Slicing and dicing a simple TNT

The problem with having to make quantities of anything is that the process very quickly goes stale unless you the hobby seamst/ress/er do something to ramp up the amusement factor. 

I'm still working on tees (and will be till the end of Nov), but have just about exhausted the amusement factor out of cutting them on the bias.  So I translated this:

to this:

Cutting through the side dart, I separated the front into a yoke and a two-piece overlapping bodice.You can see that the new pattern includes the dart shaping in the horizontal seam. The back is treated the same way, except the horizontal seam is just that: a seam; it adds no shaping.

I originally cut the bodice diagonal with a bit of a curve, but my first result ended up a bit ripply, so the next ones are cut with the diagonal straight and on-grain.  The overlapping pieces aren't attached together except at the horizontal seam.

This pattern just LOOOOVES stripes!  This blue cotton knit is lightweight but has no lycra and very little give, so I treated it just like a woven. I staved off the boredom factor by making it a boatneck and adding sleeves.  I decided on the sleeves after the yokes were already cut, then realized that I have to widen and deepen the sleeve cap to compensate for the fact that the tanktop armscye is cut differently than a sleeved tee's.

Remembering my near-fiascos with other fabrics with less stretch than the Jalie pattern - far less, in one case -  I cut the sleeves waaaay wider, then ended up taking them in, and in, and in.... it felt a little like "guerilla sewing".

 I then shifted gears to the first of my light-as-air silk crepes:

In this case, I changed the bodice to a one piece, with a box pleat in the front.  Sides and shoulders are french-seamed, while the bottom is selvedge - no hemming!  The armscyes and neck are serged, turned in & topstitched, and that resulted in my only error:  they're a little too big, so I'm hoping a little clear elastic will snug'em up.  I should've added 1 cm to them to compensate for the serge+fold!

Make a Keyhole Scarf for someone you love!

Like your sister, your mother, your daughter, ...., yourself! 

Kay and I let ourselves loose on the silk chiffons on sale at our local Fabricland yesterday, and I thought: what a perfect opportunity to try something I've been meaning to do ever since I saw the concept demonstrated.

The Keyhole Scarf!

 This one is made out of a 60cm cut of silk chiffon, 140 cm selvedge to selvedge. The length offers multiple wearing possibilities:

Ankh: looped once around and through the keyhole...

Artless: long end looped back around the neck

Ascot: looped back around the neck and tucked into the loop

This is definitely on my "make for the women in my life" Christmas list.  And that says a lot, because I'm not the "make stuff for people" type of crafty person AT ALL.

You already saw my little tutorial on the Möbius scarf - now pop on over to Kay's and Threads' tutorials for the Keyhole scarf. 

Redesigning Very Easy

For my first white blouse I decided to go with a Very Easy Vogue 7998 wrap design. It's now out of print. I  believe I originally bought it because of its "very easy" label. I do like the lay of the collar and the big tie.

 I still like the cut-on collar - it gives a lot of bang for the buck - and the casual yet dressy feel.  But once I took a look at the pattern pieces and the instructions, I decided I don't like it quite so much for my fabric:  a very lightweight cotton voile. I was afraid all the pulling and tugging would do short work of the fabric, and I was a bit put off by all the hemming it requires.  Sooo - I redesigned the pattern a tiny bit.

I always wanted to have a shirt with square armholes, and this pattern seemed to be the perfect integrated basic shape that could be easily converted.

There's a cleverly concealed bust dart in the not-very-right angle of the front piece.  I also wanted the collar and the front curved edge to have a little more body and stability, so I created a front facing.  The ties will be long and skinny, and they'll attach to the logical place, the bottom of the front curve/top of straight edge, with a slit in the left side seam, to wrap all the way around the back.  Hum, it's no longer a very easy pattern - just a regular one!

The nice thing is, if I decide to use the original pattern on a fabric with more body, the original lines are still perfectly visible so potentially I can return to it.

ETA: Angela asks about show-through.  Indeed it's quite light, but this is intended as an over-blouse whose main purpose is to protect my skin from scorching sun and ubiquitous dust, so there'll always be a tanktop under it.  If it makes it back to Canada in any shape, I'm immodest enough to dare a casual outing with a skin-tone undergarment. Ahem. Maybe. In the garden, as the proverbial rose amongst the thorns.

"Sky and sand" cotton jacquard pyramids: Soliciting YOUR advice

While I'm dithering on the white blouse, my mind is already racing ahead to next  month's projects.  I recently bought a few yummy yummy fabrics from Emma One Sock.  Today I'll discuss only one of them:

Click to see it really up close!

Gorgeous, eh?  Turquoise, dark teal, purple, and sand, with gold edging to the triangles, and all woven together in quite a striking jacquard.  Cotton, I think.  Washed well, and irons very well.

It has no crosswise stretch whatsoever, but it does have a (very) little lengthwise, so that's why it's hanging (on an ironing board, with a meter stick for scale) with the selvedge running horizontally.  That said, the stretch is so small that it probably makes no difference - the fabric would probably work just as well with the diamonds oriented the  other way.

Next month I'll want to make a jacket out of it.  It'll be one of my wardrobe's anchor pieces next year, and it'll see lots of wear.  How about YOU  point me to a pattern you'd find suitable for this cloth, and tell me what technical challenges I'd have to overcome.  Yeah, help me out.  Please.  I have a terrifically tough time making decisions. And the blogosphere is so full of wonderfully creative fabric artists - yes, you!  So have a little fun: you get play with outré ideas, I get to do all the work :)

Here's another shot to help you visualize it in the "correct" direction.

Go for it!

ETA:  After laundering, I have exactly 2 yards of this fabric, and it's 59" across.

(and thank you for your intriguing suggestions so far!)

How sewing fights boredom

 Simple:  play with your TNT pattern!

My last of this week's five tanktops is this ultra-lightweight cotton woven, finished just in time for dinner.  I got so deathly bored with four consecutive iterations of vented sides that I decided it needed a great big floppy bow to offset the, um, masculine to me, except for the colour of course, thread-woven plaid pattern.

The plaid is another of my Fabric Flea Market finds, picked expressly to go with the periwinkle, aka scrubs-coloured, linen (the UFO to  my left, courtesy of hubby-photographer :))).  As you see above, I have a little of the periwinkle linen left over - but the fabric is narrow, and it has some discolouration at one end - I may not be able to make an overblouse of it after all.

The hem band's execution is far from perfect, I'm afraid, but let's gloss over that:  no one but me will ever notice.  Better to focus on the wide-leg, but perfectly well-fitted linen trousers:

 

These are one of my elastic waistband super-fast jobs.  To make them work-worthy, I sewed front & back creases onto the legs.  Yes, they're loose fitting, but still a darn good fit in the butt, no?  

I do believe it's now time to turn to white blouse #1......