Leopard Spots

Animal prints have been in fashion for quite a few years now, so it is rather surprising that leopard spots are still an ‘in thing’. Normally I would not care, Lagenlook is much more long lived than mainstream fashion, so I am used to being able to wear my favourite pieces for many years. But when you venture into the obviously mainstream trendy such as a leopard print top, you want to avoid still wearing it when the trend has long passed. Fortunately I need not worry with this tunic yet, which is just as well because it is one of my go-to ones when the temps get chilly. The weather has suddenly turned cold, and while a top daily temperature of 17 degrees may seem balmy to some, here on the sunny Central Coast of NSW it represents the depth of winter.

The pattern I used is one i developed myself and has been a favourite for a good number of years. I initially got the idea from this Eileen Fisher top I saw on Pinterest.

And here are a few more versions of the ‘wide body with dropped shoulders halfway to the elbow and skinny sleeves’ silhouette.

Pinterest is a wonderful source of inspiration and you can even find this version with the pattern obligingly attached.

My own version has a hi-low hem and you can find the details about the pattern and sewing process here. Instead of the cowl I made a matching infinity scarf which I am wearing looped double. This was mostly because I could not decide whether I wanted a cowl or not, classic indecision, but I should have just gone ahead and made the cowl as I have never worn the top without the scarf.

The skirt is a bengaline pencil skirt with a yoga style waistband, one of my all time favourites. I winged it when I made it, adding a little extra width for the bum, then tapering inwards towards the hem. It is the classic quiet achiever and I wish I had preserved the pattern to make more skirts, but bengaline is such a stretchy, forgiving fabric that a few cm here or there don’t matter and I can probably wing it just as successfully with the next one. The important thing is to make it just wide enough below my saddlebags so it doesn’t pull inwards, highlighting them unnecessarily.

I used Australian bengaline, which is the stretchy kind, not the ribbed unstretchy one sold elsewhere as bengaline. The fiber mix is similar to Ponte, but it is a woven, not a knit, despite the stretch. The best version is viscose, nylon and Lycra, NOT the one containing poly. I love ponte for tops and dresses, but you really can’t go past bengaline for pants and skirts, because it doesn’t bag, pill or wrinkle, and it wears like iron. You will be enjoying your pull on pants and skirts for years and years, which is unfortunately rarely the case with Ponte.

If you fancy a similar pencil skirt of your own, Maria Denmark has posted a great tutorial on her website. Hers is much shorter, but of course every sewist will adjust the length to their preference.

 

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Blue Lizards

Sometimes it takes a bit of perseverance to get a garment to behave. This top started life as an unattractive shade of khaki and although I liked the fact that the cotton jersey was fairly hefty, the colour got me down. I had also been a bit lazy when carving the lizard stamp and hadn’t carved all the little lizard toesies quite nice and round enough. So the print was scrappy as well.

Then my first attempt to improve the colour was a disaster. I had overdyed in a turquoise, hoping for a nice sea green. As if! There was far too much yellow in the original khaki and it ended up a hideous shade of sickly light green. Oops.

The only way to fix it after that was to get the big guns out, meaning to overdye with a much stronger colour. So I mixed 2/3 of mid blue with 1/3 of blue black, off again into the dye pot, and here we are: much better! From flop to favourite, even the scrappy print does not show because of the reduced contrast. Happy days!

The pattern is my usual TNT tunic pattern, based on the Burda Lydia t-shirt. I paid for mine years ago, but it has now become a free download. The details of how to adapt this pattern to make a tunic are here.

 

 

Getting Ready for Winter

I really love cosy quilted knits like the one I have used for this tunic. Precisely because we barely get a frost on the sunny coast of NSW, nobody bothers much with proper heating, and sitting for hours on a computer in a chillly office has given me an appreciation for warm gear.

The design is a nod to the StyleArc Toni Designer Dress, without the CF and CB seams and the collar, shortened to tunic length. For an actual pattern I once again used my TNT t-shirt, the free Burdastyle Lydia, cut one size larger to accommodate the thicker, less stretchy fabric. The pointy bits are 20cm below the bottom of the armscyes, vertically measured, and the tunic is around 110cm wide there, then comes in again slightly towards the hem.

I usually just fold the neck edge inwards and coverstitch, but this time I cut the neck larger and added a wide band. I would have preferred a cowl, but cowls are fabric hungry and the 2m I had was not quite enough. It rather surprised me how much I ended up liking the look of a traditional plain round neck with a shirt collar peeking out.

 

 

The points are pushed inwards when worn, forming a sort of pouch, and although there is no actual pocket you can put your hands in these if you want to keep them warm. If you like pockets, you could easily insert a pocket bag into the seam just above the point and maybe even a zipper to make the pocket secure.

TNT Dress With Variation

TNT stands for Tried ‘n True, a pattern that you have used over and over and know that it works for you. Not merely from a fitting point of view, but also because it looks good on you, and you like wearing that kind of garment because you feel comfortable in it, and it suits your way of life. As a bonus, using mostly TNT patterns, the colours that look good on you and the sort of prints you like, will result in a strong personal style. So what’s not to like?

I rely heavily on TNT patterns and rarely sew with anything else. This makes it possible for me to sew as fast, if not faster, than I could buy RTW. Not always of course, a special occasion dress or a jacket or coat will take longer. But my steady diet of separates and the occasional simple dress can be made in a few hours, no longer than it would take me to drive to a shopping centre, cruise the shops, try on a heap of garments, despair about the quality, feel bad about my figure and end up with an expensive compromise. And make no mistake, any garment, other than perhaps a tee-shirt, that is not made entirely of polyester WILL be expensive.

Much more rewarding to pull out a TNT pattern, shop my stash of cottons, linens wools and silks, spend a couple of enjoyable hours at my sewing machine and end up with something that will fit and look good, at least to my way of thinking. My non-mainstream style is not everybody’s cup of tea, but then it doesn’t have to be. As long as I feel good in what I have made, my mission is accomplished!

Any TNT pattern is of course open to all sorts of variations to keep things interesting and adapt to the seasons. Here is the latest iteration of the dress pattern I discussed in my last post, a little bit more cold weather friendly with warmer fabric and a cowl instead of the V-neck. This time I also left off the CF and CB seams. But again it is based on my favourite tee-shirt pattern, with the front and back pattern pieces lengthened to a midi length dress. I kept the side splits, so this has to be worn over an under-dress, or a pair of pants, or possibly over a skirt. I haven’t tried this yet, but I will.

The sewing nitty-gritty is as usual on Pattern Review.

The fabric is a heavy cotton velour knit bought at Clear-It in Melbourne maybe 10 years ago. I bought a lot of it because it was only $1/m and have made other garments using it which I have worn and worn. It is a lovely quality, very comfortable, washes up like a dream and is warm as well. Who says you can’t save money sewing? The dress would have taken a bit under 2m of the velour (less than $2) and 3 hours of a rainy Sunday afternoon to sew. As a bonus it goes really well with my me-made jade and silver necklace.

 

The DK Experiment

Last year I saw this Donna Karan knit tunic online and loved the look.

 

So, as sewists do, I thought I would have a go at making my own. The original looks like a very fine cashmere knit, but for a first try I decided I would use a hitherto unloved viscose jersey sulking in my stash to develop a pattern. If that worked out I would seriously contemplate risking, if not a cashmere (‘coz I ain’t got none), then one of my good merinos.

Donna Karan’s creations can be tricky to copy, but this pattern looked easy enough, at least to someone who has hacked her TNT t-shirt a gazillion times for all sorts of weird creations. This time I would use it again, for the fitted side of this tunic. Easy peasy. for the loose side I just kept the shoulder seam going to about 3/4 sleeve level, if the arm is raised sideways in line with the shoulder. I then cut a perpendicular vertical line as the side seam right down to the lowest point, and from there an only very slightly sloping diagonal hem front and back, upward to meet the other side seam.

Sewing was easy and quick, and it turned out to be a reasonable copy of the DK tunic. More details are on PatternReview.

But I have to say that I had not worn the tunic much since I first made it. I thought initially that it was the fabric, which was not nearly as luxe as the DK version, but then another realisation struck me. I did not like the large sleeve opening on the loose side only halfway down the arm.

A bit drafty and I didn’t like the look much either. In my version the sleeve was just a little bit shorter, to the elbow like in the grey version above, and the sticking point seemed to be that I  had a bare arm to contend with in a garment that was not meant for warmer weather. And while I definitely like the quirky look of garments with just one sleeve, I always wonder when you would want to wear something like that: when it is hot enough for the bare arm to be comfortable and sweat at the other arm, or when it is cold and freeze on one side? Of course if you are young enough you will go for the cool one-sleeve look and to hell with the thermal discomfort, but I am past that stage. I would have to find a coordinating top to go under the tunic. Not a problem if you always have one on hand, but I don’t.

However, when I contemplated giving my trial tunic the heave-ho and chalking it up to experience, a thought struck me that I could easily add a sleeve to solve the hot-cold problem. Just a narrow tube attached to the opening, going to the wrist like the other sleeve.

The idea marinated for a while in my brain, until I finally got around to doing it and it worked! Suddenly a previously so-so garment had improved dramatically and had become something I wanted to wear!

So while refashioning previously made garments and fixing their faults does nothing for my overflowing stash, it is quite good for my sewing confidence. I still have a small problem in that the fabric on the loose side drapes a bit under the arm, which the Donna Karan tunic doesn’t. The dotted fabric is hopeless at showing this in the photos and instead I am getting a strange horizontal dividing line, below which the fabric looks darker than above. Complete artefact of the photo, grrr. I am wearing a black tank underneath, so nothing can be showing through.

I would like to fix the extra fabric below the arm which you can see a little bit if you have a close look at photos 1 and 3 below, before I cut into my merino. All suggestions as to how I might alter the pattern to achieve this are very welcome.

In the meantime I will be happy to wear my viscose version as we are heading into autumn. It is just the right weight until it gets seriously cold, and time for the merino to take over.

 

 

 

 

Fabric Printing with Sticky Tape

I picked up three cut length of linen jersey at a European fabric market some years ago and now all of them have been printed and sewn up into tops. So there, take that, stash!

While I was very happy with the first two tops which were done with my usual technique of block printing with a rubber stamp, I was itching to try somethin new. To be specific, I very much liked this Marimekko print and thought I could create something like it by taping off a crisscross pattern with masking tape and inking the fabric left exposed.

Of course the fabric I had on hand was brown, so it wouldn’t look the same, but brown was just the right colour for autumn which is around the corner. I rather like a combination of black and brown and thought I would look pretty good. So after cutting out the pieces for the top, — details about the pattern here –, I tried what I had in mind on a leftover scrap.

Too much brown, I thought, the taped off sections were too wide. So I tried to cut the masking tape in half lengthways, which was a job and a half because if it doesn’t stick to the scissors it will stick to itself. Half way through the job I gave up and finished with narrower sticky tape, taping off a sort of windowpane pattern. Instead of using a stamp to transfer the fabric paint I inked the squares of fabric left exposed directly with a foam roller.

It was much harder going than I expected, because the jersey was quite thick and getting the squares to be a nice opaque black wasn’t easy. I had to go over each square several times, working the paint into the fabric. It took a lot of fabric paint, making me appreciate how economical block printing is. Using a screen or an airbrush may have been more effective, but some of the attraction of the masking tape technique was that it looked quick and simple. I certainly wasn’t going for having to tackle a whole new technique!

But I persevered and this is what the front looked like when the inking was all done and before the sticky tape was removed.

It took me a whole week to be brave enough to pull of the tape, because I was nervous that some of the paint could have leaked under the tape, which would have ruined the look. But surprise, the lines were clean, and I rather like the way this top has turned out, even though it is quite different from the Marimekko. The pattern is much more regular, the small irregularities I thought I added don’t have much of an impact, making it look more tame and conventional. But on the whole it’s not too bad. It won’t be a favourite, and I now regret not using one of the other patterns I contemplated, but if I had, I would probably regret not trying the Marimekko knock-off. You can’t win, and the fact that decisions are irreversible in this business is part of the thrill. Live a little dangerously, I say, and besides, there is always more fabric!

I might still have a go at a black and white version the Marimekko, seeing I have learnt a couple of things with this project and always dislike the thought that knowledge, once acquired, won’t be put to good use.

First of all it is hard to do the irregular pattern with straight lengths of tape. You need to cut the masking tape into squares, which are much easier to place wonkily, and ink the lines between them, not the other way around. The fabric needs to be thin, silk would be best but it is expensive for an experiment, and it is also not very white. I think it is important for the white to be very bright and the black very solidly black for this design to work. A thin cotton would probably be ok, thin enough to ink easily. As it happens I have 10m (!) of cotton used for batik, but unprocessed and still very white, in my stash. Hmm, that would be just the right weight… and I do have an airbrush tucked away I haven’t used yet…

It may take me a while, but watch this space!

Block Printed Tops

The blue top is a bit of a blast from the past, made maybe three years ago when I was up to my neck in making Tessuti Fave Tops. I have moved on now sewing-wise, but only after, it has to be said, upwards of 20 versions of that pattern in every conceivable fabric. There are still plenty of them populating my wardrobe.

This is one I had not been wearing much, as it felt a bit plain. It had also got shorter than I like with washing, one of the rare times when not prewashing a fabric before sewing it up has come back to bite me. Normally, with the loose styles I prefer, it is not a problem. This one not only got shorter and wider after the first wash, but kept going for quite a few subsequent ones. Other than that the fabric was great, a substantial linen jersey, whose quality I got to appreciate after buying some rather lousy thin ones, and so I was reluctant to get rid of it.

Block printing it was of course the answer, nothing much to lose at this point and everything to gain. After testing my carved stamp on a scrap bit of fabric of a similar colour I was happy with the print, but didn’t do my usual test print on paper to work out how I was going to place the prints. Bad idea, because although I like the top, I wish I had placed the stamps closer together. Too late now!

If you are interested in block printing and want more information on the nitty-gritty of the technique, click on ‘Block Printing’ in the list of categories to the left of this post. It will take you to my other block printing posts, and especially the earlier ones explain in detail how it is done.

This is the first time I have printed a top after it has been sewn up, rather than printing straight after cutting out the pieces, but it went reasonably well. I put some paper inside the top so the ink would not bleed through, which proved unnecessary with the thickish jersey. Essential though, I would think, with silk or cotton voile.

You could quibble a bit about the way the pattern has been handled at the side seams, but I can live with the small imperfection. The top no longer languishes in my wardrobe for weeks on end, but has turned into a weekend favourite. Good enough, I would say.   🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A success always puts me on a high, so fired with zeal I printed another top, again a linen jersey. I bought this at the same time as the turquoise, and it had been sitting in my stash for years. I prewashed it, you will be glad to know, and hopefully it won’t get shorter and wider like its turquoise sibling. If anyone is interested in the pattern used for the top, I have written detailed instructions on how to make it on PatternReview.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I still have a brown piece of linen jersey, bought at the same time, and here are some ideas I have floating in my mind for printing. They are all black or grey on white backgrounds, but my background is of course brown, and the prints will most likely be black.

 

 

Something Fishy

Last time I came to Bali I had a great time buying batiks and ikats. One of my favourites was this fish pattern.

In reality it is the deepest French navy with lighter blue fish, instead of grey on grey,  but you get the idea. I bought 5m of it and so far I have made a tunic, with a long sleeve Jac shirt planned for next autumn. If there is enough fabric left after that I may make cropped pants to match the tunic. Matching sets seem to be making a comeback and no longer look so much like pyjamas.

To make the tunic I used a pattern that I have recently developed using the bodice of the Tessuti Eva dress, one of my all time favourites. As you can see from the photo below, I lay the bodice on the fold, at a slight angle, which in turn causes the armscyes to be at an angle as well. This pushes some of the fullness of the skirt to the middle, distributing it nicely in folds all along the hemline, rather than having all the fullness from the diagonal side seams hang limply at the sides like a bit of tacked on extra.

From the bottom of the armscye I run a diagonal side seam to the selvage, then cut the hem a good 20-30cm below that, making a straight bit at the sides which will become an open vent. The back is cut the same, using the back bodice pattern.

To sew,  I sew up the shoulders, then make a narrow hem all along the side vent and the bottom of the tunic. Lastly I  sew up the diagonal side seam, overlock it and tuck the overlocking tail back into the seam, making a neat finish. The last step is to neaten the armscyes with a self bias strip, and often as not the neckline as well. In this instance I made a narrow stand up collar, cutting a strip of fabric the same length as the neck opening and about 20cm in width. This was sewn to make a round, doubled, sewn to the neck edge, overlocked and then the seam allowance topstitched down toward the bodice, so I won’t flip up and show when the tunic is worn. I then folded this strip over again to make small stand up collar.

There are more detailed explanations of my modus operandi on Pattern Review.

Sadly the batik print does not show up as nice in the photos as in reality, much as I have tried to lighten up what looks like black from head to foot.  Looks great in real life though and one of these days I will figure out how to do these very dark colours justice in photos.  🙂

Another Noa

Here is a second version of the Noa, this time in silk dupioni. I had more fabric to play with this time, so the tunic is closer to the original in length, but not enough for the enormous cascading cowl, which is at least a half circle, if not three quarters. Instead I did my usual rectangular cowl, which is less spectacular but will have to suffice for the moment.

I used the StyleArc Toni Designer Dress as a base pattern this time. Details of the sewing process are on Pattern Review.

With different accessories and a scrunched down cowl.

 

This is linked to RUMS.

The Great Tunic Knock-Off

Not sure if it will be that great, but I certainly have put in a considerably amount of effort so far. Here’s hoping! My target is Bryn Walker’s NOA tunic. There are pictures of it all over the internet, and they all look great.

I wanted something similar and started a process of trying to develop a pattern. My first try was simply winging it, based on an analysis of this picture I found.

That didn’t go so well. It was especially disappointing because I had used an expensive linen in a favourite colour. It looked a bit like the image below, flat at back and front with some extraneous bits tacked on at the sides.

I am happy to say that I managed to recut the tunic and rescue the beautiful sea coloured linen I had used, but the result wasn’t the same as a NOA. So I had another go, this time sensibly intending to make a muslin first.

Now what pattern to use? I made a start with Vogue 9188 by Kayla Kennington.

Strangely, this pattern seems to have disappeared without a trace from the Vogue site, although I bought it only recently. Maybe nobody else liked it. I wasn’t that thrilled with it either, but I wanted it because it had an extension on one of the side flares, just like the NOA. However, when cutting out, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really need to piece the fabric there in any case. Maybe the Noa was done that way because it allowed more economical use of fabric when producing on an industrial scale. But I don’t need to worry about that, on the contrary, I need to use up stash!

My muslin fabric was a little short, so I couldn’t cut the longer side flare as long as the real NOA , but otherwise it’s not bad. Only, if you have a close look, my tunic curves outward a lot lower down than the originals. You can tell if you imagine where the belly button or waist is on the models and then on me, and where the outward curve is in relation to that. So I needed to shorten the pattern halfway between the bottom of the armscyes and the widest part of the flare, otherwise the tunic would turn out too long.

Of course I didn’t realise that, genius that I am, until I had cut into the silk for my real, no-longer-a-muslin tunic, sewn up the shoulder and side seams, tried it on, and found that the lower side came down to my ankle!

It actually looked quite elegant and I could have left it, but I wanted a tunic, not a dress. I wear tunics all the time, dresses less so because I often feel too dressed up for everyday wear to the office and for manhandling my grandkids. Besides, I wanted to develop a TNT pattern for further use, and I need tunics, not a gazillion long dresses!

Shortening at the hem is out of the question with this design, so I recut in the shoulder and bust area, taking it down by 15cm. I also used the opportunity to chicken out of the very wide armscyes and sleeves of the V9188, and substituting the ones from a TNT pattern where I know and like the fit. As I have said many times before, with a lot of volume around the hem you need a tighter fit in the shoulders and bust, or a short and stout person like me risks looking huge all over.

Now to the cutting out process itself: V9188 is cut on the bias, so you get a whole pattern piece for front and back, not just half, because you can’t cut on the fold. I ignored the bias cut and separated the two front and back halves to spread them at the hem, to insert more volume there. I want a lot of swing to my tunics, so I almost always add more volume at CF and CB. This is because I am not as slim as the models, and adding width preserves the proportions.

I laid the tunic on the fabric with one side closer to the selvage than the other, seeing one side flare needed to be longer than the other. To paraphrase for clarity, the middle of the tunic was not on the middle fold of the fabric, but off to the side. I then took both flares right to the selvage. From there you need to cut the longer flare back towards the middle on the diagonal, as you can see very clearly in the picture of the grey NOA. If you don’t do this the flare will just hang there vertically, while making it narrower at the hem than the point forces it into collapsing into itself to make nice folds, which I prefer.

The last step was to cut the hem on the diagonal. I shaped this a bit like in the picture of the white tunic, not straight like the grey.

Then, when I had finished cutting, it suddenly hit me: except for the hem, the shape I had cut was pretty identical to the StyleArc Toni designer dress pattern I had just finished working with and blogged about in my previous post!

Sure enough, when I compared the shapes they were really close! So you could use that pattern instead, much cheaper and easier to get hold of if you live outside the US like me, and much more useful for other garments like pointy dresses. You do need to shorten between shoulder and side ‘point’ as shown below. Of course you also need to make one side longer than the other and cut the diagonal hem.

I used a thin lining silk, very slightly crinkled, and overpainted from a harsh neon green to a more sedate dark green with black streaks. I’m not mad about how the paint job turned out as the green is a little darker than intended, but it’s ok for now. When I did the overpainting last spring it seemed dirge-ey and depressing, but it suits the mood of autumn much better.

 

This is linked to the German blogger party RUMS