A Tale of Two Sweaters

Whilst I'm here at the computer I also want to document two sweaters that I've finished in the last week or so.

The first was a red fleece sweater.

I started with the basic sloper pattern that I created, then cut a yoke on the front and back pieces. I then changed the front dart into a princess seam.

I added pockets into the front princess seam.  This is the one area that didn't work perfectly. I'm not sure if there is just too much flare in the front seams, or it was just the way I put the pockets in, but unfortunately that front area does not sit nicely.

Again all seams were finished with the new overlocker and a separating zipper was added to the front seam.

I don't think its a bad first attempt.  With a little tweaking I know I'll make this again.

The second sweater is a knitted sweater.

The wool is a 100% superwash merino sport weight yarn from Cascade Yarns.  Colour 114.  When I originally bought the yarn I was planning on using it to knit a pair of leggings...However after much thought I decided that, after spending all that money I wasn't willing to take a chance that they would not get worn so decided to make it into a sweater instead.  But of course I didn't have quite enough yarn to make a long sweater - so I knitted the sleeves first to the length I needed then just knitted  the body till I ran out of wool.

The pattern is self made.   I knitted up a swatch in a number of different needle sizes and chose the one that gave the gauge I wanted, not to tight, but no big holes.  I then calculated how many stitches I would require in the body and worked upwards to figure out how many stitches to cast on.

It was knitted top down in the round so the first element I had to figure out was the neckline.  I knew I wanted a cable down the front and I wanted the cable to wrap up around the neck line and ended up bringing that ribbing up into a collar.

To figure out the cable down the front of the sweater I again swatched a number of different options before picking the one that I was most happy with.  

On the back I knew I wanted one big cable detail.

I knitted downwards from the collar, increasing front and back for the raglan sleeve.  Once I joined the front and back under the arms I put the main body of the jumper aside and knitted  the sleeves to ensure that I had enough wool to finish them.

At the ends of the sleeves I knitted more cable details.

The cuff ended up a lot tighter than I had planned so when I got the to bottom band, rather than do the same cable details I did a knit 4 purl 2 ribbing with just 5 of the cables spaced around the band and the front cable continuing down into the ban in place of the 6th cable.

I also did a small twisted cable under the arm running down the sleeve and then down the side of the body.

I added some shaping around the bust/waist and overall I'm really happy with the fit of the sweater, in fact I'm very happy with the entire sweater.

Cream Leather Alabama Chanin Style Bag

Lately I've been reading lots of posts about Alabama Chanin style clothes and I have to admit that I really like the look.  I love the whole idea of making your own fabric designs.  I was thinking about trying something myself but I wasn't sure if I wanted to commit to a big project, so I came up with the idea of making a bag.

My thoughts immediately went to the teal vinyl material that I used to make my raincoat (not yet blogged about).  Looking at the left over scraps I thought that it'd make a really nice bag especially if paired with a white/cream material, then on a trip to my local discount fabric store I found a piece of super soft cream kid leather that I immediately fell in love with.

The next problem was the design.  I looked at a number of patterns online, but couldn't find exactly what I wanted so I sat down with a pencil and paper to draft my own design.

My first draft was quite floral.

However I soon realised that I had an issue.  The left over pieces of the teal vinyl were not quite as large as I thought and I wasn't going to be able to get the whole piece out of a single offcut.  I needed to graft a couple of pieces together.  I butted the pieces up against each other and used a faggotting stitch to hold them together.

I then needed to come up with designs that didn't occur over any of the joints.  After much playing around, drawing and redrawing I came up with the following designs - I had to do two different ones rather than the same on both sides due to the different placement of the seams.

Next was the rather terrifying step of cutting out the leather.  I used a little box cutter knife as that was all I had on hand.  An exact-o knife would have been better, maybe I should invest in one for next time.

The cut out leather was placed over the pieced together vinyl.

I used two strands of embroidery thread to top stitch around each cut out.  The hardest part was keeping the two layers of fabric together.  I didn't want to use pins as I knew the pin holes would stay in the leather, but the sticky tape that I had didn't stick to the vinyl very well.  Still I finally managed to get it all stitched, then used my machine with the walking foot on to stitch around the outside edge, then cut the vinyl down to size.

Unfortunately, after cutting out the two main pieces of leather I did not have a lot of material left over for the remaining pieces of the bag, but I still needed the sides and bottom of the bag and a strap.

I managed to piece together two pieces to get the bottom/sides, but the straps had to be made out of a bunch of scraps.  4 or 5 pieces for the front and 4 or 5 pieces for the back.  Each piece was sewed together, serged and topstitched.

I decided that in order to keep all pieces of the bag at the same stiffness each piece would need a vinyl backing, which of course also needed to be pieced together.

The bag was sewn together with two long seams.

The strap  was sewn up and turned inside out ready to be attached.  A lining material, a teal knit fabric with silver flecks through it was sewn up to match the bag.

The strap was tacked to the sides of the bag.

A teal zipper was sewn in between the lining and outer fabric.  Finally some more hand top stitching was done to hold the lining back from the stitching.

And voila we have an Alabama Chanin style bag.

Red paisley dress from scratch

If I do have to say so myself this is probably my most successful "from scratch" project to date.

                                     

For a while now I've been trying to make a good sloper pattern, but thus far it has eluded me.  I've attempted two times so far as documented here and here with no real luck.  So this time around I decided I needed a new approach.  I found a different tutorial on the web here.  This one seemed a bit more basic and for the first time I was able to understand exactly what each measurement was for and how to use it which allowed me to create a much better sloper.  I was even able to add in a couple of additional measurements to give it a better fit in those areas where I really deviate from the normal.

So now I have a bodice sloper and a basic sleeve (I still need to do some work on the sleeve sloper that's still not quite right) and needed something to try it out on.  Over the weekend I went through and sorted out my entire fabric stash (and my yarn stash too whilst I was at it).  What I found when I did this was that I have very little in the way of lightweight material.  I have a bunch of cotton scraps, a bunch of knit scraps and everything else is bottom weight or heavier.  I ended up back at the red paisley fabric that I blogged about here.  This is probably the lightest weight fabric of any significant length I have so I figured it was my best bet.

Now - what to make out of it?  I really don't own or wear woven shirts - its knits all the way around here.  I knew I'd never wear a button down type shirt but then I found the Torii Tunic Pattern from Serendipity Studios.

                                         

This is something that I would wear.  I originally planned on making something similar in a tunic length, but I cut it longer just in case I needed the extra fabric and ended up liking it the length it was.  Not quite long enough to be worn without leggings, but longer than a standard tunic.

I took the basic sloper and modified the single under bust dart into an under bust dart and an armhole dart.  I cut out the bodice without any contrasting fabric to test the fit of the sloper and sewed it up just using a basting stitch.  It ended up fitting really well, the only issue that I found was that I had forgotten to true the bottom edge of the pattern after changing the darts.  Luckily I decided that for this pattern the bodice needed to be an inch shorter than I had cut it, so I was able to use that extra length to fix the issue.  I also decided my sleeves were too baggy so ran them in a smidge.  Once I was happy with the fit I took the entire thing apart and modified my pattern accordingly.  I decided that I wanted the contrasting neckline so cut the front and back bodice piece into two and added the necessary seam lines.  I then went back to my fabric and re-cut it to the new pattern pieces.

To find a contrasting fabric for the neckline, waist band and bottom I headed back to my stash.  The only thing that I found that matched was a rust red linen material.  It's a much lighter weight than the paisley material so I interfaced it to give it a bit more structure. Unfortunately I only had a very small piece of it, so was only able to get a waistband and the most of the neckband and facing out of it, so the bottom band had to be made from the main paisley material.  For the neck band I ended up having to add a bit of the paisley material right at the very back seam to get it to fit which is not great, but really who's going to notice if I don't point it out.

To make the skirt section I cut two rectangles of the paisley material and sewed them together down the side.  I pinned the side seams to the bodice side seams and then took the extra material on the back of the skirt and made it into a box pleat in center back.  The front was not quite so easy to figure out.  I did not want gathers - gathers around my waistline are NOT a good idea.   I tried just taking out the extra fabric at the seam line and making an A shaped front piece, but it ended up too tight around the belly and I was not happy with it.  In the end I went with two pleats two inches from the seam line to create a nice flat section across the front of my belly.

I was now ready to sew the thing up properly.  This was the first project for me that I got to use my new overlocker that I got for Christmas on.  Every seam was basted together on the sewing machine, serged on the overlocker, then topstitched for a really nice finish inside.  The only exception was the very back seam where the zipper was to go.  Each side of this seam was serged separately  - this material frays very badly so I didn't want any exposed edges.
   

It was during this stage that I had my first....and then my second... accidents with the overlocker.  I knew it would happen sooner or later.  An extra piece of fabric got caught under the overlocker and not just stitched but cut....arggghhhh  a new hole right in the front of the arm.  And of course I didn't have any matching thread to fix it and the black looked terrible.  After playing around with a number of different options for fixing it I just gave up and left it like this.  Again, unless you know where to look a casual observer ins't going to notice it.



I put in a invisible zipper down the back - my first invisible zipper - not my best effort, but for my first, not bad.

The last step was the hem.  I had made the skirt section extra long and I knew I didn't want it full skirt length, in the end all I did was turn the bottom up about 2.5" then , turned it back on itself and serged along the resulting three edges, effectively creating a 2" band around the bottom.