Granted that yesterday’s PSD didn’t begin until 2:00 and I took time out to clean my front porch, water my plants, and make my List Week lists, I had limited productivity. In fact, knowing that this would be the case, I decided to cut out a bunch of garments rather than cutting out and sewing one or two.
Today I will do the major seams on all the garments, if all goes to plan. Which it probably won’t, especially since I have work to do.
But as I was cutting, I developed uncertainties.
First, I decided to cut by pattern — all the garments I planned from Simplicity 1467 rather than all the garments I planned from a particular fabric. I didn’t finish all the cutting, I confess, so I will start today with further cutting before I move into sewing. So I confidently cut the top and skirt, because I made them before successfully. In fact, that top has almost been worn to death. It’s great under jackets or overshirts and nice with pants or skirts. With a matching skirt, it makes a nice two piece dress.
So the blue and print fabrics at the top are two tops and a skirt from this pattern. The bright blue lawn, though not in a trendy color for this season, is lovely and I look forward to wearing it often.
The rayon print? I initially saw its sinuous curves and adherence to the Panton Fall 2015 color palette (an unimportant feature of my SWAP system about which for some reason I can get slightly obsessive) and liked it a lot. I think I ignored the size of the repeats.
In person, it might be kind of retro-psychedelic ugly. I’ve cut out the two-piece dress and plan to make a peasant blouse with it, too. Will it end up being a Hallowe’en only kind of look? I’m not sure.
Then there is the jacket. It’s a dressmaker type of jacket, not a tailored one.It looks very nice in the pattern photos, and in a photo at Rhonda’s Creative Life. It has ruffles and lots of pieces, so it needs a lightweight fabric.
A lightweight fabric is certainly what I need for 90 degree early fall here in the subtropical U.S.
I bought a bunch of linen for the Spring 2015 SWAP and ended up with a “linen-look” fabric. It’s light weight, and a good match for the (ominously creepy and poisonous looking) flowers in the print. I’m never going to make something I would wear next to my skin in a scratchy polyester fabric, but I have a ready to wear jacket made of a hideous fabric of this type, and it even has a peplum. I wear it happily now and then.
The jacket involves gathers. I like gathers and often sew garments with gathers, so I know for a fact that my chances of making even gathers are extremely slim. Seems like in home ec we learned a technique that involved drawing a pin along the gathers at some point in the sewing, but I don’t remember the technique… I just think of it every time I use gathers.
It also involves curved seams which will doubtless require some precision, and I am not precise. So I am making a difficult (for me) jacket from a fabric I don’t really like. And several easy garments from another fabric which I might also dislike, though it’s hard to say how they’ll look in the form of clothing. And a top in a lovely fabric which might not work with any of the other things I’m making.
This may be the Hopeless SWAP of 2015. I’m going to go plunge into it now.