Hiatus

I will be on a (hopefully) brief sewing hiatus. I am packing up my stuff and moving to a new home city to start my very first teaching position. This is really so exciting.

I just finished Simplicity 3678, but my camera has been packed away already. The short review is that I am very pleased, but my rayon jersey has more than the recommended stretch, so I have some minor fitting quibbles. On the whole, very cool.

Back soon!

New Look 6407

And so the quest for a decent shirt pattern continues... Enter New Look 6407. In the end, I got an OK shirt, but I don't know if this is really my shirt pattern.

Here is a quick look at the adjustments I made to the front:
In stead of blending from the size 16 bust to the size 14 hips, I just widened the dart about the same amount. I thought this was rather clever and it seemed to do the job. I also shortened the waist 1" and narrowed the shoulders by 5/8". I had concerns about the dart placement, but they weren't too far off from my sloper darts, so I thought I would wing it. After putting together the shell, I found that the "mini gusset" under the arms was more room that I needed, so I folded out of the pattern (front and back).

And then we come to the back adjustments. There was more going on here. I adjusted for my short back length. I have heard this called a sway back adjstment, but I don't think of myself as having a sway back. Note that once I took 2" out of the center back, I needed to add about 1" back at the hem to keep the length over my tush.

After I compared the back to my sloper, I decided to move the back dart toward my spine. I have "ye olde muffine toppe" and I didn't want a design element pointing directly to it. I also narrowed the shoulders 5/8" to match the front.

You may notice that there are about 4 different versions of the darts. When I rotated the pattern fr the center back fold, this took about 1" off the side hip. I was looking for a way to go down one size in the hips at the back, but I only needed to take off about 3/8" of the back pattern to accomplish that. When I put the shell together it was waaaay too tight at the hips. I almost had to call this a wadder, but then I remembered that I could let out a fair amount at the darts. The shirt was SAVED! Yaaaaaay!


So here's the finished product:

I think that th stripes in the fabric make this look at little like a baseball uniform, but that's my own fault. I'm not thrilled with the darts. I thought they would work because I carry a lot of my bust fullness to the side. I thought that having the darts more towards the sides would work, but it just seems to create this odd line. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Other issues aside, the back and side views are nice and it does not gap open in the front.




Unless I get some insight into what went wrong here, I will probably keep looking for another basic shirt pattern.

Purse Organizer

This is a fantastic (and simple) purse organizer pattern that I found on The Giving Flower. You can download very nice pdf instructions from her site. I used some silk and silk brocade from my stash. I think this might make my life a little bit better. :)