Slow Going
Posted by Elizabeth on 02-16-2010 at 5:17 pm
I have spent the better part of the last week working on a new shirt.
Yesterday, I got it done down to the hand-work. Hand-work, though, is a bit extensive when one's sewing machine does not do buttonholes.
I'm getting better at them, mostly through practice but also because I picked up a sewing book from the 1950's about a month ago. It actually has directions and decent illustrations for doing several kinds of hand-sewn buttonholes. Knowing how to do them properly, however, does not really decrease the amount of time spent on the actual sewing. It might have made it longer, in fact, because proper buttonholes have three passes of stitching.
So, three movies later, I have a shirt!
It looks better on me than it does on the duct-tape dummy, I swear. The shirt is a combination of pieces from Simplicity 3684. Just as a heads-up, if anyone out there wants to try making this pattern: The cuffs for View A, Size 24 (the size shown above) are about four inches too big, and the sleeves are really longer than I would have liked. The original intention was to have a long-sleeved shirt. As you can see, it did not happen. I ended up cutting about seven inches off the sleeves and cut the cuffs down to an inch-and-a-half wide band, which sits just below my elbows.
I will probably make the pattern again, but at this point (having added darts in the front and deepened the bust darts and mangled the heck out of the sleeve) it does not much resemble the original pattern.
Side note: For being a movie about a deranged biker gang, Mad Max is really slow.
Yesterday, I got it done down to the hand-work. Hand-work, though, is a bit extensive when one's sewing machine does not do buttonholes.
I'm getting better at them, mostly through practice but also because I picked up a sewing book from the 1950's about a month ago. It actually has directions and decent illustrations for doing several kinds of hand-sewn buttonholes. Knowing how to do them properly, however, does not really decrease the amount of time spent on the actual sewing. It might have made it longer, in fact, because proper buttonholes have three passes of stitching.
So, three movies later, I have a shirt!
It looks better on me than it does on the duct-tape dummy, I swear. The shirt is a combination of pieces from Simplicity 3684. Just as a heads-up, if anyone out there wants to try making this pattern: The cuffs for View A, Size 24 (the size shown above) are about four inches too big, and the sleeves are really longer than I would have liked. The original intention was to have a long-sleeved shirt. As you can see, it did not happen. I ended up cutting about seven inches off the sleeves and cut the cuffs down to an inch-and-a-half wide band, which sits just below my elbows.
I will probably make the pattern again, but at this point (having added darts in the front and deepened the bust darts and mangled the heck out of the sleeve) it does not much resemble the original pattern.
Side note: For being a movie about a deranged biker gang, Mad Max is really slow.
Sewing
