A non sewing ramble and a pants sloper

Not a lot of sewing has been happening lately.  The kids have been on April vacation for the last week and I've been concentrating on having fun with them.  I do admit that there are times that I really miss the kids now that they're both in school full time.  Not the day to day stuff, but the fun outings etc.  So I managed to totally fill the first half of vacation week with a million and 1 things.  Monday we learnt how to letterbox, then painted bee hives at our favourite ice cream store. Tuesday was a trip to Plymouth, Wednesday a train trip in to town and Thursday a hike with our old playgroup friends and a brownie trip to the the bowling alley.  After all that we were exhausted to we tried to take it as easy as possible for the rest of the week.....well as much as we could between birthday parties.  Then finally on Sunday I came down with some bug and spent the day in bed.  So all in all not much time to spend on sewing.

What time I did find during this week and the one before has been spent trying to perfect a pants pattern.  This has been on my to do list ever since my last pair of pants that I wasn't entirely happy with.

I decided to start from the beginning and draft a pair of pants from scratch.  I used this tutorial to start the process.  The front I was happy enough with, 

but the minute I turned around the problems started, there was just so much pulling in so many different directions.

I spent days on and off making minute adjustments.  I would think that I had it then go back and try them on again and realise just how bad they still were and try more adjustments. Nothing worked.

Finally I thought that as I was planning on making a pair of cargo pants maybe I should try letting them out and seeing if I could get them to work that way, so I made a second sloper with wider pants and extra ease around the hips

Again OK in front.

.
But still pulling terribly in the back.

A lot more playing around with adjustments got me to this, but I still wasn't happy.

Lying in bed one night thinking over my problem I came up with a solution. I was originally thinking that I needed to make a duct tape dummy of my lower half so that I could see first hand where the problem was, and then I thought about how I make my shoes, using duct tape to tape over an existing shoe to create a pattern and thought, why can't I do that for pants too?  So the next morning saw me in the middle of the kitchen wrapping myself in plastic bags and then taping myself together.  Once I had my abdomen done and had taped down the length of one legs and halfway down the other I ran out of duct tape, but I figured that that would be enough.  I took and thick artline pen to my tape pants and drew in where the side seams, the front and back seams and the inner seams should be and also a straight line down the front and back of the leg, then I cut down each of the seam lines to get myself out.  What I ended up with was:

I compared my duct tape piece with my original pattern - what did I find?

  I had seriously underestimated the amount of pitch I needed on my back pattern piece.

So I made yet another sloper based on my duct tape pattern.

Very tight obviously as it has no ease, but most of the pulling issues seem to be resolved.

So I took this pattern and modified it into cargo pants - and ended up with:

Crap!

Well I obviously did something wrong.  This is definitely something I struggle with - adding ease - I've still not found any good resources on how and where to add ease, all you ever seem to get is "Add 2 inches ease around the hips"  OK but how?  and seriously 2 inches that would be so baggy.

So after a bit of logical thinking I think I've realised the issue.  When adding ease to the center back and front seams I just added the ease onto the outside of the entire seam, but where it curves at the bottom the ease should actually be taken out not added on.

I made a few adjustments and ended up with this.

It's still not perfect but I've finally decided that I just have to go for it, if I spend any more time on this I'm going to go insane and I figure a pair of pants that isn't perfect is still better than no pants at all.  Hopefully once the waistband is on and all the pockets are in place it'll be less obvious.

So that's it.  I've finalised my pattern,  including pocket details, cut out the fabric and its just waiting for me to get around to sewing it all together.  My next question is what colour top stitching I will use and what design to put on the back pocket.

Black and Blue Knitted Sweater

 Wow - I really need to come up with a better title than that - How boring can you get - and for such an impressive piece of work....if I do have to say so myself.

This sweater was very much inspired by the Damask Jumper made by One Small Stitch.  Up till now I've never really been tempted to try any colour work in my knitting - well maybe the odd stripe or two, but I look at the fair isle patterns and whilst I like them they're not really my style so I've never bothered with them.  

But then I saw this damask design and really loved it and decided that maybe I should have another think about this colour work idea.  I've been wanting to knit a black sweater lately, they're just so versatile and my wardrobe is really lacking that, but I could never bring myself to knit a plain black sweater - how boring would that be, so when I saw the damask sweater I got an idea.  How about a plain black sweater with a design on the front in colour.

I knew from the start that I was never going to find a knitting pattern to match what I wanted so instead I just started searching for design ideas.  I kept coming up blank so I sat down with a pencil and paper to see what I could come up with.  What I came up with was this.

Now I had to figure out how to translate this design into stitches that could be knitted.  I grabbed my chart paper and started colouring in.

The result wasn't exactly the same, but it had potential.

Next I had to figure out how to apply it to a sweater.  I decided to go with a basic V neck, top down, raglan sweater as that's what I know best.  I bought a ball of the wool that I had decided on, knitted up a quick swatch to determine what size needles and what my gauge would be, then I got down to some serious maths. I calculated how many stitches I would need, how many rows, where I needed increases and decreases etc and fully wrote out the pattern for my new sweater line by line.  Once I knew how many rows and stitches I would need for the front of my sweater I started sticking together sheets of my graph paper and sketching out the outline of the sweater front.  One square for each stitch.

I started with one pattern repeat right in the center just under the V and then played around with adding repeats of the elements to fill up the front area and now I had a pattern.

A few more calculations and I had an estimate on how much wool I would require so I could finally go out and buy my wool.  I decided to go with Rown 100% superwash wool in Black and Azure.  This is a worsted weight wool with a beautiful feel to it - we will see how it goes with pilling after I've worn it a time or two.

The only real problem that I had with this project was figuring out how to get the wool back to the start of each row.  Due to the fact that the sweater was knit in the round, but the blue is only on the front, in order to get the wool back to the start of each row I had to carry a float right back across the length of the front.  To reduce the length of the floats a bit I used two balls of the blue and worked one ball across the first half of the sweater to the center and then a second ball from the center to the other side, but that still left an awful lot of long floats.  At the very end of the project I had to go back and using black thread stitch down all the floats so that they weren't flapping around.

If I were to go back and do this again I think I would split my wool into 4 or 5 balls and work each element of the design with a separate ball.

 The bottom band was knit as a 2x2 rib all in black but for the cuffs I added two rows of the blue to the ribbing for a little pop of contrast on the sleeves.

The neck band was knit last with a 1x1 rib in the black with a double decrease in the center of each row.  As the neck opening had turned out much larger than I anticipated, after the first couple of rows of ribbing I switched down a needle size to really bring the neckband in. 

 I also added about 4 short rows around the back of the neckline to bring the back neckline up higher.

After 10 full rows of ribbing I switched to a smaller needle size yet again and also switched to plain knit stitch for 4 rows to produce a neat rolled edge at the edge of the neckband.

I'm very happy with how this turned out.  The colour work itself is probably not the best example in the world, but for my first real attempt I'm more than happy with it.

It's Snowing....In April....So I'm making a Swimsuit

It's obvious really isn't it?  What else would you start sewing when there's snow everywhere and it's freezing cold (quite literally it's below freezing out there at the moment), but a swimsuit?

This project has been lurking in the back recesses of my brain for quite some time now - most of the winter really.  I made my very first swimsuit at the end of last summer.  That original pattern -consisting of a bikini top with cross over straps and boy leg shorts with ruching at the sides - which was pretty much made up as I went along - was OK, but of course for a first attempt it wasn't perfect.

 Things I did like about it:

• good coverage of the bikini line and stretch marks on the stomach
• good support in the top

Things I didn't like about it:

• Was really hard to get on and off
• the bottoms didn't sit right and needed constant adjustment.

So I wanted to try again and see if I could do better.

What I was looking for in the new swimsuit:

• Good support up top
• just the right amount of cleavage
• covers the stretch marks on my belly
• comfortable to wear

During one of my internet browsing sessions I came across this swimsuit on Pattern Review and fell in love with the back view.  All the ring details really appealed to me.

I started playing around with ideas for my swimsuit based on my shorter and wider torso and came up with the following:

I knew that in order to support the weight of my boobs I needed a good piece of elastic under them and so required a band that goes right around the chest, and then I worked down from there adding in the rings and cut outs until I found a combination that was pleasing to my eye.  

Now to make this into a pattern.  The top half is pretty much exactly the same as my original swimsuit so I recopied that pattern and made a few minor adjustments, mainly to the shape of the cups to provide better coverage. 

To get a pattern for the bottom half I found online a free hipster pant pattern from Makebra.com.  Based on my hip measurement I cut out and sewed up a size large out of a piece of neon fluro orange knit material I had in my stash. When I went to try them on however I found them to be way too large.  I pulled a pair of underwear out of my drawer that I like the shape of and compared it to my pattern and cut it down as required until I had a pattern (and a new pair of underwear) that I liked the shape of.

I then took this pattern and extended it up to meet the top half.

I wanted to get started on the swimsuit but didn't have any rings that I could use so I decided to modify the pattern slightly for a first attempt, eliminate the rings but keep the same general design.

I grabbed a piece of plain black lycra I had in my stash and cut out the pattern pieces.  I basted it together  to see how it would work..The top half was fine,and the bottoms close, but I'd overestimated how much length I needed in the bodice so it was too long.  I pinned out the extra length, and re-cut my pattern to the new length.  This cut off an entire cut out detail and ended up as:

I decided that I was close enough to a good pattern that I could break into my good material.  A polyester/lyca in shade of purple, red and silver that I've had in my stash for quite a while now waiting till I got around to this project. I'm not sure how well it will go in chlorine, but we shall see wont we.

This time I cut the front and back bottom pieces without any cutouts - I took them right up to the band under my bust and figured I could add the cut outs later when I was sure of their placement.

I reused the black top pieces as lining and recut the bottom pieces in black as well so that the entire suit is lined in black. 

I started by sewing the shoulder straps to the top pieces for both the outer and lining fabrics, then sewed the lining to the outer fabric  along the length of the strap and around to the back under the arm, and also along the strap and down to the center front.  Each of these seams then had clear elastic serged to provide extra support around the breasts.  The two pieces were turned right sides out and were then joined together down the middle seam. The resulting piece was sandwiched between the two band pieces and sewn together.  The bottom edges of the band were turned under and sewn together and a piece of 1" wide elastic was inserted through the resulting channel.

 I finished the back band with a swimsuit clasp and decided to go with a cross across the back with the shoulder straps.  I've found that I like the look of this top best when it's a halter, but wearing a halter top - especially for any length of time gets very tiring on the neck.  Straight over the shoulder straps tend to leave my boobs sagging out at the sides so crossed over is a nice compromise, harder to get into than straight straps but more pleasant to wear than a halter.

The final step was to zip zag over all the seams with the clear elastic so that everything stays in place like its supposed to.

The bottom pieces were sewn together between the legs for both the inner and outer fabrics, then positioned right sides together and the leg openings sewn together - again clear elastic was added to these seams.  The piece was turned inside right and the side seams were sewn together.  To finish off the pants I serged the top edge and added clear elastic again.

At this point I contemplated leaving the swimsuit as a bikini.   I folded a pleat around the top edge so that the elastic was at the top but it was the height I wanted.  I made the front higher than the back as I like to cover up my belly button as that has the worst of the stretch marks, but I don't like the look of high wasited at the back so took that down lower.  

I thought that I would leave this as is, but I wasn't entirely happy with it so a couple of days later I went back and started playing around with it again.

I tried just sewing the two pieces together.

And was quite happy with how it looked.  But it was just so....boring....just a plain one piece swim suit!  so I continued playing around with the two pieces

 A small change gives a little interesting detail.

I like this idea - but I didn't like how the bottoms pulled the top down when attached like this.

The only thing that I was sure of was that I liked what I had done with the back.  In order to get the back to dip like I wanted I took a small length of black ribbon and threaded it through the center back of the pants at the height that I wanted and then wrapped it over the edge pulling the back down into a dip.

I decided to try something similar in the front to get close to the original design.

Nope - but this gave me the idea of using the ribbon to lace the top and bottom together.  It wasn't until I finished the entire thing that I realised that I'd laced the top on inside out..... but do you know what.  I tried it on and was actually quite happy with the look.  The lacing gives a nice pop of detail - and the black makes a nice contrast to the busy fabric....

Thankfully the top was just about reversible anyway - all it took was to re-stitich the shoulder straps to the new underside and I was happy to say I finally had a finished design.

In the end this looks nothing like the original design, and it's not overly easy to get into still, but it is a swimsuit that I will be happy to wear out.

I'd still like to get some rings and try out the original pattern but I think I'll keep that for another day.

Sewing the Basics: Tote Bags

I don't know about anyone else but I have real problems with shopping these days.  More often that not I'll find something I like, but then go - I can make that: better... cheaper...cuter.... etc myself and so I don't buy it - but then of course I never do get around to making said item.

I've been saying that about tote bags forever - The ones I have now are all many years old and falling apart and really really ugly.  I've thought numerous times of just buying new ones, but I can't bring myself to do it, I just keep promising myself to make some.

So finally last week I decided that enough was enough I had to do it.  I was at the fabric store and they had all these heavy weight cottons in really cute prints on sale for $2.49 /yard so I bought a bunch of them and came home and started making them up.

For the first bag I decided to just make up the pattern as I went along.  I measured all my existing bags to figure out how big I wanted it - added seam allowance - enough for french seams as I knew I wanted the bags french seamed as my fabric was all very prone to fraying.  Cut out a front, back, two sides and a bottom and then started sewing all the seams together.  Of course I realised at some point that this was not the most efficient way to make a tote bag - too many seams, too many awkward angles etc

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this bag - I just knew it was too much work for what it was...
so I resorted back to the internet to look up tote bag tutorials.

I finally settled on the method shown at The Crafty Sisters.  I modified my pattern so that there was now only 1 single pattern piece that included front back, sides and bottom. I even eliminated the bottom seam by cutting the pattern on a fold at the bottom.  So now it was a matter of simply french seaming the two side seams, then french seaming the two bottom edges.  So much easier.

So my lesson for the day - You don't have to always do everything yourself.  Its perfectly acceptable and a lot easier to follow instructions if they already exist.

Shoes Glorious Shoes

A long long time ago.  On a continent far far away I found that most mythical of beasts - that holy grail.......the perfect pair of shoes.

These shoes were worn everyday for years and years....and years....and years, till finally I had to admit that they were so dirty and tattered that I had to retire them.  They then sat in the back of the cupboard for a few more years till I could finally bring myself to throw them out - it was a sad day.

So what was it that made these shoes so wonderful....Hmmm

• They were flats - always a necessity for comfort.  
• They had a pointy toe - I love pointy toed shoes (I think its because i have such short, wide feet it gives me the illusion of longer more elegant feet).  
• They were slip on - so you could just throw them on at any time,
• They were cute -so important.... they were made from a pink and blue striped fabric with a cute little flower on the side.
• They went with everything - and I do mean everything.  I don't know how a pair of pink and blue shoes go with everything but they did. They were good with a dressy skirt, but also great with a pair of jeans.  I could wear them with shorts or a dress, formal or informal.
• They were comfortable - I could walk for miles in them, and often did.

Ever since I've been searching for a similar pair of shoes but I've never found anything to match - I have, on occasions, found other pairs of shoes that were cute pointy toed flats - but they ended up being totally uncomfortable - I've had other comfortable shoes - but generally they were boring black or brown.  But never that perfect combination of everything.


So obviously once I started making shoes it was always at the back of my mind that I would try and recreate these shoes.  However at the time all the shoes I was making were soft soled and it wasn't possible to have shoes without a back.  Now that I've started makings shoes with rubber soles I figured it was time to give it try...and so I did.

Are they as good as my perfect pair....well not quite, but they're close.

I made these shoes using pretty much the same method that I used for my summer sandals.  I started with a piece of cork cut to the shape of my foot and extended to a point.  I used the same template as I did for the sandals.  I then cut  a piece of lounge suite leather and wrapped it around the cork sewing it together on the underside.  I tried a couple of different options to avoid any bunching of the leather on the underside, cutting out the excess leather where I could.

The shape of the top of the shoe I again found using duct tape over the top of a pair of shoes that I like the shape of.  I taped around the shoes over a plastic bag, then cut the duct tape off to create a pattern.  Thinking back on my original shoes I think they were cut straight across rather than curving around my foot, but I thought this might stay on my foot better.

These shoes are made from an old piece of cotton in my stash.  My son chose this Japanese print fabric a couple of years ago to make a pair of shorts out of.  I fell in love with the fabric and have been trying to figure out what I could do with the last little scrap of it.  I thought halfway through that I was going to regret this fabric choice, that it was going to be a bit blah in such small amounts but I'm quite happy with the final product.

The underneath of the top is a fuzzy light blue fabric - I have no idea what it's made out of but its been great for making shoe linings.  Between these two fabrics I used another piece of heavy cotton.  This was used to hold the toe puff in place.  The tow puff itself is made from recycled yoghurt container.  I decided that I wanted a  toe puff in these shoes as I wanted to be able to just slip the shoes on at any time, not have to open them up etc.  I've happy with the way that this worked out.  They hold their shape beautifully.

Once the three layers of fabric and the toe puff had been sewed together I then had to sew the tops onto the sole.  I used the same technique of hand sewing across the bottom of the sole.  Once all the hand sewing was done it was time to glue on the rubber sole.  this was again cut out of rubber base board and glued on using contact cement.

I haven't had a chance to try them out yet except around the house as it rained today and I didn't want to ruin them on day 1, but they seem pretty comfortable.

Time will tell if they become my new holy grail of shoes!