More New Years Eve outfit plans gone awry

Maybe I'm just not meant to sew myself a New Years Eve outfit. Long time readers may recall the New Years Eve Butterick dress muslin disaster of 2007. In 2008, I was stymied by a sprained wrist. And today, I present to you the New Years Eve dress muslin letdown of 2009, again, a Butterick pattern...

Butterick 5418 is a Maggy London design, a knit dress with interesting pleating at both the front and back neckline.

Images courtesy Nordstrom.com - (left) Maggy London drape jersey dress, (right) Maggy London drape jersey dress - plus size

I found pics of the RTW dress on Nordstrom's website, you can see the front pleat detail best on the solid blue dress.

I chose this pattern because of its obvious easy accomodation for a large belly. But pregnant or not, this pattern would have turned out to be a dud either way, I'm afraid.

I envisioned making this dress in the olive green silk jersey that I bought last month at Stonemountain and Daughter in Berkeley. With some gold jewelry, it could be dressed up for evening, or with chunky wood jewelry, it would be a fun summer dress. For my muslin, I used a dark olive rayon/lycra jersey. (I always buy rayon/lycra jersey but then I can never manage to keep it wrinkle-free! Am I missing some secret? I'm forbidding myself from purchasing any more).

This pattern has an easy rating, but note that the pleats are very time consuming, even though I just matched the pleat-lines haphazardly for the muslin, the work felt neverending. 

One thing I like about this dress is the bodice lining (Butterick calls it a "foundation").  It ends just below the bust, and has elastic casing to hold it snug against the body.

The first issue I have is with the center front neckline. The seamline where the vertical pleats are stitched to the lining has major bulk. It's true that I didn't do much trimming of seam allowances on this muslin (nor did the pattern instructions advise me to do so), and while that may have helped a bit, I don't see how the bulk could be eliminated.  The understitching on the lining (which I did in ivory thread) is visible because the heavy CF pleating pulls down and exposes the stitches.

Same thing is happening at the back neckline, the lining can't stand up to the weight of the pleats, and again the understitching is exposed.

Also, there is some puddling happening above my rear end, which I think is caused by my large belly and hips and could be easily resolved by letting the seams out.  I cut a size 10 to fit my shoulders and bust, everything below the bust needs to be a bit bigger!

I would love to see the RTW dress in person to see if it has the same issue with the bodice lining being exposed.  I'm not certain how to resolve it and therefore I won't continue with this project.  Pressing the seam doesn't seem to help.  Too bad really, I followed the pattern instructions closely, I imagine others will have this same issue too. 


Oh well, nothing like last minute dress shopping..!

Jenna's holiday duet dress

I was catching up on TV this week, including the December 10, 2009 episode of 30 Rock (Secret Santa), and don't you think Jenna's dress here looks just like Cynthia Steffe - Vogue 1151?

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care

Pattern: Simple Embroidered Stockings from the Purl Bee blog. Obviously I omitted the most time consuming part from the Purl Bee pattern, the hand embroidered initials!

Fabric: Quilting cotton from Joann. I was in there buying a Dritz maternity band (I'm planning to convert a pair of RTW pants) and the holly print seemed a perfect gender-neutral and modern print for the stockings.

I actually made three stockings, the third one in ivory for the new family member we'll have next Christmas, but somehow it's already temporarily packed away in the basement with all of our empty Christmas decoration boxes.

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Merry Christmas!

Germany is the place to be in December

Well!  Tim and I were scheduled to return home to Seattle on Sunday, but our connecting flight to Philadelphia was canceled because of all the snow, and the airline told us we'd have to wait another 3 nights before they could fly us home. Here I was, so pleased that we had fit all of our activities, visits, shopping, etc into just under a week - I had it timed perfectly.  I was completely unprepared for this, not to mention that we'd both miss more work, need to rebook our hotel, have to extend our already busy catsitter, etc.  To top it off, Tim's suitcase didn't make it back with us on the return trip (yet - hopefully).  Such is life.  But really, if you're going to be stuck someplace in December (and you are the type that celebrates Christmas), let it be someplace in Germany, as they really know how to do Christmas right!  Some trip highlights:

Christmas markets are seemingly around every corner in Munich. Much is for sale:

handmade wooden Christmas smokers, pyramids, and ornaments...

candy and chocolate...

and Gluhwein, a spiced hot red wine, essential for keeping warm on a chilly winter evening. There is an alcohol-free version too (Kinderpunsch), but it just isn't the same...

We also visited the town where my mom grew up - Kirchberg an der Murr (near Stuttgart).  Her brother and a few other relatives live there, it was nice for Tim to meet my the German side of my family and have a peek into that part of my background.

This is my cousin Nina and I at the Christkindlmarkt in Ludwigsburg, a neighboring city.  It was about -10C (14F) that morning.

If you like meat, you will love Germany; there are butchers everywhere.

We saw this guy in a Munich subway station one night - he was wearing a loden green green Bavarian cape and had an owl on his arm.  He was fielding questions from all the fascinated people who gathered round and some people even pet the owl.  You don't see that every day.

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If you emailed me during the past week, please be patient while I catch up :) I will respond to you in the next couple days.

A bad marriage of fabric and pattern

Thanks everyone for the well wishes for my pregnancy! As I said before, it's so nice to be able to share it here on the blog now. sewingsue, thanks for the maternity fashion blog recommendation - I've already combed through a lot of it and I'm following it in my blog reader now. Sew4Fun, I admire your ability to sense these things; I am always late in figuring these things out about others!

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Simplicity 2754

This was supposed to be my Thanksgiving Day dress. It never quite made it to the point of being wearable.  This issue was my fabric choice.  The pattern recommends wovens or a matte jersey, the model photos clearly show fabrics with really nice drape, but I had this vision in my head that it would look fabulous made up in my Vera Wang wool jersey, and I forged ahead, despite how heavy it is. The VW wool jersey is the kind of knit that would even work well for a semi-structured garment...

I got to this point in the construction and tried the dress on. Frankly I think the photo above looks just fine. But the issue is that the fabric is so heavy, the skirt really pulls the bodice down and after a couple of minutes of moving your arms about, doing ordinary daily activities, you get something....

...like this, in which the horizontal seam is pulled down and the bust darts just look hideous. *shudder*  I made a 12, thinking I'd need the room to grow, but maybe a smaller size would have been better? Who knows. I left it alone for about a week, wondering how I might be able to salvage it, and in the end, I decided a drastic measure was called for, and I ended up....

...with this!  It's my TNT t-shirt pattern.  I turned it into a basic, crewneck sweater.

The dress sleeves were 2-piece with a seam along the outside of the arm, so in order to reuse the sleeves, I had to keep that long outside seam, which I think makes for a neat design feature.  I added "cuffs" to the sleeves to get them to a nice length just past my wrists.

 

Same thing goes for the back - the dress back had a center back seam (into which I think you were supposed to insert a zipper), so now my crewneck sweater has a CB seam too. 

I had a couple of questions on how I use the fusible knit hem tape that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It's very simple really but easier to explain with pictures than words. First I fuse the interfacing to the very bottom of my hem on the wrong side of the fabric.

The hem tape is 1.25" wide, and I press the hem up just 1" wide, so that the interfacing is in the fold of the hem; this provides extra stability and helps the garment hem wear better/longer.

Now stitch the hem with your preferred method.  Here I just used two rows of parallel stretch stitch on my sewing machine.

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I'm out the rest of the week for a quick trip to Germany! I'll be in Munich and near Stuttgart. Plenty of pics to come. Have a great week!

You could say this is my most important project to date

Baby's first booties, courtesy of Grandma

Now that I've had a chance to tell all the important peeps in my life, I'm happy (and relieved) to finally be able to share with all of you that Tim and I are expecting a new little person in our lives next year! I'm due in April and we're having a girl :)

I was tired the first couple of months but I feel fantastic right now. Just trying to stay in shape, eat well, and absorb all the ins and outs of caring for a baby. And of course, I've been checking out all the maternity sewing patterns (or lack thereof - ahem - I'm looking at you, Burda magazine!). Fortunately we're all aware that there are plenty of non-maternity options that easily accommodate a growing belly, so it's really not so bad, more on that soon.

Easy baby blanket

I have a friend who is due with her first baby is just a few days and I recently made her this baby blanket - it's my favorite quick baby gift to make. The pattern is from Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts, it's the "super quick + easy baby quilt" on page 42. Super easy it is - it's just batting (I usually use the craft size Warm & Natural Cotton batting) sandwiched between 2 quilting cottons. You use a machine embroidery or zig zag stitch to quilt it together in a grid pattern to prevent the batting from shifting. The most time-consuming part is tying off all the threads. I highly recommend this pattern, and the book is full of other great gift ideas.

Black Friday fabric shopping

As I alluded to in my previous post, I spent my Black Friday visiting fabric stores. I met up with my sewing girlfriends Cindy (who visited me a couple of months ago) and Leslie for a day of fun.

First stop, Britex in San Francisco.  Britex offered their email subscribers a coupon for 30% off remnants on Black Friday. We got there right after they opened at 10 am and headed straight for the 4th floor. Even though we spent more than an hour there, we didn't buy much, each of us leaving with just one cut of fabric I think. I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that Leslie has a cut of Burberry plaid wool in her shopping bag there...

Next stop, Stonemountain and Daughter in Berkeley. Both photos the cutter took for us were slightly blurry, her arm must have still been quivering from cutting all of our fabric.  I think we were there for 2 hours. We were armed with Black Friday coupons for 20% off regular priced fabrics, plus there was great stuff in the 50% off sale section upstairs.

As you can see, I stuck to basic solids that should stand the test of time (if not in the closet then in the stash). Only the cotton chambray is from Britex, the rest is from Stonemountain.

Purple is one of my favorite colors, but I have hardly any purple clothes, so I made it a point to include some in my shopping cart. The silk/cotton woven is the same type of fabric I used to make BWOF 6-2008-120 (this is even the same color) and BWOF 7-2009-104 . It is truly the most divine fabric to work with.

Stonemountain had an amazing selection of silk jerseys, a few solids and close to 20 different prints, all priced at $20/yard ($16/yard with coupon!). I was very tempted by several of the prints - you know how you carry a bolt around the store with you while you "think about it". Ultimately I stuck with a solid, neutral olive color. At 60" wide, it was a steal.

I was also thrilled to find the "Home Sewing is Easy" print by Alexander Henry. It's based on a vintage sewing booklet (a copy of which I'm lucky to own), and I didn't even know the reproduction fabric existed until Sew Tessuti shared it with us. My plan is to use it as a ironing board cover. But now I'm thinking I first want to upgrade from my 14.5" wide ironing board to something wider (18"+).  Any suggestions?

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One more thing - in my previous post, I mentioned that I had found one of the Threads DVDs, Threads Industry Insider Techniques, at my public library. It is well worth watching, I highly recommend it. I can't wait to try out the pattern alteration to create a bulk-free collar. Also, Louise Cutting demonstrates the proper way to use a point turner, which was a real eye-opener for me! I always assumed you were supposed to just shove that little thing in the corner of your newly-turned-out collars (as is shown on the package in the link); Cutting's method is much more sophisticated and less likely to poke straight through and damage your fabric.