Hurricane Sewing - Melody Dolman

As I've mentioned, my firm has moved to a new building. This new building's management has slightly different policies during hurricane times in Tampa, and I'm here for them (the new policies — hurricanes not so much)! This building shuts down as soon as there is an official Hurricane Warning from the weather service. Well, that official warning for Idalia came Monday afternoon. Which means the building and my office was closed from then through yesterday (Wednesday), and it was sewing time! It felt like a "snow day" from my youth. As far as the hurricane, I had nothing but rain Tuesday night and never lost power. It's still rainy today so I'm tired of rain but I'll take that over an actual hurricane.

Below is my finished Love Notions Melody Dolman. It's too big on Zillie because Zillie is currently smaller than me. 

I was able to look at past orders online where I learned this fabric is a rayon challis I bought from Fabricmart in 2020. That's the last of the old dryer fabrics. 

The sewing part was a breeze (hurricane pun?). But the buttonholes made me want to scream. My (now ancient but still loved) Viking D1 is in sore need of servicing and it just did NOT want to make buttonholes without a fight. Ripping out a black thread buttonhole on b/w fabric is not a pleasant job. After doing that once, I decided to move to Plan B …

… which was bringing out my Featherweight and the Singer buttonhole attachment. I shouldn't have grumbled about this because it didn't take long to set up, review You Tube to be sure I was threading and attaching correctly, and then make 6 perfect buttonholes in a row. Plus, it was fun to visit with my Featherweight. 

Here are the finished Featherweight buttonholes. Sorry, you can't see much with the black thread on b/w. (One of my near-future projects really needs to be a new ironing board cover.)

Below you can see the edges of my buttonhole and the buttons I chose for this top, as well as my fading chalk marks for placement. These buttons are from Carolyn years and years ago. Thank you again Carolyn! I went with 6 buttons instead of the 5 per the pattern. I may have even gone for 7 if I had 7 buttons. I like less gaping opportunity.

Overall, I think the pattern is pretty good and goes together well. The only other thing I'd change (and I did) would be to interface the entire integrated facing instead of using just a strip per the pattern below. 

Here's the inside of the shirt. Nothing too exciting here. I attached the cuffs technically wrong but I wanted them to be bands and not cuffs so they're attached opposite of the pattern instructions. At the bottom of the shirt, I turned up a 3/8" hem, twice, and stitched it from the wrong side. 

The Melody has a standard camp collar, with good instructions, although I question why they have you snip 1/2" into a 3/8" seam allowance. I think that's a typo? But if you've been lounging around your living room watching Netflix for the past couple of years and NOT sewing (who me?), a good refresher is Katrina's video below. Her Lifting Pins and Needles channel is fun to watch.

I'm not sure what's up next. Now that I've sewn up the dryer fabric, I have given myself permission to look through my stash. That should reacquaint me with what I have and hopefully inspire a pattern/project choice.