Niagara No. 3

Continuing on with the (unplanned) turquoise and navy theme of the month, I made my third Pattern Niche Niagara top in stash ITY knit from Fabric Mart (I think).

For this one, I extended the cut-on-fold pattern pieces so I could cut flat in order to center some of the motifs in a more pleasing manner than willy-nilly. I'm not going to lie - this was a Royal Pain in the Arse since I had 4+ yards of this fabric and wrangling the slipperyness and weight of it over my cutting table and then cutting the big pieces was a Chore. But it all worked out and I'm happy with the design placement (although I could be a tiny bit happier with the lower front bodice but I wasn't about to re-do it for something no one but me will notice/care about.) I do love how the back yoke turned out.

This fabric has a border print along each selvedge and I decided to take advantage of it for both the neck binding and by adding sleeve bands.

To go along with my blog return, I also cracked open my Instagram account yesterday and posted a couple of these photos, noting that my binding skills seem to be like riding a bike. Whew! I don't, however, think my current bike riding skills are like binding with a coverstitcher. ;-) 

Part of the "skill" is using scraps of fusible interfacing on the binding strips to give them a bit of oomph and to prevent the edges from curling. Match the direction of stretch in the interfacing to the crosswise stretch of the binding.

I guess I've been in a hole, but apparently quilters are using coverstitch binders on their sewing machines to attach quilt bindings? Of course, the sewing machine companies aren't calling them coverstitch binders and are selling them at high dollar with specialty plates so the binder can be attached to the sewing machine. Interesting. Anyway, I saw a tip in a You Tube video (13:15 mark) to use an awl between the foot and binder to help guide the binding, as shown below. It's a good tip and I highly recommend it when coverstitching a binding on.

Are you Team All The Pins when you attach gathering to a non-gathered piece? I say the more the merrier and sew very s-l-o-w-l-y over them. Next up will be a skirt to match this top. I'm not sure of the length yet (probably midi so I'm not a complete walking wallpaper) but I do want to try to incorporate more of the border into it. There's now less of the fabric to wrestle so hopefully cutting out will be a little easier.