A Tribute to Matisse

How designers manage to put a collection together twice a year with entirely new ideas beats me. I must be a very boring person because once I have hit on a style that works for me I do it to death. The last couple of years have been Lagenlook tunics with harem pants of all descriptions, and now I am onto boxy tops with culottes or Oska-type bubble pants. The Tessuti Mandy with cuffs instead of sleeves looks like it will go the way of the Tessuti Fave Top, being made over and over. I just love the silhouette and it’s such a terrific backdrop for my fabric printing.

Which brings me to Matisse. I don’t know what his contemporaries made of him at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, he is so radically modern. His cut-outs seem childishly simple but are at the same time such supremely pleasing shapes. I have quite a few earmarked for my fabric printing, and here is the first one.

My interpretation is monochrome, I don’t think I quite have his skill with colours. I started with blue on cheap white cotton, as a muslin, to try out my new stencilling method before risking more expensive fabric.

I used a large sheet of stencil plastic bought in an art supply store and cut my stencil out with a knife. To get the outline from my laptop onto the stencil I enlarged it to the size I needed, printed it out in sections, assembled it, then cut it out with scissors and placed it on the plastic sheet so i could trace around the outline with a pen. The cutting out was painful, literally, as you have to press quite hard to cut. Or maybe my blade was just blunt. In any case, I plain to use a hotknife to cut my stencils in future, which is a sort of soldering iron with a fine tip. It melts the plastic and makes cutting much easier.

I also had a few issues rolling on the paint. I used a foam roller and it took a lot of applications to get good cover. Everyone recommends to apply the paint thinly or it will bleed, but I got frustrated and slapped it on quite thickly in the end. No bleeding, so there. The thick paint is a bit rubbery and stiffens the fabric, but I can live with that until I find a better way.

My other issue was that my blue screen printing ink was old and had partially dried out, and so didn’t blend well with the white to make a light blue. I had dark blue lumps in the paint which eventually dissolved into dark blue blotches. Fortunately it didn’t seem to matter, a bit of colour variation actually looks quite good. I like the top and will definitely enjoy wearing it.

Fired with zeal I used a beautiful black linen next, with a grey print. The linen is from the same piece of fabric as the culottes and so makes a nice set.

This time I applied the paint quite thinly, again no bleeding thank goodness, but no matter how many coats I applied, the texture of the linen came through. It is quite smooth, so I don’t understand why, especially since a stencil I did before on a much rougher fabric did not have this problem. Not the end of the world, I love the resulting top, it just didn’t quite turn out as I had imagined. I am thinking that perhaps this was because I used the foam roller dry, while before I wet it and squeezed it out before rolling on the paint. But live and learn, and it is still a nice top.

Repurposed!

I always thought the linen I salvaged from a sofa slip cover would make some nice garments one day. ‘One day’ took a decade or two, but fortunately linen only gets better with age. So here is what I made out of one of the cushion covers, after a little judicious block printing (sofa cushions tend to pick up stains).

The pattern was another version of the Tessuti Mandy, shortened to high hip level and minus the sleeves. For this I needed two pieces 75x55cm for front and back, and a couple of small pieces for the cuffs I added where the sleeves would have joined. I made them 15cm wide and folded them double. This makes a terrific summer top, even if I say so myself, it was absolutely free and repurposing makes me feel virtuous. What’s not to like? 🙂

Wedding Guest

My niece was married a couple of weeks ago and it was such a happy occasion! You could tell that the brides had been planning this event for years and had put a lot of thought into the service. Not a dry eye in the house! Each wore the wedding dress of their dreams (not the same, that would have been weird), but both traditional long and white, one featuring lace and the other beading.

It was a daytime mid week summer wedding, so quite informal, and a hot day. I have quite a lot of dresses I could have worn, but at the last minute I decided to use a beautiful cotton/silk print I have been sitting on for years waiting for the right occasion. It had arrived!

It is the sort of fabric that wants to do all the talking, so a very simple style without too many seams to interrupt the design was in order. I used my trusty TNT, the Tessuti Lily Linen dress, hybridised with the armscyes and short sleeves from the Tessuti Eva, another trusty TNT.. The sewing took next to no time, including the cutting out and some frog stitching after a brain blip when I attempted to attach the bias binding for the neck to the hem. 🙂

I thought seriously about ballooning the hem by attaching it to a cotton slip, and possibly twisting it a bit, but work has been very busy lately, and time and energy are at a premium right now. So I folded back the hem at the sides by about 15cm to add some interest to the hem. Flat sandals with bling, a straw hat and a baroque pearl necklace completed the outfit. I felt very comfortable and stylish.

The Tessuti Iris Dress

I finally got around to buying and making the Iris dress, after my first attempt at it using the Eva as a base and winging it from there. Of course it is the depth of winter now, so linen and sleeveless wasn’t going to cut it. Fortunately I found some Ponte in a suitable colour combination (always a problem!) at a sale, for a winter friendly version.

The actual Iris turned out to be a bit more slimline than my fudged version, and as much as I like the extra volume in a light batik for summer, I do love the more neat and trim version in Ponte. There are other differences too, the lower skirt is wider (I think I had lack of fabric issues with the batik) and the bodice seems a little longer, — not to mention the long sleeves and cowl!

For those who want to know, all the sewing details are on PatternReview.

Ikat dress

It’s been a hot summer and even though we are well into March now the heat doesn’t seem to want to let up. The ikat I bought in Bali last time I was there is ideal for these sort of temperatures, apart from being a gorgeous handmade treasure.

There are, however, some design restrictions with this type of fabric, because it is made on a traditional loom and it is therefore only 100cm wide, with a border on both selvages. I opted for the same pattern as for my last ikat dress, a sleeveless empire bodice with a pleated long skirt, because it shows this gorgeous fabric off beautifully and the loose style is so comfortable in the heat.

I have had the pattern I used for the bodice for donkeys years, bought second hand for 50c and it is certain to be no longer available, so I can’t recommend a specific pattern. But any bodice without bust darts and with straight sides would probably do the trick. I have used the bodice of the Eva dress before, straightening the curved bottom edge and making it around 37-40 cm long, including the 4cm flange that hides the top of the pleats. I flipped it partially up in the photo below so you can see.

An undarted bodice generally has enough ease to get on and off without a closure, but if you are more generously endowed you might need bust darts, in which case you might also need to make the back of the bodice in two parts with buttons, or put a zipper in the side seam. The sewing details are on PatternReview.

 

From Eva to Iris

I might have mentioned before that the Eva dress by Tessuti is one of my all time favourites. I have been sewing it for years and one of the summer versions I made a few years ago needed replacing.

I have seen the Eva made up successfully in prints, but I think it is best suited to plain fabric to show off the top stitched seams. I had some medium weight linen marinating in my stash that fit the bill nicely. It is a light-ish indigo, just a little more purple than a straight dark blue. I pretty much love all shades of purple, especially the more subtle ones. Purple suits redheads almost as much as grey.

So here is the result.

 

 

If you are interested in the sewing details, they are on PatternReview.

On a roll, I decided I wanted another summer dress. It is so hot at the moment and dresses are definitely the coolest option for work wear. Cotton batik is a superb choice for hot weather, cool and not as high maintenance as linen can be, and I had a lovely piece that I bought as a remnant from a roll of sheeting. It was only 85cm, but 2.8m wide, so enough for a dress. I would have been tempted to make another Eva, as the painterly batik was different enough to the plain linen not to be too obvious, and with the flowing colours there was no problem with an awkwardly chopped up print, but unfortunately the Eva is a little fabric hungry and there was no way to cut it efficiently from such a narrow and long piece.

So I had a look for a pattern I could use, and found the Iris dress, which is a variation of the Eva.

The bodice looks the same, but the skirt only has one horizontal seam. A four-piece skirt produces less fabric waste than one with eight, and as I am rather keen on bubble shapes at the moment it was settled.

Unfortunately I had not planned ahead, and had taken my printer to work. I was far too lazy to go in just to print off the pattern. What to do? I thought I could modify the Eva pattern enough to make the Iris, which is probably what Tessuti had done in the first place.

Bad idea! I did get there is the end, but it took me a lot longer than it would have with a proper pattern. For a start I sewed the bottom skirt piece in upside down, not the end of the world but I only discovered this after I had overlocked and top stitched the seams. Both front and back! Unpicking long seams with multiple rows of stitching is only recommended if you like boring hand work and have oodles of time you want to kill. 🙂

The second problem was that I made the bodice with too much ease. This was ok with the Eva dress, because it is quite long and the proportions are different. Even though the Eva is a bubble, it is not particularly voluminous. The Iris bubble is wider before it goes back in, as the top half of the skirt flares out more because it is longer, at least it is in my version. I would be interested to know if this is the case with the Tessuti pattern as well, so I will be buying it to have a look. Judging by the pictures, my bottom skirt piece is narrower, making the dress shorter. This was due to fabric constraints, but I quite like the shorter look.  Unfortunately it all added up to make the silhouette quite square, courtesy of the loose bodice on top of everything else. So more unpicking. I took a total of 7cm out of the bodice width, quite a lot, but it now looks much better. I can still get it on and off without a closure, always good news as far as I am concerned.

I ditched the short sleeves I had been toying with, again because they made the top of the dress look too wide. I think a deep U neckline might have helped make the bodice look less square, but I had already finished it with a self bias and I had well and truly enough of unpicking. The original Iris pattern had a little stand up collar which I rather like, but I have so many necklaces that I feel I need lots of clothes with plain round necklines to get some wear out of all this jewellery.

 

 

The Hazelwood Top

After wearing pretty much only tunics for quite some time I seem to have developed an interest in short tops. From one extreme to the other, I suppose. Not sure though if the love is being returned, as my rear end is somewhat generous and a short top does nothing to hide that. But I have been looking for a bit of a change and it definitely is that. So when I came across the Tessuti Hazelwood top I thought I would give it a go.

 

The skinny jeans are not my style, being a pronounced pear they definitely don’t do me any favours, as much as I like the look on others. But I thought that my wider, Oska style pants might be quite a good combination.

What possessed me to leave off the cowl I really do not know, it was one of the things that attracted me to the pattern in the first place. Fortunately I block printed some extra fabric to give me the option of adding the cowl later and I think I will. It needs a little more oomph, probably because the tunics I am used to wearing have a lot more of a ‘presence’ visually, almost like a dress, but a short top is just that, a top and pants. That has much less of the appearance of a complete outfit, and adding a jacket is not an really option. almost too hot right now and it is not going to get any colder as we go into summer.

What I do like is the block print though.

For the print I re-used a block I already had, so that was a quick and easy job. Here is the top I made the first time I used this block.

The Mandy Boat Neck Tee

Tessuti are one of my favourite pattern makers, and I don’t mind shouting it from the roof tops in the hope that it will encourage them to make more and more fabulous patterns. A pattern maker whose taste aligns with mine is a gift from heaven.  The other company that comes up with patterns I love is StyleArc, and both these companies offer PDF downloads, which is great. These days to go to a shop to look through the pattern drawers to find the one I want, which is often sold out, is something I avoid like the plague. A bonus is that the patterns printed at home use up the pile of misprints that collect around the printers in the office, something which appeals to my frugal self that doesn’t like waste.

But let’s get back to my topic today, the Mandy.

The Mandy is an oversized tee, clearly designed for striped jerseys, and I do like that look. However, to try the pattern I repurposed a wadder I had made a couple of years ago, a very voluminous tunic that looked pretty disastrous when it was finished. The jersey was to plain, to beefy to drape nicely and too yuk on its own for the wide expanse of the style. It would have needed a fabric that did all the talking to look good, and this one wasn’t it. I kept it because I thought there was enough fabric to make something else, and I am so glad I did.

Talk about ugly duckling to swan! The beefy fabric suited the Mandy so much better, the inky blue I disliked on its own looked transformed combined with the black print, and the result is now a firm favourite in my wardrobe.

The low contrast between the dark blue and the black is ideal for block printing, because it hides the fact that this technique can look a bit scrappy. The rubber block does not deposit as much ink on the fabric as one would like, leaving a few specks of some motifs uncovered or transparent, and a high contrast colour combination can really highlight this unfavourably. Block printing also tends to produce a few ‘oopsies’, where a bit of ink is deposited where it should not be. This of course depends on the skill and concentration of the operator, and I don’t know what this says about me, but I find that there are always a couple of spots somewhere. Dark-on-dark or light-on-light makes these shortcomings far less noticeable. It is also better if your design does not have too many big, solid areas where a nice even coating of colour is desirable. A design with thin-ish lines close together seems to be better suited to block printing.

The only mistake I made was that I cut this Mandy too long, as I realised later when I was forced into a shorter version due to lack of fabric. Fortunately this is easily fixed.

Here is the shorter version, 55cm long on my 161cm frame.

This time the print is stencilled on, the first time I have done large scale stencilling with a design covering the entire garment. I am still experimenting with stencil mediums, this time I used clear plastic meant for covering textbooks. I thought the adhesive side would help making sure there would be no bleeding outside the stencil lines, and the grid on the backing paper helped with even placement of the motifs.

The adhesive proved to be a disappointment, as it did not stick to the fabric very well, but being careful to apply the ink with the foam roller from the edge of each motif to the middle produced nice clean edges anyway. I might try another stencil medium next time. The freezer paper I have is in sheets and too small for a whole garment, but you can buy large sheets of stencil plastic. This is not sticky, but it’s stiffness will hopefully mean that loose edges in the design, such as the small strips separating the ‘fish bones’, do not stick to the roller and flip up as the roller is moved back and forth. I will report back after I have tried it, being designed for the express purpose of stencilling might just mean it will work better than the random stuff I grab and press into service, haha.

More pics below. Excuse the odd blurring on my face on the first one, my camera does this sometimes, it is not intended. It’s a good shot of the top, so I will use it anyway.

Details about the sewing process are on PatternReview.

The Trouble with Perfect Patterns

I use almost exclusively so-called TNT (Tried aNd True) patterns, patterns I have used over and over where I know that the result will be a success. It makes sewing quick and easy and my wardrobe preferences are very much simple styles anyway. Good on you, sewist who are adventurous and like to try out the new and unusual, or who are keen to stretch your skills. I salute you and I admire you, but you are a foreign species to me.

There are those focused on detail, and those who see only the big picture. I am the latter, what matters to me is the look of the whole outfit. That needs to look professional, but the individual sewing techniques used to achieve this don’t matter much to me. I know I can do welt pockets if required, but my ambitions vere off into different directions entirely.

But back to TNT patterns. I have 3-4 top or tunic patterns, 3 dress patterns, 2 pants and 2 skirt patterns that are my staples. I sew something most weekends, so I have quite a few of each, but the fabrics make all the difference and only other sewists would notice that I use patterns over and over. As we are a rare breed these days there are not many in my real world orbit. Most non-sewing people would see it as personal style.

But sometimes I use a pattern so much, because it is stylish, flattering, economical with fabric, quick to make and oh, so very useful to sew down what I have in my stash, that even I have to admit that I have done it to death. Alas, my self-developed tunic pattern, with a swing hemline and side vents has been a firm favourite this past year summer and winter for both wovens and knits, and consequently is now in that category. I have posted about it here, here and here. May it rest now in peace.

Thankfully I have found a couple of patterns for tops that have sparked my imagination and may take its place. A little early to tell, I need to see how much I like wearing them over time.  They are both Tessuti patterns, who are one of my very favourite pattern makers. Quite a few of their patterns have been absolute gems, like the Eva and Lily dresses, the Jac shirt and the Fave Top. The latter in particular has been an obsession, that has now thankfully passed, but not before I made a gazillion versions in every conceivable fabric. My summer wardrobe is still full of them.

The Tessuti Mandy top has now captured my interest. It is still in my preferred oversized style, but a little more restrained than some of my wilder flights of fancy when I was in the grip of Tina Givens and Co.

The Tessuti Hazelwood top is not so much oversized as swing, a little short, but I love the look. Time will tell if I feel comfortable wearing it, and I’m sure I never will with skinny pants as pictured. I usually like to hide my bum as much as possible, and the new wide, cropped pants or culottes this might be a better option for me.

So watch this space for my version of these two. They would make a nice canvas for block printing too.

The Jac Shirt

I do love Tessuti patterns and have made their Jac shirt several times now. The first time I made it as per pattern and it turned out fine. However, I can never resist fiddling with a pattern, and have since settled on some modifications for further versions.

As you can see in the pic above, I have added some ‘swing’ to the back of the shirt by tilting the back pattern piece away from the fold of the fabric when cutting out. This leaves the top part unchanged so it will still fit the collar and shoulders, but adds volume at the CB hem. You can’t really see that I have lengthened it by 5cm too, but here is my original make for comparison, sewn as per pattern. I am wearing it with harem pants, in case you are wonderin what the funny garment is.

Nothing wrong with this version of the Jac, except I am probably acclimatised to the volume of Lagenlook, so I prefer a bit more swing and length, especially when the shirt is worn open as a light jacket. A bit more length also lets the shirt tails peak out from under my jumpers, which I quite like. One thing I have discovered though, lengthening does not look so good without a simultaneous increase in volume at the hem, as you can see with the version, below, cut from the good parts of another worn out doona cover. I have used only the collar stand for a grandpa style collar variation. It is sort of ok, but not quite, without the swing at the back.

 

The original green version is silk dupioni, which has lost some of its shine and acquired a subtle distressed look after a few years of being worn and washed. Just right for a casual shirt, and I don’t do dry cleaning in any case. All my silks are washed, usually with shampoo as that is formulated for protein fibres, which both human hair and silk are, but in the machine and without fuss. I line dry everything, using my dryer only in emergencies, and to cure my hand-printed projects. All my silks so far have coped very well with this treatment. I don’t cater to primadonna fabrics, except maybe for very special occasion garments like my MOB and MOG dresses, and they get worn only once anyway.

The blue striped fabric is a batik bought in Bali, originally grey and white striped, which had an encounter with the dye pot. Unfortunately I got distracted and forgot to agitate for about an hour, which is a big no-no if you want an even result. So it is a bit blotchy, but thankfully that is not very noticeable due to judicious cutting out. I really like the colour, and with winter around the corner, under jumpers only the collar and tails will be visible in any case.

Regarding the sleeves, I am not a huge fan of traditional sleeve plackets and cuffs. They are useful if you want to roll up your sleeves, but I never do. At least, when wearing the shirts where I have made plackets and cuffs, I don’t remember rolling them up even once. So, being a lazy sewist, I ask myself if the extra time making this is worth it. The Jac has a bracelet length sleeve with a notched hem that can be folded back into a 3/4 length sleeve with a notched cuff. I have lengthened the sleeve to make the full length in shirts I want to wear in winter under jumpers, to avoid potentially scratchy wool around my inner wrists. More about the sewing nitty-gritty on PatternReview.

And here is one more version of the Jac shirt, this time collarless for summer, again in a cotton batik. Like the other versions, it works really well as a light jacket.