Adventures in Lagenlook

Tags

2015 FAL, Boho Banjo, clothing, sewing, Willara

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I’m always on the hunt for unusual shapes or details in the clothing that I make, so lately I’ve been thinking about trying out some Lagenlook (“layered look”) clothing (see here for some background and examples).  Something a little bit drapey and fluid, to be worn with bold jewelry and flat shoes–right up my alley.

So I decided to give the Willara tunic a try.

This pattern was a free download when it was first released (and, seriously, if you like this sort of thing, you should be following the Boho Banjo blog–she’s got some very cool stuff on there), and you better believe I downloaded it as soon as I saw it.  The pattern’s designed for knits, but I decided to make a muslin with some rayon challis my mother gave me, and see if it would work with that.

I knew that wide neckline was going to be a problem for shoulder-free me, so I brought it in by an inch or so, then cut out a medium in my muslin fabric.   And ran into my first problem–the fabric requirements on this pattern are not accurate.  I had a bit more fabric than the pattern said I would need, and I had nowhere near enough to cut any sleeves at all, much less the 3/4 length ones I wanted.  EDIT:  please read my statement below regarding fabric requirements for this pattern; in short, the fabric requirements are correct for 44″-wide fabric, but will not be sufficient for anything even a few inches narrower than that.  Be sure to check!

So I cut just the front and back and sewed them up.  The instructions are in a bit of a rough state; I wonder if the pattern was given to testers before release.  For example, the cutting instructions have you cut two back pieces, but the sewing instructions tell you to cut one (even though there’s a back seam in the line drawings).  Not a problem for me, but would be for a noob sewer.  Also, the instructions say that “ALL SEAM ALLOWANCES ARE 1CM (3/4”).”  Um, no.  I wasn’t paying enough attention and sewed them at 3/4″, then had to rip and resew at 1/4″ to get the right fit.

But the fit was good, so I cut my “real” fabric, sewed it up with 1/4″ seam allowances, and decided to use my muslin as a lining for the body of the tunic.  The neckline was still a little bit wide for me–I think adding the sleeves pulled it down a bit–so I added binding to the neck edge.

Here’s a shot of the lining.

I really love how this turned out; the fabric is so soft and so beautiful and I just love the shape of the top.  This is exactly what I wanted–something a little bit unusual, with lots of rich color and an interesting shape, without looking costumey or over the top (it’s easy to go a little overboard with the whole layering thing, especially if you’re short, and wind up looking like your closet exploded on you ).

If you make the Willara, though, be aware that the sizing is unusual.  I went by my bust measurement and made a medium and it pretty much fits me perfectly.  Folks, I haven’t worn a medium anything since I hit puberty, damn near 40 years ago.  I wear an 18 in RTW, 20 to 24 in big 4 patterns, which is nowhere near a medium.  And I made this in a woven, when the pattern is meant for knits.  Also, I’m 5’4″ and typically have to cut at least a couple of inches off things I make; I didn’t adjust the tunic length or sleeve length on this at all, so it’s going to need adjusting if you’re tall.

But, whatever, I love this top!  And, please note, this is FINISH #6 for the 2015 Finish-Along.  WOOT!

STH

ETA 03/14/16:  I finally got around to checking the fabric requirements for this pattern again (Pearl Red Moon, I’m so sorry that it’s taken me so long to do this–I’ve been having a difficult time lately and things are not getting accomplished around here–many, many apologies to you!)

I’m going to qualify what I wrote regarding fabric requirements for this pattern:  I think that two yards IS sufficient to make this top, but ONLY if your fabric is at least 44″ or 45″ wide.  I laid out the pattern pieces on 42″-wide fabric and it wasn’t wide enough for the pattern pieces to fit within the 2-yard piece–you need at least another couple inches of fabric width to get them in there.  So the cutting diagram is correct for 44″-wide fabric, but make sure that’s what you actually have, because you won’t have enough fabric if yours is actually 42″.  Now, 44″-wide fabric is not very common in the U.S. in my experience (42″ is much more typical), but the pattern is intended for knits or drapey fabrics such as rayon, which are usually wider than that, so realistically, few users of the pattern are going to have this problem.  I think what happened in my case was that my muslin fabric was a unusual narrower than 44″-wide rayon, so 2 yards of it wasn’t enough for me to cut sleeves.

I apologize to Pearl Red Moon for my inaccurate criticism of the pattern and have edited the post to reflect my change of heart.

 

 

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Make-a-List Monday 1-4-16

Tags

2015 FAL, cats, sewing, upcycling

Pooh, Social Media Bear

(Make-A-List Monday is an idea that I borrowed from Sarah Craig over at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and I thank her for inspiring me to try it!)

Running a little late this week–time got away from me yesterday.

How did I do with last week’s list?

1.   Finish the Willara tunic.

Done!  Just need to get some pics and post.

2.  Make fabric box #3 for the Finish-Along.

I decided not to do this one, as I’m planning to reorganize some of my sewing gear, and I’m not sure I’m going to need it.

3.   Make my sewing weights for the Finish-Along.

Done!

4.  Make my windowsill pads for the Finish-Along.

Done!

I made three pads, two for the front room and one for the bedroom.  The fabric here is a queen-size fitted flannel sheet that had some worn spots and was starting to tear.  Most of it was still good, though, and it’s nice and thick Lands’ End flannel, so I didn’t want to waste it.

All I did was cut off the elastic edge, then use my rotary cutter and largest cutting mat to cut rectangles a bit smaller than the windowsills.  I wound up with five layers for each pad.

I pinned them together, then used a small square quilting ruler to mark them and sewed stars at each mark to keep the layers together.

I finished it with quilt binding, which I somehow seem to be using on everything I make these days.  😛

This is finish #5 for the 2015 4th quarter Finish-Along.

5.  Do end-of-year blog posts.

Done!  Did it all in one post, which is here.

 

Pretty productive week!  I’m really happy with all the sewing I’ve got done lately.  This coming week, though, I need to focus on some organization and administrative tasks.

1.  Do a blog post on the Willara tunic.
2.  Link up finishes to the 2015 Finish-Along–6 finishes out of 10!
3.  Do a post for the 2016 Finish-Along (starts 1/7).
4.  Deal with another pile of mending.  Ugh.

5.   Reorganize this corner of my sewing room/office/world headquarters.  Why do I have 10,000 little note pads, when all my obsessive list-making is done using sheets from a 2010 cat-a-day calendar?  Surely there must be a better place to store quilting rulers than on the floor with my yoga mat?  What IS all that crap on my bulletin board?

So, yeah, time to reorganize and regroup for 2016 sewing.

STH

Sunday Sevens 01-03-16

Tags

2015 FAL, cats, cooking, quilting, recipe, sewing, Sunday Sevens

A pretty quiet week here, and mostly inside as it has been cold and nasty outside (currently 17F and snowing).

I had some sad-looking pears hanging around, so I combined them with some apples and made Rum-Raisin Apple Butter for the freezer.

I won a book!

I entered a giveaway at Sew Mama Sew and won this book.  So many cool ideas in here!

I made pattern weights!

This was a fun project for an evening when I wasn’t feeling very well and just wanted to sew without too much hard thinking.  My intention starting out was to make 6 or so, but before I knew it I had 14 and had used up most of this leftover flannel.

A tightly-woven quilting cotton would probably have been a better choice for these, but the fabric’s been hanging around in the stash for a while and I wanted to use it.

Pooh was after me for cuddles while I was trying to get photos, so he got put to work as a model.

You can tell he’s not at all sure about this modeling business.

For those following along at home, this is my 4th completed project for the 2015 Finish-Along.

Saturday was a big mail day here–look what came!

And my Xmas present!

WOOT!

So much sewing is going to happen around here!

Have a great week, everybody!

(And many thanks to Natalie at Threads and Bobbins for piloting the Sunday Sevens mother ship.  Check out her blog to see how you can join in!)

STH

 

 

Make-A-List Monday

Tags

2015 FAL, cats, Make-A-List Monday, sewing

Shelby contemplates productivity systems (also snow).

Folks, I have a LOT that I want to get finished this month.

I’ve made some progress on my projects for the Finish-Along–three down!–but there’s plenty more work to be done there.  Some small Xmas presents need to get made.  And I’d like to get my honey’s wool jacket done, or at least as done as I can get it while waiting for the lining fabric to arrive (current ETA:  4-6 weeks from now 😦 ).

So I’m going to try something that Sarah over at Confessions of a Fabric Addict has been doing:  Make-A-List Monday.  Every Monday, she posts a list of what she needs to get done that week, and also reviews last week’s list to see how she did.  And you guys, she gets a HELL of a lot done every week.  I want to get me some of that productivity mojo!

So here’s my list for this week:

1.  Get holiday cards and presents done and in the mail. I actually have a chance of getting Hannukkah cards to their intended recipients during Hannukkah, rather than a month afterward.  They will be amazed (as will I) if I manage to pull this off.
2.   Get partner’s jacket to the point where it’s ready for lining.  I need to make some minor adjustments to the pattern based on the muslin I made, but a lot of the problems I had to tackle as part of this project have already been solved.  SPOILER ALERT:  a video on how to make a zippered welt pocket does in fact exist and I DID IT.
3.   Adjust the Willara pattern, then cut out the muslin.  Pattern is taped, but I need to trace it and check for fit.  I’m hoping this muslin will be wearable.
4.    Keep up with self-care.  Winter is tough for me, and I need to do everything I can to keep my mood as good as I can get it:  exercise every day, eat healthy, get to bed early, use my light therapy lamp every day, get outside (if it ever stops raining), and finish my anxiety book.

This may be a bit much; I tend to overestimate what I can get done in a certain amount of time.  The Willara muslin is sort of a stretch goal, but I’ll try for it.

Wish me luck!

STH

 

Sunday Sevens, 12-06-15

Tags

2015 FAL, cats, cooking, CozyAfternoonQuilt, quilting, recipe, sewing, Sunday Sevens

I’m back!

I took a little not-really-planned hiatus from the blog for a couple of weeks, but now I’m back.  Plenty has been happening, but I haven’t really had the energy to write about it.  I’ll try to hit the highlights for ya–lots of pics ahead!

1.  First, and most important, my mother’s carpet has been replaced!

Just to recap:  my mother’s quite elderly cat died recently, so it was time to replace the carpet in most of my mother’s house and, hopefully, get rid of the smell the cat had left behind.  This involved packing up 20 years of my mother’s junk (I’ll just say that she does not throw things away, and let you imagine what that means over 20 years), completely emptying the worst room so the subfloor could be replaced, emptying the rest of the rooms, replacing the carpet over two days, then putting everything back.

2.  The day we moved all the furniture back in happened to be Small Business Saturday, so I got myself a little reward for all my hard work:  fabric remnants on sale at SCRAP Tri-Cities.

You have never seen anyone get so excited about fabric scraps in your life.

I am such a dork.

3.  Thanksgiving happened in the middle of all this contractors-and-cat-pee madness.  My honey and I went to the local buffet, as usual, and ate too much, then took a walk along the river.  Cold, but sunny, day.

A good effort, considering how little raw material there was to work with.

4.  Winter arrived suddenly, with cold, cold temps and a little snow, so I’m getting back into cold-weather cooking.  This meal was so good, I made it twice in one week:  roasted potatoes on left, chicken sausage and roasted veg on the right.

5.  I finished the Cozy Afternoon runner, and in time to enter it in the contest!  The process of finishing it felt like such a hard, slow slog, but getting it done gave me such a boost.

ETA:  this is finish #3 for the 2015 Finish-Along.

The Quilt As You Go method that I used on this was such a big help; I will definitely use that again.  There are different ways to do it, but the method I chose (one of four from the book “Divide and Conquer”) basically involves leaving an unquilted border around your sections, then sewing together just the edges of the top.  Press open, then butt the batting edges and hand sew.  Finish by folding under the raw edge of the backing and blind-stitching it down; then you can finish up your quilting.

I’m really enjoying having this on my table.

6.  I put the Christmas tree up over Thanksgiving weekend and the cats are having such fun with it.  Every morning I put all the ornaments back on the bottom third of the tree and every night they pull them off and bat them around.

7.  I had a moment of geekery on Friday and had to whip this up.

I had a bit of garam masala and a bit of pumpkin pie spice, so I used a combination and I really liked it, but my honey found it reminded him a little too much of curry.  If you make it, try a different glaze recipe, as the proportions are off and the glaze doesn’t work as written; also, this thing is HUGE, so consider making a half recipe if you don’t have an army to feed.

Oh, I have more pictures, but that’s enough for one week!  I’m working away at my honey’s wool cycling jacket, so I’ll have an update on that soon, and I also plan to get started on my Willara tunic this week.

Have a great week, everybody, and happy Hannukah to those who celebrate it!

STH

ETA:  I have linked the table runner up to Scraptastic Tuesday over at She Can Quilt.  Thank you to Nicky for reminding me to link to it here!

 

Modern Rainbow Quilt

Tags

2015 FAL, quilting, sewing

Here it is!  This is the birthday quilt I made for my honey, and I’m really happy with it; I tried some new things, made a first tentative little foray into modern quilting, and gave him something he really likes!

This project started with him mentioning how sterile and colorless his office at work is.  AHA!  Nothing cures sterile and colorless like a quilt!  Then it just happened that I got a Keepsake Quilting catalog in the mail and it seemed like a good opportunity for some intelligence-gathering, if you get my meaning.

We looked through it together, and talked about what we liked and what we didn’t, and both agreed that this quilt was very cool.  Problem is, it was WAY too big for his little space, and too busy for his taste (he tends toward the minimalist).

So my idea was to do something similar, but very simple, small, and in the colors of the rainbow.

I picked up a yard of good-quality white quilting cotton from SCRAP to use as the base and cut an 18″ x 24″ piece from it.  The stripes are fabrics from the stash; I sewed tubes, wrong sides together, pressed them flat with the seam on the center back, and hand-appliqued them on (the Stix quilt pattern has you topstitch, but I wanted a cleaner look).

Some time in the middle of this process, I came across this post on a quilted pillow cover and just loved the great texture and modern look of the quilting on it.  I knew immediately I wanted to use the same technique on my quilt.

The green backing fabric was from the stash, and I thought its modern, abstract look went well with the feeling of the quilt.

To make the quilting easy, I just used the edge of my presser foot as a guide for the quilting.  The lines of stitching are a little over 1/4″ apart.  Now, that sounds like a lot of quilting, but it really wasn’t on this small quilt, and it went very fast since I didn’t have to mark anything.

This was such a fun project!  All the things I love–bright colors, hand applique, small size, quilting without stress.  More small, modern quilts are definitely going to happen in my life.

And he loved it!  He says it’s too nice for his office, so he’s hung it up in his office at home.  🙂

ETA:  this is finish #1 for the 2015 Finish-Along.

STH

Sunday Sevens 10-25-15

Tags

2015 FAL, Columbia Park, Kennewick, Oregon, Oregon Zoo, Portland, sewing, Sunday Sevens, Washington

Sunday Sevens is a series in which we post some pictures from our week and show a little bit of what we’ve been up to.  See Natalie from Threads and Bobbins for more info.

A bit late to the party after a fun weekend in Portland.

Preparations for my mother’s new carpet continue.  I brought her some boxes this week so that she could start packing some things up.  I’m also hoping she might donate a few things, as her three-bedroom house is jam-packed full of stuff.

So far, she’s donated this jar, a throw, and an unused set of sheets.

Three down, ten million to go.

More thinking about sewing than actual sewing this week, but I did do some darning on my honey’s jeans; they were in excellent condition except for tears at the inner corners of both back pockets.

Saving usable clothing from the landfill feels like a big ol’ win.

And I got the super-sized snaps onto my fleece jacket!  For those following along at home, that’s two finishes toward my goal of ten by the end of the year.

Took a walk with my mother to the fishing pond at the far end of Columbia Park.

We spent the weekend in Portland; on Saturday, my partner went off on a bike ride with his buddies, and I went to the Oregon Zoo.

Here’s an eagle for ya (another one is behind the trunk of the tree).

Isn’t this a beautiful place?

And a cheetah:

And (slightly less majestic) Naked Mole Rats sleeping in a heap.

And, just for fun, a couple of bonus pictures of the fall colors from the drive back home on Sunday.

This is at the Starbuck’s in Hood River, OR.

And a tree farm near the Oregon-Washington border:

Have a great week, everybody.

STH

WIPing Out Those UFOs

Tags

2015 FAL, cats, quilting, sewing

You guys, I’ve got PILES of halfway-done projects around here, and I’m starting to get annoyed about it.  I have some in my overflowing WIP box, and then there are the ones in my mending pile, and the pile next to my sewing machine, and some stuffed into the closet . . . .

Which wouldn’t be such a problem, except that the STH Sewing Hut / Office / Exercise Studio / Cat Storage Area is NOT a huge space.  It’s a teeny-weeny little spare bedroom that’s already pretty full with two desks, a big dresser, and lots of plastic bins full of scraps.

Time for a Finish Along!  I just happened to come across this quarterly Finish Along a few days after it started, and I thought it might help me to get some things done if I were lured along with the promise of PRIZES.

So here’s my list of the WIPs I want to finish sooner rather than later (picture-heavy!):

1.  Birthday present for my honey, deadline 10/24.  Needs binding and label.  #1 because it’s the only one with a deadline.

2.  My very-autumnal fleece jacket from last spring still needs these big snaps sewn on.  Fairly high priority because the weather’s going to cool off soon.

3.  Shark glasses case–needs zipper redone, eyes added.

4.  Flannel wall quilt–don’t remember when I started this, but I suspect I lost my nerve when it came time to quilt it; it’s been in the Dresser of Shame for years.  All sandwiched and ready to quilt.

5.  Cozy Afternoon BOM–finishing instructions will be e-mailed out on 10/13 and will hopefully help me figure out how to do setting triangles so that I can turn this into a table runner.

6.  Willara tunic–I want to try this very cool tunic pattern in the super-soft rayon challis my mother gave me.  Should probably do a muslin first, as the neckline could be a problem for shoulder-free me, and there’s also the little issue of the pattern being designed for knits.  But I’m SO excited about this one!

7.  Fabric box #3–need to use some more of my Mary Engelbreit sewing-themed fabric to make another box for my purse hardware collection / mess.  Boxes #1 and #2 also need some hand-stitching to make them look a little neater.

8.  Pattern weights–started these recently, then got distracted by purple sharks and other pretty things.  Need to finish sewing and fill with rice.  Thank goodness I just happen to have close to 10 pounds of white rice that I bought for the Class That Wasn’t.  I could wind up with a LOT of pattern weights.

9.  Window cushions–this olive green flannel sheet that’s got some worn spots needs to get turned into some thin cushions for the wide windowsills where the Cat Posse spends most of their time.  Simple rectangles with some quilt batting between them and ties to hold the batting in place.  The things I do for those spoiled cats!

10.  The black jumper (“pinafore” in the UK?)–I’ve been wanting to make this for at least a year.  I finally found the fabric I wanted and bought it as a birthday present for myself last August.  It’s a very lightweight black denim with a little stretch.  The plan is to make the red version in the picture, layer it with blouses and turtlenecks, and wear it with necklaces from my VAST collection.  I have so many necklaces that I’ve never worn because all my clothes are too colorful to show them off properly.

Whew!  That seems like a lot, though some of them will be quick to do.  I tend to really dislike sewing plans–and completely ignore them when actually choosing what to make–but these are all things I really want to sew.  I’m basically just writing down the list I’ve been carrying around in my head.  I’m also resolving not to beat myself up over this; these are just ideas, not assignments.  I’ve got enough here that I should be able to find something on the list that I’m excited about so that sewing doesn’t feel like a chore.

We’ll see how it goes, anyway.  If I get half of these done, I’ll consider it a win.

If I get them ALL done, I’ve got at least two more quilt UFOs in the dresser.  Oh, and then there are holiday presents, which I’m going to have to start figuring out soon.  YIKES–so much to sew!

STH