FabricMart

I've been sewing, so you can't say I haven't!Butterick 4609 View C -- In Progress

I've been working on View C of Butterick 4609-- the blouse with the French cuffs. I'm doing the sash thingy too. I'm making it out of one of the "Trendy" rayon challis-es I got from FabricMart's most recent 75% off sale.

It's not done, but it's getting there. I still need to hem it and put in the buttonholes, and stabilize the front band. Well, it's not actually a front band it's a self-front-band, basically just folded over and then over again to form what would normally be the front band. It says to catch-stitch it in place. And doesn't say anything about interfacing. I used some stitch-witchery tape in between the innermost layers, I'll probably add another strip on the back. I'm not completely sure, though. I've been playing with buttonholes on scraps. Hopefully I'll pester Kris into helping me rewire my BC so I can use my actual buttonholer. But, uh, I've been saying I'm going to rewire the BC for quite awhile..

This blouse is the first time I've successfully made real cuffs! My first try was McCall's 5929 which caused a huge amount of frustration and ended up being a wadder. The Simplicity 2758 blouse I made back in December to shut dfr up only had those little narrow cuffs and not all the trappings real cuffs like the bound slit-- and the bound slit is the mind-boggling part. (Why didn't I do a post on that blouse? I wrote a review, but no blog post. I thought I wrote a post, but now all that seems to be on my site is the picture. Oh, it was probably because it was while dfr was in Florida! LOL Okay, that explains my lack of a post!
But this time I managed real cuffs! The instructions on the pattern were pretty good, and in combination with my copy of the Singer Sewing Book (1949 edition) I managed to make it work!

It looks a little awkward on my dress form. I do hope it ends up looking better on me. My dress form is slightly crooked, which makes everything look a bit awkward. Most of the reviews say that it runs a bit big, but it actually seems quite snug. I cut a 14, which should be about right, and seems to be, but it's hard to tell for sure before finishing up the buttons and all. I did use French seams, but I don't think they should have made too much of a difference.

I'm hoping to finish this one up tomorrow. Either with buttonholer-ed buttonholes or my normal unautomated machine buttonholes.

Silk Panel Silk Panel Pattern Closeup Y'all know that "If Microsoft made cars" joke? Remember the line about accepting that every so often, it'll suddenly stop working and you'll have to close all of the windows and restart the car? The other night when I originally took the pictures of the panel, I was having trouble getting my computer to recognize when I plugged the memory-card-to-USB converter into my USB hub. Dunno what the problem was, but restarting the computer fixed it.

So anyway, here are the full panel and closeup views of the silk border print I've gotten in my last two mystery bundles. (I got a two-panel piece in each bundle. They were labeled as two yards, but each panel is actually about 42 inches, so each piece is about two and a third yards.)

It's definitely heavier than I'd think of for chiffon; I'm not totally sure what it is. Crepe de chine, maybe? Georgette? I don't have swatches of either of those in my fabric dictionary. I'll have to go through more of my old mailers to see what swatches I might have that haven't yet found their way to their respective fabric dictionary entries.

It's not too transparent, but I wouldn't call it opaque either. I do have some trouble gauging the sheerness of fabrics that are neither totally sheer nor totally opaque. Are there any guidelines so far as lighting and such for determine how sheer a fabric is? In the picture you can see the two horizontal lines from the glare off of the picture frame that's behind the panel. It recovers well from being pinned to the wall, too. At first I just pinned the selveges on the side, but it drapes too much not to add a pin in the center. The pin didn't seem to do any damage.

I don't know which way is up. Sense seems to dictate that the stripe would be at the bottom, which is certainly the most practical so far as making it into a garment; the horizontal line would be at the hem.
But it almost looks upside-down, doesn't it? Maybe that's because some of those sets of three wedge-thingies are green, yellow, and pink which gives them a traffic-light look. And the design has a kinda martini-glass shape to it. It's that stem-glass shape with a line sticking out the top. Although turn it upside down, and it looks like hanging lamps. Or suspended citrus wedges. Folding or feather fans? But then those sticks point out the top would bop the user in the face.
Why I'm turning a geometric fabric print into some kind of non-blobby Rorschach test, I'm not sure. It just seems like it needs an explanation.

Well, I'm sending one of the pieces to dfr, so maybe she'll be able to explain it. And figure out what it wants to be. She's the one with decent style/overall look visualization ability. My visualization ability is generally limited to spatial manipulations; rotating and flipping around shapes and such. Somehow things like imagining a fabric as a garment, or what a garment would look like in another fabric never come easily to me. There have been quite a few nice patterns that I never considered just because I wasn't fond of the way they looked in the fabric on the front of the envelope. I may be getting a tad better at that with practice, but my progress there is slow.

Copyright note: I watermark photos I upload because I took the photographs, and because images are so very easily swiped on the internet. I am posting these photos of the physical object (fabric) that I received in a mystery bundle, in order to better describe and comment on said bundle.
Obviously I did not design the fabric or the print, and as such, the copyright for the print does not belong to me. The selvedge identifies the copyright owner as Calamo Silk, Inc., which appears to be a custom silk manufacturing company.
(A word of caution about their site: It's a flash site. The sound can be turned off. As far as I can tell, the same is not true for the scrolling background. And by "scrolling background" I don't mean that it scrolls as you scroll down the page, I mean it continuously scrolls horizontally, right to left, underneath the text and everything. It's a grey-on-black world map, and while it's not initially as obtrusive as the sound, it actually started to make me motion sick after a little while.)

Mystery Bundle -- April 2011

Someone bumped the mystery bundle thread on PatternReview, and I realized that I still hadn't put up any pictures of my last mystery bundle! I guess this was a fairly typical bundle, useful but not one of the really great ones. That fabric on the left is silk, but I'm not sure what to make of it. It's a heavy-ish chiffon (er, if that's not a contradiction in terms) with a kinda panel-type layout. I'm always happy to get silk, but I'm not sure what to do with it. The second one is that mushroom-brown linen I've already used, but have a bit left over. The third one is a rayon print that's soft and nice, but not quite enough to make a top out of. The last one is a green stretch twill. It's a rather bright color for twill, and I don't know what I'm going to do with that either. But overall, it was a bundle containing cotton, rayon, linen, and silk, so I'm not complaining.

Linens from FabricMartAnd here are the fabrics I actually ordered along with that bundle. Dfr has been telling me I need linen, so when they had a big half-off sale on the linens, I ordered some. There's an "antique red," an orchid, and a black and white silk/linen blend. That silk/linen blend is WONDERFUL. It's soft and pretty and I just love it! I'm expecting to try making a tailored jacket out of it, although I've never actually done a tailored jacket yet, so that'll probably take some time.

Febuary 2011 Mystery Bundle: Left to right, 1.25 yards gray wool gauze, 3 yards purple cotton (I think-- it's plant-based, anyway. Seems like cotton.) 2 yards taupe wool gabardine, 2 yards of one of those cotton prints that were on sale recently, and 2 yards stiff, thick-ish black silk (twill?) So I got sucked into the most recent 50% off sale, from which I got a beautiful silk charmeuse and a pink Shetland wool.. And a mystery bundle!