Brasov wrap top

Pattern: Brasov wrap top by Itch To Stitch

Fabric: 1.6 m Modissimo from Textielstad (65% modal, 35% polyester)

Haberdasheries: none!

All credit to Welmode for this pattern+fabric combination. When I saw her Brasov I wanted to make one, too, and got the same fabric but in a different colour.

The pattern was quite easy to work with. Printing and assembling the digital pattern was especially easy, because of the option to print only your own size. It’s great that Itch To Stitch put that in! I didn’t always find the pictures in the guide very clear though, and I also had to alter the top a bit to fit properly, which I’m not too happy about. Why do so many patterns that are specifically for knit fabric put in so much wearing ease?! According to the size table, I should make a size 0 or 2, but luckily I read about this project and its sizing on another blog and decided to make the smallest size, 00, instead. And that fits great! Knit fabric is made for a little negative ease…

Besides making a different size, I also took about 2 cm off the shoulder because I don’t like the seam hanging off my shoulders, and to match the armhole of the Lady Skater pattern, as I wanted to use its sleeves instead. Finally, I made the shirt 3 cm shorter, which went fine using the instructions.

I sewed the shirt up in just an evening, after the cut out pattern pieces had been in my cupboard for about two months…

My Make Nine 2018 choices

A few years ago I took part in Lucky Lucille’s Sew For Victory and Spring For Cotton sewalongs. Here’s another one that seems nice to take part in, especially as her website states “This is a gentle challenge. It’s not one that you can fail. It’s meant to be flexible”! =) I’ve been trying my best not to stress myself by imposing deadlines on myself anymore, so a gentle challenge is the only thing I want to be going for…

Here are my choices, though in no particular making order!

Project #1: 1920s-40s knitted men’s slipover

I’d like for my husband to have a full civilian outfit for both the 1920s and 1940s, and this is the first part of it. This project’s already on the needles!

Project #2: Napoleonic short cloak

Last year I made a 17^th century cape for my husband, and I’ve got enough left of the wool fabric to make myself a short cloak for another era. Since I always borrow his Napoleonic cape, it would be nice for both of us if I had one of my own!

Project #3: A new 1940s dress

I’ve been (occasionally) doing World War 2 events for a few years now, but there aren’t that many clothes in my 1940s wardrobe yet, and even fewer that are a colour that actually suits me! So I want to make a new 1940s dress in a nice bright colour pattern. My husband and I have been taking 1910s-40s dancing lessons, and I'd like to go to a lindy hop party in full 1940s attire.

Project #4: 1920s party dress

Last year I went to a nice historical clothing exhibition at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (well, actually it was both historical and more recent fashion, but I largely ignored the contemporary pieces! :P), where I saw, among other things, this lovely 1920s dress that I’d like to recreate. Probably in blue, though. I’d love to wear this dress to a 1920s party!

Project #5: The Drawers of Doom

(Imagine dramatic background music) These are the drawers of my fabric cupboard. There are four of them. And since they are full of UFOs and bought clothes needing alteration (yes, all four of them!) I call them the Drawers of Doom (D.o.D.). This year, one of the main sewing related things I’d like to do is to get the D.o.D. a lot emptier than they are now! Then I could do something nice and handy with these drawers, such as storing my yarn stash in them =).

Project #6: Brasov wrap top

I really like Welmode’s Brasov top, and would like to make one as well.

Project #7: Underwear!

For years now, I’ve had trouble finding nice underwear, so I thought I’d have a go at making it myself. It would be awesome, once I’ve got a good pattern, to never have to look for underwear that it exactly to my liking, again!

Project #8: WW2 QAIMNS uniform

I’ve got two World War 1 nurse uniforms, and a Boer War one, and since I already bought suitable fabric for a WW2 version a couple of years ago, and had a look at an original last year, why not make the WW2 one as well? I suppose this project has the lowest priority, though, as I haven’t got any WW2 nurse events planned yet.

Project #9: It Cannot Fail To Please sweater

As I said under #3, I’m hoping to add more deep winter colours to my 1940s wardrobe, so I’ll be making this in dark pink.

Zebra skater dress and shirt

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 2.3 m zebra patterned knit and black cotton knit

Haberdasheries: none!

How many Lady Skater dresses is too many? I don’t know, but I do know the answer isn’t four! So here’s my fifth one! (See my other four)

It is getting quite boring to use the same pattern, and cut the same pieces, again and again, but I like these dresses so much and they are so easy to combine, that I really want more of them! And on the plus side, at least I can just get started and don’t need to make a toile. This time, it was even more of the same, because the zebra fabric I found was very thin and needed another layer of fabric underneath it, so basically I had to cut two dresses to make one. But I’m happy with the result. I like bright coloured animal prints :).

The skirt is the original length, as in the pattern. Once again, I made elbow length sleeves, my favourite sleeve length for Skater dresses, and a low neckline at the back. And as the zebra fabric, which I got on Etsy, came in a fixed length which was enough to make a shirt as well, I did!

Leopard tartan floral skater dress and shirt

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 2.7 m viscose and polyester (?) knit

Haberdasheries: none!

I ran into this slightly crazy fabric at a store and wanted to buy the usual amount for a skater dress, but since there would have been a very small piece left over, I got that for free. Therefore, as I think this fabric will look nice with a jean skirt I plan on making, once I had cut out all the pieces for the dress, I also cut a shirt out of the leftovers.

 

I had just cut the front of the dress when I realised the part of the fabric I liked the least would be the main visible part when I wear a cardi over the shirt. So I cut the front again, with a nicer layout, and just used the first front as the back, resulting in a low neckline at the back of the shirt. I had been thinking of doing this anyway as I saw it on another skater and liked it.

This fabric was difficult to serge – I took a serging lesson and thought I now understood the machine, but it gave me a hard time again with this dress and skirt – and also nasty to hem, as it’s got velvety swirls on it which are thicker than the rest of the fabric. The twin needle hem initially looked like this:

Eek. This made me think about why I twin needle the hem of the skirt anyway. The sleeves, sure; they need to be elastic, after all. But the skirt doesn’t! So I ripped the hem and restitched it with a single needle, and that looks much better.

Blotchy skater

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 2.5 m rayon and polyester Ponte di Roma knit

Haberdasheries: none!

I’m not quite done making Lady Skater dresses yet! The third one I’ve made is more suitable for autumn and winter, as it’s made from a thicker, Ponte di Roma knit. The fabric is supposed to be half rayon and half polyester, but the polyester seems to be on the inside, so I hope this dress won’t be too perspiration inducing…

I bought the fabric online. I really liked the photo of it, and even the sample I ordered first, but when the full piece of cloth arrived it turned out the pattern, which in my mind was supposed to look pretty random, was really repetive:

I wasn’t happy about this, but I made the dress anyway since it’s so little work, and I think the repetitiveness isn’t that obvious when I wear the dress.

I had big problems getting my serger to cooperate when I made my previous two skater dresses, but this time it behaved admirably once again. I think it’s just got a problem with very thin fabric, for some reason.

Here’s the dress in progress. I decided not to topstitch the neckline this time.

Again, I lengthened the sleeves and the skirt by a few centimetres, while shortening the bodice quite a bit.

 

Lacy skater

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 3 m rayon or cotton/rayon knit

Haberdasheries: none!

So, when I didn’t have any trouble using my overlocker for my KittySkater shirt, I thought: this is going so well, let’s carry on with the next Lady Skater dress straight away! And as soon as I put this fabric under the machine, it started skipping stitches like mad, and driving me crazy as before. WHY?!

I wanted to take this dress on holiday with me so I was determined to finish it quickly, but don’t ask what it looked like on the inside… Or well, I’ll show you:

The only reason I got away with this and could actually wear the dress, is that the lace design hides the gaps in the seams. I have now fixed those by zigzagging the missing bits on my regular sewing machine.

I’ve got a lace print shirt I really like, so I was looking for a lace print fabric for a Lady Skater dress and found this:

I was happy to find something so close to what I was looking for (that doesn’t often happen!) but I didn’t like the border, as I think it looks too different from the rest of the print. So I bought three metres and hoped that would be enough to avoid using the border. When I came home I realised that unless I wanted a black lace band running down my front and back, I’d actually have to cut the fabric perpendicular to its grain! I had no idea whether that would be acceptable (the dress might start stretching too much lengthwise after repeated wearing), but as it had similar amounts of stretch in both directions, and I didn’t like the vertical print option, I just went for it.

Pattern matching this was a bit of a nightmare as all the lace patterns had different widths and their centres didn’t line up, but I think I did a nice job!