Boring Basic

I know many sewists don't like sewing basics, but, truthfully, making basics is one reason I'm back in the sewing room. No, basics are not exciting blog content. But they sure are workhorses in my closet. I have a RTW plain(ish) black top that I've never loved even though I wear it a lot to the office because most of my office wardrobe is pretty much a take on basic and/or black these days due to a relaxed dress code and opting for comfort over "fashion." It's been way past time that I make a plain black top I actually like.

So, I present my 6 zillionth TNT Ottobre tee (view 4 with the gathered front). This pattern is now 16+ years old and still going strong, both on my cutting table and in my closet. I have more than a few I still wear from when I started making them 16 years ago. (Gotta love indestructible polyester haha!) And if I haven't sewn a knit top directly from one of the multiple views of this pattern, I've used it to fit most any other tee I've sewn.  

(In the pic above, the arrow is pointing to fabric I'm planning to use next for a skirt. It will be another boring project, but I imagine I'll get a lot of wear out of that too.)

This is what this particular 02/2007 Ottobre Woman issue looks like. It's actually still available, only in Dutch, on the Ottobre website here. I'm pretty sure I'd still wear most everything in this issue. I really should revisit it now that I've re-stocked my tracing paper.

I went "old school" with this top and used a neckline band instead of a binding.

And as usual, I coverstitched the bottom and sleeve hems. Which leads to …

… this little doo-dad. I've seen these hem guides a few places on the interwebs lately, and being the notions collector fiend that I am, it was soon in my Amazon cart and on its way to my sewing room. Yes, a stack of Post-Its still works just as well, but this looks cooler. :-) 

The package comes with two guides, which can interlock or not, and a little clear ruler grid if you want to set the guide up at a measured distance from your needle, which is probably more useful on a sewing machine and not a coverstitch machine. The guides have a removeable, and renewable, stickiness on the back to attach harmlessly to your machine bed. Here's the Amazon link so you can check it out (which is an affiliate link so I might make a fraction of a fraction of a penny if you happen to buy one from the link).

As you can also see in my hemming pic, I've finally found a good use for the sewing clips I bought a while back. I mostly press and coverstitch hems by eye but I usually use a few pins to hold things in place. Except some of the pins inevitably fall out as I'm going around the hem. These clips are a perfect replacement. Old habits die hard so I find the clips are still not as quick to use as pins in most of the rest of my sewing and they had pretty much been collecting dust. I'm glad to put them to use at last.

Chalk and Notch Fringe Dress - Finished

My Fringe Dress is done, and overall I like it. I'm still not loving the fabric though. The print/color is good. But the fabric quality is just OK. It's very drapey and comfortable, though I expect it to wear out quickly.

The dress sat in Time Out for a week because the bottom edge just seemed so uneven and I didn't want to deal with trying to even it out. (I had eliminated the curved up sides of the pattern and just squared off the hem but that wasn't a factor.)

Here's another view. It looks like the sides of the dress are hanging much lower than the front/back.

Well, today I had the brilliant idea to finally try on the darn dress. And, guess what? The bottom edge hangs MUCH straighter on my actual body and not Zillie's. The dolman sleeves without arms in them made the sides of the dress hang lower. It's obvious NOW, but when I was looking it on Zillie, all I could see was the floppy unevenness, hence the Time Out. 

I decided that any residual unevenness is not obvious when I'm wearing it, so I just hemmed it, added buttons, and called it Done. (Do you see my Cyrus—aka Velcro—behind me?)

Here's the back view. (I really need to fix Zillie's tilt.)

The inseam pockets.

And the sleeve "cuffs" that are the View B sleeves bands, which aren't really cuffed and there are no tabs. I didn't want to fiddle with those.

I also didn't want to fiddle with buttonholes. The dress fits over my head fine so I just sewed the buttons on, by machine, through all the layers. 

Before I get into my very few quibbles, I'll say the pattern goes together very well, I like it, and I'm sure I'll make it again. Now here we go on the quibbles …

The PDF prints in landscape orientation and I found that kind of awkward. It's not a deal breaker and I know I'm being nit-picky, but I do wish at least the instructions were portrait oriented. It's just what feels "normal" to me. I kept reading the left side of the page top to the bottom and then the right side, like columns and not rows, and the instructions are oriented in rows not columns, so I was reading out of numerical order and had to keep self-correcting.

I found it completely ridiculous that there are about 20 pages devoted to patterns for interfacing. (Outlined in yellow below.)

And even if you deselect those sizes in the layers tab of Acrobat, the interfacing pages still print with the page outlines and number watermarks. Yes, I could have checked and done a custom page selection before clicking Print but since I print at the office, I tend to just print everything because I blend between sizes and I want to be sure I don't miss something. Even with the "key" telling you what to print for certain sizes, it's difficult to know which pages are actual pattern pieces and which are interfacing pieces. If you're using your own printing supplies, you may want to check what pages you can eliminate from printing. Twenty extra is a lot.

After all that, I didn't even use the interfacing patterns, preferring instead to block fuse my interfacing to my fabric and cut out the facing pieces that way. The instructions have you fuse the interfacing to the garment wrong side instead of to the facings, although fusing to the facings is an "option" mentioned. Fusing to the garment side of things is way too fiddley for me, especially with this floppy rayon challis. (See here if I didn't explain well.) I'll also mention that the interfacing pattern pieces do not include seam allowances, which can be good in theory but extra fiddley to place accurately. Also, you shouldn't be using interfacing on this dress that is thick/firm enough to be a problem in the seam allowances so I think eliminating the seam allowances from the interfacing pieces is not really necessary here. Plus, I *like* the interfacing to go to the edge of my facings, especially on fabric that ravels when you just look at it sideways. And I don't turn under the edges of my facings - I just overlock/serge those suckers, at least for non-fancy stuff like this. So I guess what I'm saying is the instructions are fancier than I sew. Haha.

But the instructions overall are good. Not too verbose and well-illustrated with diagrams/drawings. If you prefer photo instructions or want more fitting help, there's also very good extra information on C&N's sew along pages, here.

Like I said above, I do want to make this again and I like the pattern. Any negatives I've detailed above are not show stoppers and are easily remedied or overlooked. I also hope to get a decent pic of me in this one, but who knows when that will happen. 

Question(s) of the Day: Do any of you watch sewing channels on You Tube? Who are your favorites? I have a few but I'm always looking for new ones. I miss the sewing shows from PBS. Sandra and Nancy and Shirley were gems, weren't they?

Quickie Update

I was able to get the Chalk & Notch Fringe dress pattern put together and cut out on Friday and over the weekend. I even started sewing it yesterday.

So far, so good. But I think I hate the fabric and if I continue to hate it, this will be a muslin/toile. The fabric is more lightweight than I was expecting, which I could work with, but it also seems kind of low quality. By that I mean that it just seems like it will fade and show wear fairly quickly. Just a hunch. Hopefully, I'm wrong.

The pattern, on the other hand, seems good. Everything is going together nicely so far. I do have a few opinions (surprised?) which I'll detail whenever I make a final post about this dress. Nothing really bad at all — just my own preferences on some things. 

So now that the sewjo is back, I'm seeing all sorts of things I want to make and there's not enough time in my days. One thing on the short list is this Double Vision glasses case for toting two pairs of glasses in one case. I'm always juggling between my prescription sunglasses and regular glasses and it would be nice to have a pretty single case instead of two ugly boxy ones. The boxy ones are good for protection but I'm not actually going anywhere where I'm slamming down my purse, so an interfaced fabric case should be fine to protect my eyewear from lens scratches while inside my purse. I'm not sure exactly how I ran across this pattern, probably from looking at the designer's sewing room tour on YouTube. But the pattern is only $2.95 and the video tutorial looks like it will be a fast and easy project. Also, good Christmas gift for my sister. I'm not affiliated or anything — just sharing. Wawak has all the interfacings/notions needed, which I ordered (and which brought the cost of the $2.95 pattern up substantially. Haha.). I'm sure I have plenty of quilting cottons in the stash that will work fine for this so at least I'm "saving money" on that part. 

Parting shot: My table in the midst of a project. I need to figure out a second surface for this room so I'm not constantly moving things on/off the cutting table. Maybe a bookcase to the left with a couple of empty shelves for in-progress stuff. I've already filled up the shelves below the table. 

What's New?!

I haven't done any actual sewing since my last post, but I have done some sewing adjacent activities.

I've been working on the Chalk and Notch Fringe dress. First was assembling the PDF. This is NOT a no-trim pattern. Boo. I spent an evening in front of the TV trimming the pages. Yes, I know I could do the "fold a corner thing" but actually trimming gave me an excuse to do something sew-y that didn't take much brain power. 

I left the TV to assemble the pages and sort out which pages/pieces I needed and which I didn't. Thankfully, I can use my office printers and not worry about ink or paper because there were a LOT of wasted pages, like 10-ish or so pages just for interfacing patterns and 5-6 that ended up being blank after turning off smaller size layers. I don't use/need interfacing patterns and I either just block fuse (preferred) or I use the actual pattern pieces. I certainly didn't need to print interfacing patterns for a bunch of different sizes but I found the "key" for which pages to print kind of fiddly and/or my brain just was not on full power. I generally print ALL the pages (thanks office!) and the sizes around my general base size and then I sort out which of them I actually need to put together. 

The fabric I'm planning to use is below. It's the Fabric Mart navy blue/dotty rayon from one of my last posts, which is now hanging over my chair since I pre-washed and pressed it.

The big (BIG!) sewing-adjacent activity (previewed on Instagram) was bringing in my Designer 1 for service (finally!) and also coming home with this. 

Meet my new toy! It's not a top of the line anymore but it's certainly at least 50 steps up from my Designer 1. It's weird (and not gonna lie, still a teeny bit annoying) to have to wait for my sewing machine to boot up. But it's also very cool to have a 21st Century sewing machine. This one better not die before I do. Not that my D1 is dead — I expect to pick her up in a couple of weeks.

I went into the store set on a Topaz 50. But there were a couple of quirks I just wasn't thrilled with. Silly, minor things but things that would bug me nonetheless. Don't get me wrong, the Topaz is an excellent machine and I almost came home with one but … I spent a good 2+ hours in the store (an independent fabric store slash Viking/Pfaff/Singer dealer) and the saleswomen were very patient with me, letting me go back and forth between machines and do whatever I wanted with no pressure, and in the end, the owner/saleswoman dropped the price of the Sapphire 85 considerably lower than what I have ever seen for a new OR used one and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. If you're ever in my area and need a new machine or sewing stuff, I highly recommend Fabric Warehouse in Lakeland. (Side note and probably one reason for the extra good price on my Sapphire — There's a new Designer Epic 3 coming out next month that's going to cost ~$25K. It's quite a machine from the previews but for that price, it had better drive me to the fabric store too.) 

Here's the internet on my new machine. Well, sort of. I haven't actually created my account yet.

Here's the regular stuff.

All of my Designer 1 feet and accessories are 100% compatible, including embroidery hoops, which is great news because I have about every foot made and it's nice to not have to re-buy them. But I knew that before heading to the store which was another reason I stuck with same "family," the main reason being I'm just a Viking girl.

But there are some Viking feet I didn't know about until I started looking at new machine stuff, including an "interchangeable" walking foot. It's just like a regular walking foot except there are specialty feet options, such as an edge joining foot, a 1/4" guide foot, and others, so you can dual feed AND precisely topstitch/edgestitch at the same time. Cool, right? I'm not sure how often I'll actually need it, but I was stupidly happy one was included with my new machine. My name is Debbie (hi Debbie!) and I have a machine/accessories problem. ;-) 

I'm hoping to get my dress cut out before the weekend so I can actually SEW for real on this new machine. I will not be shopping for a while. 

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.