An end-of-June check-in

[nou]

Hello sewists! What have you all been up to recently?

I finally finished making test sleeves and made a REAL clothing item with ACTUAL sleeves, and all of that long slog was 100% worth it because they’re the most amazing sleeves I’ve ever made. They fit me beautifully and they have a great range of motion. The first day I wore the top, I couldn’t stop staring at them in the mirror because they’re so good. (Overall it took about 9 or 10 test sleeves to get this result, but that’s OK because now I have enough muslin scraps to do more dyeing.)

The pattern is now completely unlike any sleeve pattern I’ve seen before, since it has a dart in the sleeve cap and another dart in the back seam. Long sleeves do sometimes have elbow darts, especially in couture, but this is a short sleeve which ends at the elbow and hence traditionally would not have any darts at all.

(If anyone else is aware of other sleeve patterns with darts in these places, or discussion of doing so, please point me at it! I’ve tried googling to find other people’s thoughts on doing this, but have drawn a blank so far.)

Comments

[via_ostiense]

Your top sounds great! What's the pattern?

[nou]

It’s all self-drafted. The top is just a plain tunic with a rounded neckline and split sides at the hem. The sleeve currently looks like this:

[via_ostiense]

Wow! Do you do a lot of self-drafting?

[nou]

Yes, see above re 9 or 10 sleeves :D

But seriously, yes, most of what I sew is my own patterns. I like fairly simple shapes without too many frills and bits and bobs, so I generally just sew the same basic patterns in different fabrics. Using my own patterns for that means I can get the fit right once and then add detail on top of that, rather than having to readjust a new commercial pattern every time I want to make a new thing.

[a_natural_beauty]

Congrats on the sleeves! That sounds impressive! :-) Be proud of yourself!
Not much is up with me, I've been working on staying cool in this new summer heat.

[nou]

Thank you :) Every so often I go on one of these “improve the fit!” benders, and while they’re going on I’m convinced it’s all a waste of time and I’ll never manage to improve on what I already have, then I finally make a breakthrough and all is good.

[a_natural_beauty]

You're welcome! :-)
I'm glad you have been able to make breakthroughs, that's a good feeling!

[shermarama]

I'm immediately thinking of two-piece sleeves, like you get on coats and jackets, and wondering if those do some of the same job as your darts, but in a different way? The shaping doesn't look obvious when you look at the flat pieces, but having made a two-part sleeve for my overcoat, I know as soon as I sewed the pieces together they had obvious shape and form - they would no longer sit flat, were obviously handed, and were generally exuding sleeve-y personality even before I did any gathering / easing at the top. I'm also thinking of what I learned from Fit For Real People, the pattern-modifying book I use for making full-bust adjustments - because that often involves adding extra darts, they suggest a bunch of ways to move the darts to somewhere less visible, like effectively shifting them off into a seam somewhere else. (Raglan seams being particularly magic for this - they look simple, but can be doing a whole lot.)

For my own stuff, I've only been doing some preliminaries for now, but it's the time of year when Aussie pattern companies have offers on for EOFY, and that includes the one I've been buying a lot of stretch-fabric patterns from, Waves and Wild - I've bought a pattern for some joggers, which I think will have some quite general-purpose use. It's for fabrics with smaller amounts of stretch, like as low as 10%, and that means some people have used it for office-wear in something like a heavy ponte knit... But first I'm going to try using the double-sided merino / poly / elastane I got super-cheap a while ago, to make some comfy winter trousers for around the house, and if those work I should be able to use the same pattern to make my partner some close-fitting merino joggers, for wear while cycling, and then we'll see what else.

Also I saw a post elsewhere that put me on to this pattern, the Riley Crossover Bra: https://www.radpatterns.com/product/riley-crossover-bra/ I honestly had thought I had my bra issues sorted, with the Superstar Bra pattern, but a) that seems to have been a contributor to damaging my shoulder and b) it's hard to get those bras on *while* I've got a damaged shoulder. Riley's gimmick is including instructions for making it front-fastening, so you put it on like a waistcoat, and I'm trying a test version of this in random leftover athletic stretch fabric. If that works... I'm wondering if a version in the thick merino/nylon leggings fabric I bought would fly? Because a winter bra made of merino sounds frankly excellent, if I can pull it off.

At some point I probably need to work out what to do with all the things I've sewn that don't quite fit so I don't wear them, or were never quite completed because they weren't going to fit... I do very little clothes shopping but I still have piles of surplus clothes, and in this case they're unlabelled and weird sizes and deeply unlikely to fit anyone else either. I've had periodic clear-outs, usually occasioned by moving country, but could probably do with finding a more positive / useful approach that I can use before it gets to that...

[nou]

Good thought re the two-piece sleeve, thanks. I’ve actually made a start on splitting mine into two pieces, not necessarily for use as-is but because I thought it might be easier to lengthen it that way. I can’t use this to eliminate the darts entirely unless I run the seam down from the shoulder point, and I’d rather not do that because it’s too visible, but I can do a sort of Dior dart to get rid of most of the larger dart.

That’s a clever-looking fastening on the Riley bra — do report back on how well it works.

Re your things you don’t wear that won’t fit anyone else, depending on the fibre content maybe you could cut them down into cushion covers/pillowcases/storage bags/place mats/facecloths/other household textile items?

[shermarama]

Ooh, the Dior dart looks interesting - I mostly do things like that with princess seams, since they allow so much bust adjustment, but that looks like a good alternative for some things.

I don't really have a huge demand for household textiles, or the sorts of things these are wouldn't really suit anyway. The one that really grinds my gears is a long jacket made of sweatshirting and lined with fleece, and all the seams were done with a lightning / stretch stitch that's a nightmare to unpick, and I've already tried one round of fixing things around the neckline that didn't really work... but I still can't bring myself to either junk it or complete the overhaul.

[nou]

I’ve seen the Dior dart described as a way to have a princess seam that’s further toward the side of the garment rather than running over the bust point, which makes sense to me.

I’ve done a bunch of two-part experimentation now, which has resulted in the below. I can’t get rid of any more of the dart because shortening it any further would make it impractical to sew.

(I was puzzled for ages about why I can’t just keep shortening the dart until it’s not there any more, but then I realised there’s actually a singularity at the dart point — as the dart gets shorter and shorter, there’s less and less length at the fabric edge to deal with the dart angle in, and even setting aside practical considerations, you can’t keep reducing that to zero because then you’d be trying to make a triangle with a side of length zero. And if you don’t close up the dart angle, then you end up having to sew a straight seam on the undersleeve to a seam with a sharp bend in it on the upper sleeve, whereas with the dart closed, both seams are straight and the same length.)



That jacket of yours does sound tricky to repurpose. I guess you could cut it into rectangles and layer them to make a kneeling pad, but that’s no use unless you actually need one. If it’s just the neckline you dislike, could you cut out the neckline area, piece in some new fabric (cut off the bottom if you don’t have any left — a short jacket is better than no jacket), and make a completely new neckline? The piecing line would show, but maybe you could make it look purposeful.

[fred_mouse]

Yay for sleeves that fit you!

I have definitely sat down at the sewing machine in recent weeks. Other than repairs, I can't actually think what I might have done (one was 'wait, offspring, turn your back to me... give me that skirt, I will Fix It NOW'). I have, however, ordered two zips so that I can fix a couple of foldable backpacks -- these have been great (I bought several, because they compress right down) except for the zips. I think this is numbers 2 and 3 requiring zip repairs, and I'm hoping I do a better job of these than the last zip I put in, because apparently not doing a zip for a decade meant I'd forgotten the exact method that worked for me.

[nou]

Oof, good work on getting repairs done. I have a bit of a pile at the moment, including a shirt of bob's that basically needs an entire new collar (this is OK since I made the shirt and hence have both the collar pattern and the fabric). Good luck with the zips!

[fred_mouse]

Oh, collars. I'm pretty sure there are some shirts composting in the repair pile because the only thing that has disintegrated is the collars. I even have a box of collar points somewhere that I acquired in a closing down sale at least 20 years ago, which I've never opened, because I have avoided collars!

I did not remember the zips today, which is only a little bit annoying. I have several days before I need them, but I really want to remember that they need doing before the day of!

[nou]

I’ve now made the collar (see photo below) and attached it (no photo yet).



I used freesewing.org to generate the pattern for the collar stand and collar. That took a bit of fiddling because their collar pattern is part of a shirt pattern rather than being standalone, so there’s no way to ask it to just make a pattern to fit the specific neckhole length of an existing shirt.

But now I’ve done it, it’d be easy for me to do it again, so if you’d like me to generate patterns for you, just let me know the length of the neckhole sewline and what size of paper (e.g. A4) you’d like to print the pattern on (it will be more than one sheet of paper so you’ll have to glue them together before cutting out).