Frustration on several fronts

Sewing

I made Vogue 2449 before, and still wear the resulting trench coat, so I didn't see a need for a muslin.

I should have thought about the very different qualities of my fabric then (soft, limp) and now (stiff).

Right sleeve is pinned further in,
left sleeve still needs to be removed 

Stiff fabric that's coated on the reverse with a waterproof membrane of some kind. It's the very devil to sew without puckers. This is the only similar quality between fabric then and fabric now.

So anyway I had not realized how very wide this coat is across the front in the shoulder area, and how extended the shoulders. This became painfully obvious, once I sewed in the sleeves. In a softer fabric and a double breasted trench it didn't matter too much but there is no place to hide with a light coloured stiff coat front.

Yes of course I edge stitched the sleeve cap before I tried it on!

So I am spending some quality time with my seam ripper today. I think I'll move the sleeve seam in 5/8" (1.5cm) at the shoulder point and in the front bodice, leaving the underarm the same. The side benefit is that the little bit of ease in the sleeve cap (which was pretty difficult to deal with) will be taken up by the slight extra length of the revised seam line.

Machine Knitting

I bought a cone of rather lovely creamy yellow silk yarn, intending to use my Passap knitting machine to make a summer top out of it.

But it breaks. It is a noile silk that has no bounce (softness, stretch) whatsoever. When it's tensioned, its relatively short fibres just don't hold I guess.

I tried a different knitting machine. Same thing.

It's really thin and will take a very long time to hand knit.

Sigh.

But have a look at this terminally cute little sweater!

The knitting was surprisingly easy on my LK100 bulky machine. The collar was hand knit. In the time it took me to sew up the seams I could have made another back, I think.

Hand Knitting

So, this hand knitted cotton top was unforgivably biased. Some yarn just does that. I wore it a few times but its twistiness really bothered me. So much that I knew I wouldn't be reaching for it.

Don't know why this is sideways

The nice thing about failed knitting projects is that you can recover the materials and reuse them just as if they were brand new.

It doesn't take very long to un-knit a top, using a swift and yarn winder.

I started a new one in a lace pattern. For some reason, lace patterns can eliminate bias. Look how square the swatch is!

The pattern is Feather Pullover. You knit it top down, increasing within a modified version of the lace. So far my impression is that this is a great pattern; really well written and thorough.

This 'n' that

In the past couple of years my contributions to Pattern Review have tailed off but this year I decided I will faithfully post every sewing project I complete.  I played a bit of catch up and in  the last week, I posted reviews of the coat I just finished and the volcano-inspired dress I made from a sari last fall.

And what do you know, PR made me the Member in Focus on their blog!  I have been a member since 2004 and I've posted 177 pattern reviews.  That seems like an awful lot!

I'm at work on project #178 - my Lekala jacket.  I made some final adjustments to the pattern to further reduce the size of the collar and fine tune the fit.  Thanks to the commenters who made suggestions!  I confirmed that I have enough fabric to make a skirt to match, so it'll be another Sewing Lawyer suit.  I traced off a pencil skirt from the September, 2012 issue of BurdaStyle Magazine.  Specifically, the one from this interesting vintage suit.  I wanted something sleek and this skirt is - it's nicely pegged and with some reshaping at the hip and lengthening of certain darts, I think I have a good fit.

Extreme closeup - Prada wool with
wool double crepe and light wool challis

As a reminder, I'll make the jacket and skirt from a length of Prada novelty weave wool.  At left it's posing with some light blue wool/lycra that is destined for dress #1.  At right you can see the detail of the weave (although the light blue in the weave is kind of washed out) and how good it looks with the dark grey wool double crepe I purchased at the same time (dress #2).

I also discovered a long piece of extraordinarily lightweight wool challis deep in my stash.  It's so old that I can no longer remember where I got it, but I am pretty sure that I got it at a thrift shop or other source of old stock.  It's only 34" wide! I believe it is within the class of fabric known as "nun's veiling".

It's a very light grey and I think it might make a really nice top of some kind.  Pattern TBD.

In other news, I got out my bulky knitting machine (it's a Singer LK-100) to see if I could coax it into cooperating in the production of some colour-work - specifically, stranded knitting and intarsia. I didn't want to commit to a really big (adult-sized) project and settled on a vintage Mary Maxim pattern for a little boy's jacket, "Soldier Boy".  I'm making size 4 in the hopes that it will fit the grandson of a friend.

And I made a sleeve. It's not perfect but it's not bad for a first attempt.  AND IT'S SO CUTE!