the same bodice, just different sleeves, skirts and neckline treatments.

I finally managed to use a fabric that I had bought for an event like this. It’s some form of slightly stretchy woven thing with large floral print. I’m not generally one for florals, but this one was not dainty, so it fit me better. However, there wasn’t very much of it, so I shortened the skirt and did not make a full lining for the bodice, but improvised a partial lining. I attempted to do an exposed zipper for the first time ever. It was also the first time I tried a horsehair braid hem.

The main alteration was that I had to take the back in by at least 5 cm, I don’t know why. Apart from that, I think that the darts were all in the right places and the pockets are very nice. There is a snap on the top closure thing, since I didn’t want to make a button hole.

Cutting the pattern probably took the longest. I had put all the pieces on my fabric and it was not fitting on at all, so I shortened the skirt, which helped, and then tried to find the configuration which would save the most fabric. Then after sewing most of the pieces together, I had to cut out the partial lining. For some reason I was afraid of this, so that took a few days of gathering courage. Eventually I did manage to get my act together and put the thing together. Then some minutes of watching horsehair braid being applied and I went for it, which took some time at the television to hand sew and voila, a dress!

Bras are in danger of showing a little, but I have decided that it shouldn’t be too big of a problem. With the shrug over it, no one would be able to tell anyway. So far, it does wear nice, but it needs an under skirt of some kind if I’m wearing a legging. Shouldn’t be a problem next summer.

Shrooms on the EDC

Some people have a pocket knife that they drag around everywhere, some people have a pen and a notebook, I have a whole pouch of stuff I transfer from bag to bag to make sure I have everything I might possibly need on a day to day basis. We call this the Every-Day-Carry. Mine’s been living in a pouch made from a weird kind of rain-coat-ish fabric that was never pretty but fairly functional. However, that pouch was completely flat with a zipper at the top, as such, fitting stuff in was a little hard at times. It needed a revamp.

Enter the tablecloth-type fabric sale which had some fantastic white on black mushrooms for sale. I got myself .5 meters and set to work creating a block zip pouch. I chose to do one 10 x 10 x 28 cm, since my original pouch was 28 cm. After finishing it, it turned out it was too big. So I made another one that was 8 x 8 x 28 cm. Perfect size! Left is the large one, middle the medium one and right the original one.

Next, I set out to create a little pouch for my dice. This was based on the Pyramid Pouch, mainly because I thought those looked cool and could hold some dice. The dice pouch now lives inside the larger box pouch that comes with me. I chose to do a red zipper because I had one on hand and I thought it looked cool.

After the success with the black pouches, I went back to the shop and got half a meter of the same fabric, but now in an ochre yellow. I was going to go on holiday for a few days and I wanted to have a nicer looking toiletries bag. So that is why the ochre came to be. It’s a little shorter than my original, since the longest thing in the toiletries bag would be my toothbrush. And saving space is always good.

Lastly, I made a tiny coin pouch based on some half-moon type thing (here) and attached a longish loop to it so that it could be fished out of my bag easily. My wallet does not have space for coins since it is cards only, but I wanted to have a place to put coins if I happened to pay in cash.

All in all, I had a good few hours of pouch making and am now set to create a cover for my new miniature scooter thing. It’s foldable to allow carrying, which is useful. However, if the wheels are dirty, my pants become dirty also and I want to prevent that from happening. Hopefully I’ll manage in a short enough time for it to be of use.

Improvements Needed

Remember all those sporting skorts of which only one had pockets? This is no longer the case. I put pockets on the three remaining skirts such that I will actually choose them. I also took in the elastic on of them such that it fit slightly better. I’m quite happy with this improvement. You might even be able to see the single pocket that was added to these skorts.

The second improvement was to the riding jacket. As I mentioned before, it shrunk in the wash and the sleeves needed to be let out and lengthened. Finally finished this today. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get done. It was not too hard to finish it.

Lets hope that these improvements will help to get more wear out of these items.

 

Striped Shorts

After sewing the Tantalus scarf, I started leafing through my pattern magazines and I spotted some shorts I thought looked cool. Burda 6/2009, shorts 120. I liked the idea of the vaguely paper bag looking waist and the ties on the side. So I copied the pattern onto pattern paper, made an adjustment in the width of the crotch (need to remember for next time to add even more width), since that tends to be a regularly required adjustment and gave up for the day.

 I hadn’t figured out which fabric I wanted to use, but the next day it came to me. Why not use some striped black stuff I’d previously used for something – cannot remember what – and make them look vaguely formal. So off to work I went, cutting out all the bits and pieces. Then I tried to follow the (dreaded) Burda instructions…  Well, until the zipper. The instructions were half a page full of text, no pictures whatsoever. I did not understand what in the world they meant. So after pondering for a little bit, I decided to ditch the instructions and use me some google to get the job done. This led me to a page of someone who also had had problems with the instructions and gave me the new name for all my boxes of fabric: the hoard. This is the quote from ‘Sewing for Life’:

“my hoard (I stopped calling it stash…it’s really a hoard of fabric I have.  A stash is something to work from, constantly being used and renewed.  A hoard is just a stockpile that keeps getting added on to and therefore keeps getting bigger and bigger!” (here)

I managed to get a good zipper in, when I figured out that the pattern also had a button. I was not interested enough in undoing all my hard work and just left the button off. The next day I finished hemming the end of the first and the second leg, and project was done!

There are in seam pockets, and those two little ties and I think it looks good. I’m hoping it will actually be nice weather again soon, because I cannot wait to try them out for real.

Fire Playsuit

I have had a piece of stretchy stuff with a sort of fire-ish pattern on it, hanging on a hanger in my sewing room for a seriously long while now. Finding a pattern for it had never worked out so it was just hanging there. One day, I think a few weeks back? I figured I needed to get my act together and actually make something from it. I searched through my pattern magazines yet again and discovered an interesting looking playsuit-thing with a front zipper in Simplicity 27 – model 15. So I copied it onto pattern paper and got myself into gear.

I wanted the whole front to be firey and since the fabric was fire down the middle and black on the sides, this meant that the back of the suit would be completely black. Now, I’m not completely happy with this thing. The interfacing I used along the zipper is too stiff, the whole thing feels frumpy and the neckline is too low. I’m not sure of the length of the legs and overall just not really happy with it. Perhaps it will grow on my once I wear it a little, so I hope the good weather comes out to play and I can incorporate it into my Me-Made-May 18 pledge. If I figure I will not wear it, I might just donate it to someone else and/or goodwill.

Some items are just winners, some are losers but if you have some suggestions on how to make it look.. better, I’m all ears.

Even More Skorting

So there was still a little bit left over of the two fabrics I’ve used for my previous skorts. Last week I made a similar one to the improved version, so a half circle skirt. This time with a zipper in the waistband to create a little pocket for a key or such.

In order to make the zipper function correctly, and not get stuck in the fabric all the time, I put some ribbon behind it. There is also elastic in the top edge.

I managed to fit another skort in the last few remaining bits and pieces. This was another type of skort. The same shorts pattern was used, taken in about two centimeters to make it fit on the fabric. For the skirt, I googled skort and found a Jalie pattern (Jalie 2796 Multi-Sport Skort) of which I liked the features, so I attempted to draft something similar. I probably did not make it wide enough in the front since it seems to bunch up a little. But this tends to happen with skirts anyway. So I will see in the summer whether it works. The good thing about this one is that it has pockets in the sides and another hidden pocket on the leg.

All in all, getting four garments out of two coupons of fabric is quite a success. I’m going to try to throw out the leftovers. Then I won’t have more stuff remaining.

Graduation Winter 2018

So the inspiration for this one was based on these two pins: skirt & dress. The bottom is two half circle skirts, and the top is the always fabulous garden party dress, somewhat hacked. I used a knit fabric that was black on one side and had a diagonal plaid pattern on the other side. The bottom had a kind of odd graffiti border, but I choose not to show that, and it’s now the inside of the outer skirt. There was not a lot of fabric left after cutting two half circle skirts, so I had to make some choices to conserve fabric.

Those little reverse triangles in the shoulder meant I could position the front more economically on the fabric. For the sleeves, I did use the original sleeve width, but the sleeve caps of a t-shirt pattern were substituted. I made the sleeves as long as I could with what fabric remained. However, elbow length sleeves are the devil – cold underarms. So I decided to attempt a kind of bishop sleeve by using another piece of fabric. This worked! It’s just about long enough and has the shallowest hem I could manage.

One of the hardest parts of this dress was figuring out how to do pockets. For events like this, I need to have pockets to put my phone and the schedule etc in. Since there were no side seams, in seam pockets would be hard. Making symmetric welt pockets in a stretchy knit would also not be my idea of fun, also because I did not have a lot of fabric left. In the end I made giant patch pockets. They are not super visible, but did work very well.

I liked this dress, although it was not as successful in keeping out the cold as last year’s outfit was. Still, it performed its duty even if I did change into pants and a sweater halfway through the reception. For next year, I’ll try to find something warmer.

Plaid Pants – Blue

So somewhere in 2017, I bought a length of black-blue-red plaid to make another set of plaid pants. I reworked my original pattern a little bit – slimming and straightening the legs a little and copying all the pattern pieces onto tracing paper since the original is still the boob-height pattern of the Helena Culottes. Now I have all pattern pieces that fit together well. Apart from one thing, but we’ll get to that.

Cutting out the pieces taking care to pattern match, where possible and sewing it together all went pretty well. I used the blue origami cats for pockets/waistband/zipper guard (I thought it was funny to have more cats behind the zip). The only problem was the waistband. I clearly did not use a well-fitting waistband so I had to make numerous adaptations. This is the one major aspect that I need to improve for the next version (there will probably be a next version).

I had worn it with hooks & eyes and the too wide waistband, but that was not a true success. So I shortened it a little, and replaced the hooks & eyes with a jeans type button – lesson 2: shorter shank next time. I also took more chunks out of the waistband to get it to fit better. Now it works really quite well, I finished it right before Christmas and I enjoy wearing it.

These new plaid pants also allow me to wear my red sweaters with them. My other plaid pants are green, and I don’t want to look like Christmas in July, so that was not an option. This was a large part of the reason for picking up the fabric. Also just because it is plain and I seem to have a fond liking for plaid. I still have a length of red plaid in the stash, but I was planning on making a jacket out of that.. We’ll see whether that ever happens.

Sport Skort Evolution

In December I will be playing my first roller derby game. It is very exiting and very scary. We will all be wearing a yellow sport top with our name and number on it. However, for bottoms, we can figure it out ourselves. I wanted to have something different from just short leggings (or long leggings), so I set out to create a skirt with attached short leggings, now named the sport skort.

The first iteration used the leggings pattern from the striped leggings, taken in along the side seam and back seam significantly. With an added full circle skirt from some strange waffle-scuba type stuff. I had the waffle stuff on the outside. While testing it out, I determined that I liked the idea of the skirt, but since the fuzzy side was down, it kept sticking to the attached shorts. It was also very full which made it behave less than ideal. This is also why it ended up in the closet and is wrinkled in the pictures.

The second iteration took the same pattern, but I overlapped the side seams to each leg is now one piece. The skirt is a half circle from the same fabric as before, now added with the waffle side in and the fuzzy side out. The waistband is still from the leggings stuff, now with an added pocket for my mouth guard. This is most likely the shortest skirt I’ve ever worn outside of my house.

The only reason I dare to wear this it is because it has the attached leggings. This version fares much better and I’m actually thinking of making a second one, since this one is very comfortable. I declare this a success!

For the second version I cut the skirt with the same diameter, but being a half circle vs. a full circle, the waist takes up more of the diameter and the skirt becomes shorter. On the left the first version and on the right the second version.

Bottle Cover

A weekend at a larp and a new bottle require a new bottle cover. The new bottle was a lot larger than previous bottles and would not work for it’s intended purpose. I did base the design in part on my previous version Invisible Plastic.

After the hat I still had some more of the wool left over and figured it would work as a more or less waterproof cover. I cut out a circle, added some sides and a hanging loop. I needed to attach to pieces together to form a large enough rectangle for the sides. Then I needed to figure out how to close the thing. I the end, I opened up the front a little and keep the flaps to close over each other. Then I added another button to the front and a semi-decorative closure in a vague leaf shape.

I made it somewhat too big by accident and decided to sew an additional seam at the front to make sure it was not too loose. This also allowed me to open up part of the piecing on the front and create a miniature pocket. For proof I added a brownie spoon, it will probably hold a pencil while in action. (note from after the event, yep, it did)