Louise's First Fitting

Have I ever mentioned how important dress fittings are? If not, I'm doing it now. Fitting garments using a muslin is crucial if you want a garment that fits properly and is flattering. This is especially true if it is a fitted garment that will be less forgiving than something with more ease, or if you have made changes to the pattern.

I last sewed for Louise a year ago, and this is the same pattern, so you'd think it would fit exactly the same way that it did last year, wouldn't you?

Apparently not. Bodies change over time, and the assumptions we make about body shape are not always correct.

©Aspiring Threads

Here is the bodice muslin, after marking everything that I need to fix. It doesn't look very nice in this photograph, because I didn't press the seams since, after all, it's just a fitting muslin. Also, my dress form is smaller than Louise, so don't use it as a reference for fit. One of these days, my dress form will get her makeover, but not yet.

Louise asked for more room at the bust, so I did a 3/4" FBA at the fullest part of the bust (remember what I said about assumptions about body shape?) Unfortunately, this isn't where she needed the fullness, so I marked with chalk on the muslin where the fullness needs to be (the three horizontal lines). The FBA put the fullness above her bust, which simply isn't going to work, as it made the seams above the bust "tent". This tenting is marked with chalk above the bust. The tightness at the bust also led to the bottom of the bodice pulling upward, which interrupts the nice, smooth lines of the bodice over the tummy. Of course, the weight of the skirt will help keep this area smooth, but we don't want tightness or pulling in the finished dresses!

Also, I thought I'd redrawn the armscye on the pattern tissue, but perhaps I didn't, as I need to drop the armscye about 1 1/4". This is marked on the back of the muslin, which is why it is not visible in this photograph.

None of this is a really big deal, and I expect to be finished the second muslin tomorrow so that Louise can come back for another fitting whenever she's got time this week... but can you imagine what a disaster it would have been if I'd just cut into the fabric she bought without doing fittings first? She'd have ended up with two poorly fitted dresses, and I'd feel terrible!

Always do muslins. Always. Especially if you're sewing something fitted. You won't be sorry if you spend the time to do a fitting and everything is perfect, but you will be if you skip this step and there's something wrong, because you can't always fix it after the fabric has been cut.

Vogue 2903

© Vogue Pattern Company

Louise's dress is view A of Vogue 2903 (the green version). This pattern is a vintage reproduction of a Vogue dress pattern from 1957.

The dress has princess seams, sleeves in two lengths, and an inside yoke with two neckline variations. The skirt has inverted pleats and is mid to lower calf length. This dress has a back zipper... In fact, the only notions required for this dress are thread and the zipper!

The pattern envelope suggests using cotton broadcloth, shantung, faille and piqué. When selecting fabrics for this dress, keep in mind that it is unsuitable for obvious diagonals, plaids or stripes.

Also very important when selecting fabrics is to keep in mind that the dress does not have a waist seam, therefore the pattern pieces are the entire length of the dress. Make sure to buy enough fabric - you will not be able to wiggle the pieces into a smaller yardage of fabric than the envelope calls for, and if you don't have enough, you can't just go back to the store and buy another half meter of fabric... In fact,we made a point of buying extra fabric for this dress because I didn't have enough fabric for the red tulip dress and had to buy more.

©Aspiring Threads

Here's a reference photo of the red tulip dress, which we're further modifying for the new dresses.

Previous Modifications

These are the modifications we made to the original dress. Louise has a petite frame, but doing a standard shortened waist didn't work with this dress, as her torso isn't where the adjustment needed to be. We needed to take up the shoulders of her dress. This involved shortening the shoulders by 1.5". Unfortunately, this led to shallow armscyes, so we had to drop the armscye by 3/4". We graded the pattern to allow for her measurements at her bust and hip.

Because the sleeves on this dress are very slim fitting, Louise and I decided to make the dress sleeveless, so that she can move better while performing. Leaving her arms uncovered also keeps her cooler while on stage.

The Full Bust Adjustment

Louise found the bust on the tulip dress just a touch snug, so we're doing an FBA on future versions of the dress. I never do adjustments on the original pattern pieces, since making future changes is more challenging if you use the original pieces. I traced the bodice sections of the front pattern pieces. This dress does not have a waist seam, so the pattern pieces are the full length of the dress.

An FBA on princess seams isn't much different than a darted FBA. The biggest difference is that you close up the dart you create and rotate the fullness elsewhere, which means drawing a new cutting line. This tutorial from Craftsy is an excellent lesson in doing an FBA on princess seams.

For Louise's dress, I did a 3/4" FBA. Since the FBA is done on 1/2 of the pattern, the adjustment was 3/8". Louise is coming over today for a fitting.

Other Modifications

The last modification will be to add pockets to the dress. I have a pocket template that will allow for pockets roomy enough that Louise will not need to carry a purse, but will not add unwanted bulk. I added pockets to my wedding dress because I did not want to carry a purse.

I'll be posting about the construction of this dress as I go, so please check back for more!

Dress commission

You may remember a while back, when I came back to blogging, that I posted about a dress that I made for the lady who sang at our wedding reception. The post is here, and the relevant part, with a picture of the dress, is at the bottom of the post.

©Wanderlust Photography

I don't have any photos that really show Louise in her tulip dress, but thought I'd post this one anyway.

We ran into Louise and her husband at a friend's wedding recently, and she was wearing her dress! I was really very happy to see that she's still enjoying it. She asked me if I'd be interested in sewing another, in fact, which I said I'd be happy to do for her. I enjoyed making her dress, and it really made me feel good to know that she wanted me to sew for her again.

I met up with Louise earlier this week to shop for fabric. It was fun, because we went to Dressew, which is a truly mad, wonderful, crazy place to shop. They don't have a website, but their Yelp page is full of glowing reviews. Anyway, since we had such great success using quilting cotton on the first dress, we went straight to that section of the store. There are those who think that quilting cottons are only suitable for quilts, and perhaps clothing for babies and toddlers, but I disagree. Quilting cottons are quite versatile, and can make for some lovely garments, depending on the weight of the fabric and the type of garment. Gertie wrote a post about it a while back, and brought up some very good points about the different schools of thought on the matter.

In the case of this particular dress, we chose quilting cotton because it has a bit of body to it, which makes the skirt stand out nicely. It's a full skirt, so you don't want a droopy, drapey fabric. Quilting cotton is also soft enough that the skirt remains "swishy", so the dress moves with her as she performs. Quilting cotton is comfortable - it gets hot under those stage lights. It doesn't chafe like synthetics can, which is a bonus if you're dancing under hot lights. Finally, it's easy to care for. That's a big bonus, especially if you are busy and don't have time to get your dress drycleaned in time for your next show.

Louise and I spent over an hour looking at fabrics. She was drawn to red, but already has a red dress, so we looked at other colours. We had a few criteria in mind... the prints had to be bold, so that they wouldn't disappear on stage, and the fabrics should show up against a curtain. We wanted her to stand out, not blend in with the drapes! The other criteria was that the fabrics should suit the vintage look of the dress. The tulips are a bit modern, but they're still a floral, which worked, because floral prints were common in the era this dress is from.

We had no luck with green, unfortunately, because all of the cooler shades of green were unsuitable prints. The warmer greens were too yellow for her skintone. Anything with large amounts of yellow was out of the question. She's not a big fan of purple, so we didn't really look there. We wanted to avoid black, because we want her to stand out on stage. Same goes for pretty much any dark blue. Finding just the right fabric was more challenging than you'd think, especially in a store that has hundreds of quilting cottons to choose from!

©Aspiring Threads

We ended up narrowing it down to three fabrics. One was a black fabric that had enough of a pattern on it that it wouldn't blend in with the background. I didn't get a photo of it, but I think I liked it better than Louise did, and I'll probably go back and buy some for myself. These are the two fabrics we found. The pink fabric is a Michael Miller fabric, so it was a bit on the expensive side, for a quilting cotton, but it will make a stunning dress. The blue and white was half the cost of the pink floral, so it balanced out. The fabrics are modern, but like the tulip fabric, are very workable for the style of the dress.

My next post will detail the modifications we made to the pattern, and my thoughts on working with this pattern.

Up next!

I've been quiet on the blog for a little while, as I haven't been sewing and knitting is so dreadfully slow... besides, updates on knitting projects that are, well, uneventful, are rather dull. It would be different if I were working on something really challenging that needed explanations on new techniques and such, but that isn't the case here.

I do have something new up my sleeve, however. I've been wanting a nice quilt for our bedroom for some time, but couldn't decide what colours to use. Originally, I thought I'd go with olive and burgundy, as we have dark furniture and an olive green wall behind the bed, but that sounded too dark, and was a bit more masculine than I wanted.

Of course, I didn't think my husband would be terribly keen on a really feminine quilt, either, so that left a lot of fabrics out of the question. No pastels, no girly florals. I didn't want anything really dark, and I didn't want to have to repaint the feature wall, so I decided to start with a pattern, and hope that inspiration struck.

All People Quilt

After a lot of looking, I found the High Light quilt pattern, from All People Quilt. I've turned to them for patterns before, and I like that they have a good selection of modern quilt patterns, as well as more traditional patterns.

What I liked about this pattern is that the blocks are fairly large, which allows me to use bolder prints. There are plenty of options when you use large blocks! My daughter's quilt has large blocks, which meant it went together quickly, and I could use pretty much any fabric I wanted.

I also like the yellow sections used in this quilt, as they add pops of bright colour without being overwhelming.

©Aspiring Threads

The next step was choosing fabric. I had some fabric in my stash that I quite liked, but had no specific plans for. I brought a swatch of it to the fabric store, and came home with this... The aforementioned fabric is the black and green one on the bottom, by the way. The green in the fabric is similar to, but lighter than the feature wall, so it ties everything together nicely.

The other fabrics are a variety of greys, greens and yellows, with a bit of white mixed in for good measure. Normally I'm not a big fan of yellow, but the yellow fabric is a soft, buttery colour and there won't be a lot of it, so I think it will work nicely without being too much for my tastes. I think it'll be a fantastic quilt, and I'm looking forward to starting it. I do still need to plan out my blocks, but they're pretty straightforward, so that shouldn't take long. I do need to modify the quilt a little, since we have a queen sized bed with a king sized duvet on it (queen sized duvets are never big enough for a queen sized bed).

An added bonus is that my sister in law started a long arm quilting business a few months back, so I won't have to struggle with quilting a large piece on my machine. I don't have backing fabric yet, but that's no rush, since I haven't even begun cutting yet.

©Aspiring Threads

Here's the plan for the quilt, since I'm a visual person. As I mentioned, I'm going to have to modify the pattern to make a larger quilt, so I'm adding two extra rows of blocks to make it four blocks long by five blocks wide, instead of three blocks wide. This will give me a quilt that is large enough to cover a king sized duvet.

The border fabric is the green on black floral, which is swatched at the top. The pale yellow floral is the "highlight" fabric. I'm making two different types of blocks, and the fabrics are swatched together. I will need to buy some plain black fabric for the inner borders. This also covers my binding fabric, since I don't want the binding to stand out from the rest of the quilt.

I'm planning to start cutting my blocks on Monday, as this weekend is going to be very busy with guests visiting. Fortunately, large block quilts like this sew up really quickly, so I could potentially be finished the quilt top by the end of the week, unless I get distracted by something else (which happens on a fairly regular basis).

Rainbows...

When we moved into our new home, I promised my daughter that I'd make her a new quilt. She'd outgrown the cute pink and purple one I made when she was in Kindergarten, so she was pretty happy to hear that she'd be getting a new, more grown up quilt.

Daughter had this idea that she wanted her bedroom to be "like a garden", so I bought a tree wall decal, painted her walls robin's egg blue, and got a rug from Ikea that looked like grass. The quilt, which is up in her loft bed, is a rainbow.

Of course, stripes are boring, and I didn't want to spend all that time and money working on a quilt that she wouldn't like in a year, so I picked out some fabrics that are more grown up, and somewhere in between pastel and bold...

©Aspiring Threads

The pattern I chose is called Window to the Soul Gypsy Caravan, and it is by Amy Butler. The pattern is free, which is a bonus!

Unfortunately, the pattern makes more of a square quilt. I really need to get more consistent about reading finished quilt measurements! Lesson learned!

©Aspiring Threads

It's next to impossible to photograph a quilt in a loft bed, so these are the best photos I could get of the finished quilt.

Here's some background on the quilt, which I started quite some time ago...

First post, talking about the planning stages...

Second post, an update and talking about my machine...

Third post, another update...

Fourth post, could it be? Yes, another update...

And the final post on the quilt, the finished pillow sham.

Then nothing. I posted nothing further on the quilt. For shame! Well, I'm remedying that now, aren't I?

©Aspiring Threads

The quilt, as I mentioned, turned out more square and was therefore a little too short, so I cut off the binding on the top and bottom edges, and added a band of another coordinating fabric to both ends.

©Aspiring Threads

How did I add the length? Well, the quilt was already finished, so I had to trim off the binding. Have you ever taken scissors to a quilt? It feels so wrong!!! Anyway, that's what I had to do, and I lived to tell the tale. Thanks to my friend Andrea, I learned about the "quilt as you go" method, which I was able to adapt to this quilt. Basically, I used this version of the method, but more or less in reverse. First, I sewed the green and teal strips together, then I added them to the purple edge, which previously had been the finished edge of the quilt. I trimmed the extra batting, and used a decorative binding stitch to ensure that I caught everything on the underside of the quilt.

I had lots of the light green from the center left, so I used that, as well as some teal that I found I did not need.

Now the quilt is plenty long enough for daughter's bed.

Boyden cardigan

©Aspiring Threads

It's been a while since I posted, but that's because I was a busy bee, working on my new cardigan!

The yarn has been in my stash for a while, and it was just recently that I found the perfect pattern for it.

The pattern is Boyden (although for some reason, I keep calling it Camden). The yarn I used, has, sadly, been discontinued. It is Cepholopod Yarns Traveller in the "Groton" colourway.

©Aspiring Threads

This is a really interesting sweater to knit. It has beautiful Celtic inspired cables, on the right front, left sleeve, and right back. The subtle asymmetry is really appealing, as it prevents the sweater from looking too "busy", which can happen with cabled sweaters, especially in variegated yarn like this.

I did have a few issues with the pattern, but the designer is very available and approachable, and I got my questions answered very quickly. The first issue I had was with the stitch counts. I wanted to make absolutely sure that I had the right number of stitches, but the counts for the right and left fronts were different, and were not listed in the pattern. The extra stitches on the right side were to allow for the cable, so that it wouldn't pull the button band off-centre. I made a note of this on my Ravelry project page as well.

©Aspiring Threads

Another issue I had with the pattern was that you're supposed to end the cable with a certain row, but mine didn't. I don't know if I made a mistake somewhere (if I did, I can't find it) or if there's an error in the pattern, but the front and back cables are supposed to meet up so that when you graft the shoulders, they flow over the shoulder. Mine appears to be off by a stitch or two. I'm not bothered by it, but if I knit this sweater again, I'll be more careful.

One thing that I learned on this sweater was how to do closed loop cables. I'd never done them before, and they're not as hard as they look. I didn't like the instructions provided with the pattern, as it resulted in a big hole at the bottom of the loop, so I used these instructions instead. The loops turned out quite nicely, I think, however I later found this method, which I will use in the future, as the increases are spread out over two rows, so you're even less likely to make a hole where you shouldn't have one.

©Aspiring Threads

I also had issues with the sleeve caps. This particular sweater is knit in one piece for the body, then grafted at the shoulders. You then pick up stitches around the armhole, and knit back and forth across the top of the sleeve. The instructions were slightly unclear on the last row of the sleeve cap, so I've made a note on my pattern to ensure that I don't get stuck again.

All in all, I'm pleased with my sweater. I love the colour, and it is lovely on. The buttons are a perfect match, though the buttonholes are a bit too big, so I'll have to sew them shut a little bit, or perhaps run yarn through them to prevent them from stretching. I usually wear my cardigans open, but I like having the option of wearing them closed.

I think the only thing I would do differently is to make the body longer. I usually prefer my sweaters to be a bit longer than this one turned out, but I was counting on the superwash yarn growing a bit more than it did. I do find that most cardigans are a bit snug at the bust, so I would probably go up one size if I make this one again. I also find the sleeves a little bit snug, but I frequently have issues with sleeves being too tight, whether I'm knitting or sewing. I probably couldn't wear a shirt with sleeves under this cardigan without making the sleeves look lumpy.

I would not recommend this as a travel project, unless you can count on having long periods of uninterrupted knitting time. The cables are complex, but fortunately there's a lot of stockinette once you're done the cable panels, so you can breeze through a lot of the sweater. I usually prefer smaller projects, like socks or hats for travel knitting anyway.

Would I knit this cardigan a second time? More than likely. I enjoyed knitting it, and the finished result is lovely and very wearable.

A little housekeeping

I'm not currently sewing anything (I have jeans to talk about, but haven't bought my pattern yet), and I'm knitting a sweater that I'll post about when it is finished. Rather than letting my blog go quiet, I decided to add a couple of pages of tips, tricks and tutorials.

The first (and so far most useful) page is for sewing information. As I find more useful information on the internet, I'll add to the collection of links.

The second page is for knitting information.

These pages will grow and become more helpful as time goes on, and the links can easily be accessed in the bar under the header on all of the pages of my blog. I don't currently have any tutorials myself, but as I start making them, I'll add them to the relevant pages.