BrambleStitches

Finished your taxes yet? I just did. It was grueling; I’ll probably have to finish off the Easter candy to recover from it.

I’m going to reward myself by staying up late to sew. Olga found an pattern in my pattern box for girl’s pajamas, and requested a set out of some white ribbing I have on hand. The pattern is Butterick 6659. I’m making view C for summer (the sleeveless top and shorts).

This was a “used” pattern, found at a thrift store, and some of the pieces had been cut, but most of the scraps had been saved. I was able to tape the original back together, except for one piece which was lost, but I was able to make a pretty accurate guess on that piece. I never actually cut into my patterns. I trace off the size I need onto STP (Sweedish Tracing Paper), and leave the originals in tact, so that as my children grow insanely fast, I don’t have to kick myself for “ruining” the larger sizes.

I cut everything out a few days ago, so I just have to set up the serger tonight and whip it together.

Sewing

I can’t tell you how proud I am of my little girl. She completed her very first sewing project! We had a little bit of down time last week while Gavin was napping, so I asked her if she’d like to make something.

She decided to make a toy bunny, so we picked out several different fabrics from my stash. She chose white, dark blue, and sage green flannel, and pink ribbing. (We ended up not using the blue.) Since this was a real sewing project, we got out the real sewing tools: heavy duty Gingher scissors, a sharp needle, and fabric marking pen. We used hand quilting thread, since it’s heavier weight and less likely to tangle.

Olga did all of the cutting herself, and as I held the fabric for her, she sewed around the edges with the needle. At first she needed both hands to manipulate the needle, but by the time she got to the ears she was able to work it with one hand, although she still needed a little bit of help to pull the needle all the way through the fabric.

When she finished the sewing, she used a disappearing fabric marker to draw the face, then I embroidered over it with floss she picked out. She wanted to be sure everybody knew that bunnies have belly buttons. In all, this was a pretty quick project. Olga worked on it for a little under an hour, and there was about 15 minutes of embroidery for me. Olga is so proud of her new bunny, and even more proud that she can sew “for real.”

Sewing, This dream of mine

During the month of February, I’m going to try to mend my way through all the ripped and torn, frayed, button-less, broken-zippered, and just plain falling apart items we have. I know I’ve been putting it off. It’s not because I don’t like to do it that the mending basket is overflowing; it’s because I like to sit down with a hot cup of tea, take my time, and do things right. Mending is one of the simplest ways you can stretch your family dollar. The cost to repair an item is usually only a few cents, and the time you spend stitching is an opportunity to travel back in time. You might be surprised at the memories a simple piece of cloth can evoke.

I hope you’ll join me with your own mending basket by your side over the next few weeks as I do my best to make things do.

Day 1:

The Manly-Man brought me his sweat pants today to see if I could fix them. These are the sweats he has to wear for PT (physical training) at work most mornings, and they’ve seen many miles. I’ve repaired one of the ankles before, but it was so long ago that I didn’t even remember until I saw the blue thread in the seam. (Fixing Erik’s work stuff is usually a good opportunity for me to use up odd bits of bobbin thread. Nobody is going to see it, and Erik certainly doesn’t care, as long as it’s not visible from the outside.) These tears are probably from trying to quickly pull the sweats on over size 13 running shoes. It just doesn’t work, honey! I zipped this up quickly on the machine, using an over-edge stitch.

The next repair is a little tricky. It’s a hole that has started to run on the back of the sweats. The hole is about 1/2" wide, and the run is about 2 1/2" long. I’ll do this one by hand. I happen to have some slightly brighter green jersey (aka single knit, or teeshirt fabric) in my stash that I originally got for $1/yard. I’ll only need a tiny scrap for this.

I held the jersey "patch" in place and prick stitched around the edge of the hole. A prick stitch is a bit like a back stitch, but the stitch on the visible side of the fabric is very short, only a thread or two long at most, so it is fairly unnoticeable. In the photo above, I’ve already stitched down the right side of the hole, and I bet you can’t see the stitches.

After stitching the patch in place, I trimmed around leaving about 1/2" allowance.

Jersey doesn’t fray, but in the interest of making this laundry and Marine proof, I folded under the edge of the patch and whip stitched it to the pants. There’s no need to stitch all the way through the fabric, a couple fuzzy loops are enough to keep things in place and still look neat on the outside.

I’ve whip stitched all around the patch, and secured my thread ends with a knot.

Next I’ll stitch through the loops of the run, to make sure the run won’t "run" any further. I’m not sure you can see it here, but this run is comprised of three rows. The top row runs from the hole, to the end of the run. The middle row goes from the hole to just a little past the mid point of the run, and the bottom row is only about 1/4 the total length of the damage. At the farthest right point of each of these rows of running stitches, I’ll take a stitch right through the loops where the fabric is still good. This stitch has to be in the same row as the running stitches in order to check the run.

I’ve stitched the patch to the pants. Now it’s time to stitch the hole to the patch. I don’t want anything to catch on the hole and make it bigger, so I’m whip stitching it to the patch all the way around. This will hopefully keep dirt and filth from accumulating in the space between pants and patch.

And there you have it. A fairly invisible, but quite secure patch. I know the green is a little bright, but I think it will tone down after a few washings. If it’s still noticeably different in a week or two, I’ll try coloring it a little with a permanent marker. That ought to do the trick.

Life in the Corps, Mending, Sewing

I don’t know when my baby grew up into this chunky boy–it certainly wasn’t while I was looking. The hat Gavin is wearing is a prototype of a version I’ll start selling in my shop soon. It will be ready to go as soon as I figure out a way to make it a bit more adjustable.

Sewing Gavin, hat

 I almost didn’t make Halloween costumes this year. I woke up this morning, knowing that I still hadn’t even started on them, and instead pulled weeds in our front flower bed (which will be a vegetable bed next spring). But at 10am (that’s nap-time around here) I decided that maybe I really should try to make something for Olga, at least. So after about six hours of feverish sewing, snipping, and creative license, I turned a rather ordinary pattern for pajamas into these:

Oh, and by the way… What do dinosaurs eat?

Candy, of course!

A few more pictures of the costumes to follow. I need a chance to recover from the sugar rush first.

Sewing, This dream of mine

Now that the alterations are mostly complete on Erik’s dress uniform (I may have to reconstruct the collar, as I can’t seem to find one), it’s time to start on my gown for the Marine Corps birthday ball coming up in November. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to work on it, since deadline is creeping up on us again. I’ll tell you a little about the dress, though.

I’ve had some wonderful golden yellow silk crepe in my fabric stash for a couple of years (I bought it on clearance from Fabric.com when it was less than $2.00/yard) that I’ve been wanting to use for a fancy dress for myself.

This year I’ve decided to use a lovely historical Regency era (approximately 1790-1910) pattern designed by Jennie Chancey of Sense and Sensibility Patterns. The pattern itself is very simple to sew. There aren’t many pieces and I won’t have to worry about the proper positioning of darts, because there aren’t any. I’m going to add a few special touches to this dress to make it my own, too. First, I’ll probably change the puff sleeves to something a little more fitted and elbow length. Second, I’m going to add a little extra fullness to the front of the gown. Actually, my dress will end up looking similar to this lovely wedding gown, only gold and not as embellished. The back of the gown will be quite gathered, and I think the front will look nice that way, too. And this way I won’t have to be ladylike in the buffet line.

I hope I can get to sewing a bit this weekend, but so far I’m pretty booked. Tomorrow my friend Katie is coming over, and we’re going to put up some veggies and applesauce using the pressure canner. It will be the first time either of us have used one, and I’m very excited.

Sewing

The Marine Corps Ball is coming up fairly soon, so it’s that time of year when the Man hems and haws about which uniform he’ll wear, how poorly his blues fit, and how smarmy he’ll look if he’s the only jarhead who shows up to the birthday bash in Service As (the green uniform a few posts back). Last week he asked very nicely if maybe I could fix them for him, so he could look just as dapper as all the other lads (okay, he didn’t say that part. that’s what he meant, though.).

See the wrinkle across the shoulders? That means it’s too narrow. And see how tight the waist seams are? They need to be let out a bit. The tight waist was the easy fix, because there were several seams to work with, each with about 1/2 inch of seam allowance to let out. I only needed to let out two seams, so I did the two that had been taken in when The Man first bought this coat–the seams directly adjacent to the center back seam.

I basted along my projected new seamline with contrasting thread. I never use matching thread for this, especially on dark fabrics, because it is impossible to find and later remove the stitches. A long running stitch is perfectly fine for this. After I sewed my basting line, I ripped out the old seam, then had The Man check the new fit. So far so good. I waited until I finished my other alteration before sewing these seams. Sometimes making one alteration can change the other one. In this case, it allowed the coat to hang a little lower, and took up a little bit of the fullness under the cross-shoulder wrinkle. But the neck was still obviously way too narrow. Unfortunately there was very little seam allowance to work with at the neck. I first tried to widen the top back only, leaving the collar intact so I wouldn’t have to mess with it. That made the wrinkle even worse.

So I took off the collar, basted a new, much narrower seam allowance at the top of the center back and let The Man try the fit. It eliminated every wrinkle! (Below, the pressed seam at the center back neck has only about 1/8 inch left to give.)

Of course now the trick is to get the same collar, which hasn’t grown any, back onto an altered jacket that now has a neckline 1/2 inch longer than before. A normal, well-rested professional might tell you it can’t be done, and that you’ll need to order a longer collar. Since by this time it was 2:30 am, I was willing to try anything. [Note: I'm writing the rest of this post a couple days later. I will infact need a longer collar, but the assembly instructions would be the same as the rest of the photos below.] I basted each collar edge to its respective front, then basted the collar on by machine (with contrasting thread).

Now at this point, had the Man been awake, I should have had him try this on. Since it was the middle of the night I didn’t. I’ll go ahead and show you the rest of the process, but you should know that I’ll have to go ahead and buy a larger collar for this after all. All of my alterations did work, but since I let out the back neck so much, I wasn’t able to fudge the collar back on as I had hoped.

After stitching in black over my basting line, I picked the white thread out, then whipstitched the collar lining back in place.

In the end I did manage to get the too-small collar back on evenly, but I’ll have to replace it with a properly fitting one. (I’ll post again about that whenever the new collar gets here.)

Life in the Corps, Mending, Sewing

Now that my sewing table is set up, I’m getting around to a bunch of sewing and mending that I’ve been putting off since we moved in. I just finished replacing a hem that had fallen out of my silk jacket.

The original hem was probably a machine sewn blind hem stitch, but I used a hand-sewn herringbone stitch this time. Either one is appropriate.

You might know this better as an embroidery stitch, as seen on crazy quilts. Actually, my big Erica Wilson’s Embroidery Book was the only book I had with a diagram of this stitch.

You see this stitch mostly used in the hems of womens clothing, because the wide spacing of the stitches lends itself well to easing the hem, and the tiny horizontal stitches are truly invisible from the outside of the garment. The blurry background below shows the shadow of the hem (I haven’t pressed it yet), but in the clear forground of the picture there are no stitches to be seen from the right side of the jacket.

Mending, Sewing