An October check-in

[nou]

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

I’ve been very very slowly cutting out and doing the darts in a top for myself from the oil-green crinkle linen I mentioned in our last check-in. It is such a monumental pain to mark — it doesn’t like to take the chalk at all — but my top pattern has eight darts in total and I like to mark them all. Sleeves and front are cut and darted, just need to cut the back and then sew it all together.

Comments

[shermarama]

I've sort of made a pair of joggers in a light-brown merino-poly-elastane mix - which is to say I've done almost all of them, but have stalled on the very last finishing bit of pressing and topstitching the waistband. The thing that interested me was making a leg pocket that has a covered zip sitting vertically; I'm thinking these will make good outdoors / camping / hiking trousers, being warm and quick-dry and stretchy, and with the cuffs keeping the hems off the floor of, e.g., the long-drop toilets in conservation campsites... but then I like to have a zipped pocket somewhere in those sort of trousers, to reduce some minor paranoia about losing keys in the middle of forests, and that seemed hard to manage in a stretch fabric. It's got the least stretch vertically, though, so I've put a vertical zip in the side of a leg patch pocket, and that seems to work well.

My only issue now is something I wasn't expecting about the main hip pockets. The test version I made of this pattern was in a dark fabric with quite a high-contrast pattern on it, and I hadn't realised how much work the pattern rather than the fabric or shape was doing to disguise all the stuff I'm normally carting around in my pants - wallet, keys, phone at a minimum. I only put a zipped pocket on one side, which I quite like from a style point of view, but the top of the patch covers the bottom of the hip pocket underneath it and does a similar concealing job to what the print does on the other ones... But now it feels like whatever's on the non-zipped pocket side, usually my phone, looks like an obvious blob in there. I mean, I'm sure I can get over this in use, or I could open up the leg again (lightning stitch on the inside leg seam, though, which is a nightmare to unpick) and put another leg pocket on, but, I'm just mildly annoyed that I didn't see the issue.

Otherwise I am a) resisting ordering dark purple corduroy off AliExpress (for some reason I really like the idea of having some dark purple trousers, but am struggling to find any suitable fabrics from NZ sources) and b) gearing up to having a think about trying out some freesewing.org patterns, while also c) having a bit more of another think about getting a pattern projector. I mean, I'm quite at home with a lot of digital stuff like 3D printers and laser cutters, I've used printed OHP transparencies to project large pattern pieces onto paper stuck on walls before, but the idea of there being sensibly cheap projectors for doing this, and being able to use them for other weird maker-stuff projects too, is really tempting me. But, I'd have to digitise a lot of my existing patterns to not be frustrated that I can't just Use The Thingy, and I'd have to work out the toolchain to do the extensive list of edits I do to paper patterns, in digital ones, and this seems like a lot of hoopla.

[yhlee]

No real sewing, just a tiny bit of embroidery (backstitch and satin stich so far...) to test whether I can usefully trap tiny embroidery in resin to make resin baubles. /o\

[a_natural_beauty]

Next month I plan on fixing up a pair of pants I have. They have a small hole or two in them that I need to patch up.

[fred_mouse]

Tiny bit of quilting, tiny bit of repairs, and I made a bag. Used the end of an old queen sized quilt cover, seam up the side (carefully folded, so there is no seam on the outside) seam across the bottom (I chose not to be so tidy with this one), then added a long strap. This is to carry the dog blanket that goes with partner's (relatively) new service dog.

I have plans to be doing more, but have been focusing on a different set of tasks.