Sorbetto top - another beginning

I think it's important to blog about the hassle of sewing and the "why" that it doesn't happen so easily. I WANT to sew. I WANT and NEED to make my clothes. So why amn't I?

So here I am again... bought fabric for Sorbetto top at my recent visit to London and The Village Haberdashery.

Pattern: https://www.colettepatterns.com/catalog/sorbetto
Fabric: https://www.thevillagehaberdashery.co.uk/sewing-patchwork/fabric/shot-cotton-grapemist

So today, I set about printing out the pdf pattern for the top... and my printer ran out of toner.
That's it! Hiccup. Obstacle. Shopping for clothes is so much simpler - just one stage kinda - purchase garment. I believe in making clothes but there are sooo many more stages involved. So much more room for hiccups.

Grainline Patterns - Morris Blazer - The beginning

I finally made it to the bricks and mortar shop The Village Haberdashery. I've been buying fabric online from them. They stock such beautiful things. But actually my last purchase was a few years ago... like my last post here I suppose.
I need new clothes, I am about to start a new career, and I'd like to be making and designing my own clothes. So I stocked up on some practical patterns and fabrics.
I have a mock job interview tomorrow and wanted to get cracking on a workstyle jacket. I'm not a power dresser so the casual, comfortable Morris Blazer from Grainline Studio seemed a good option.

And this wool fabric from Lady McElroy design, 86% wool and 14% polyamide.

A few days ago I started on this project

* washed the fabric

* cut the pattern pieces.
I took my bust measurement and cut the pattern to size 14.
And of course I discarded the leftover pattern edges.
Oops.
Now that I'm placing the pieces on the fabric and checking some key measurements, I note that my biceps measurement is way too big compared to the pattern piece. I need to add 2.75 inches. So either the pattern is for teeny arms or I just have giant arms (I know I have large biceps).
I looked up some good tutorials on biceps adjustment but they mostly suggest a maximum adjustment of 2" added so I don't feel I'm ready to tackle this right now as I'll have to alter the sleeve head, the armhole etc.
Disappointed.
TBC...

Fabric Stash Audit - Jersey/Knit

I recently learnt about "Stretch Factor" in knit or jersey fabrics. I use the term knit/jersey pretty much interchangeably in this blogpost.

As per the tutorial instructions, I made myself a "gauge" for measuring the stretch factor in fabrics.

And I methodically went about analysing the "stretch factor" of all the jersey fabrics in my stash using this gauge.
One by one, I numbered each fabric, measured how much I have and then I placed two pins 5cm apart on the crosswise grain (doubled-over, perpendicular to the selvage) and stretched the fabric along the gauge. Then I did the same on the lengthwise grain (again doubled over).

The photographs really highlight the "knit" of these fabrics which I don't think I'd ever noticed before.

Stable Knits

I have two "stable knits" in my stash. Stable knits are treated like woven fabrics. They do not require the pattern to be adapted to accommodate for the ease or stretchiness of the fabric.

 Grey/black crisscross pattern.

 

Turquoise-green colour sweater fabric with furry texture on reverse side.
From the most stable to the most stretchy...

Super-Stretch -100

I nicknamed this category "super-stretch-100". Knit fabrics with a stretch factor of 100% in both directions (crosswise and lengthwise) are a category unto themselves! I just have one of these in my stash: white with navy stripes which used to be a t-shirt... and which has suffered slight pink discolouration from a washing machine adventure with something naughty and red.

Knit fabrics like this with 100% stretch in both directions require a 10% pattern reduction; usually the reduction is taken from the side-seams.

Super-stretchy

I have 7 super-stretchy fabrics. Some of the fabrics, however, are equally stretchy in both directions, albeit not quite as stretchy as "super-stretch-100"!
This fabric, a deep tomato red which used to be a dress, has 100% crosswise stretch and 85% lengthwise:

Whereas this light grey fabric has 90% crosswise stretch and only 10% lengthwise:

The light grey fabric is woven in a tube! There is no selvage edges - I'd never seen that before. Actually, "woven" is completely the wrong term... because of course we're dealing with "knits" here. So the fabric was knit in a circle.
I think it's fascinating what a big difference there is in the crosswise stretch of each of these fabrics. The red fabric is definitely a "two-way-super-stretchy" knit whereas the grey fabric is simply a "super-stretchy" knit.

More Two-way Super Stretchy knits

 Cerise pink. 87% stretch factor in both directions.

I have made baby hats from this green-with-pink-dots fabric and they have worked out very successfully. I only have 60x60cm left. It has stretch factors of 75% and 85%. Because I have so little left, I couldn't guess which direction was crosswise and lengthwise. The tutorial I was taking recently recommended that stretch fabrics are used with the direction of greatest stretch across the body.

I really like the feel of this fabric. But I don't like the pattern! In general, I'm not good with pattern. I try to introduce more pattern to my life, but invariably I don't like the item! I made a dress from this in my very early days of dressmaking but I never wore it. Was it the pattern? The fabric? The fit? My analysis now shows it has 80% / 50% stretch factor.

More Super-Stretchy (but not two-way)

 This off-white fabric has 90% stretch in one direction and 32% in the other.

This is a baby pink colour fabric with gold dots. It's not really a fabric I like but I think it would make a great garment. I bought it a week or two ago at a dressmakers closing down sale, she advertised on facebook that she was clearing her studio. I paid €3 for a metre of this fabric, 128W. It has 90% crosswise stretch and 20% lengthwise.

Stretchy

This is the beautiful Nano Iro printed knit fabric. I only have a teeny amount of it: 81x60cm. It has 65% and 20% stretch factors.

This fabric was bought about two years ago to make a dress for a friend but I haven't had the courage to tackle it. I feel I need to be better at drafting patterns and making blocks that fit etc. She's a very patient friend! The fabric is quite thick so it's appropriate for a winter dress. It's much less stretchy than I thought: 57% crosswise and 18% lengthwise. So only stretchy in one direction really.

I bought this light-brown fabric in Penney's. It was sold as a scarf. It is 90x180cm. Stretch is 60% and 10%.

Moderate Knits

This is my newest fabric! A bright multi colour stretch. This is the fabric that I want to make a t-shirt dress out of; the reason I undertook the tutorial on knit fabrics which has led me to doing this analysis on all the jerseys in my collection!! This fabric has 50% stretch on the crosswise grain and 35% lengthwise. It is therefore a "moderate knit" and would require pattern reduction of 2%.

This is the fabric I used to make my beloved "t-shirt dress". It's a two-way moderate knit: 48% crosswise stretch and 45% lengthwise.

I'm calling this "geometric autumnal". It's actually quite a light fabric and I don't know what to do with it! I bought it a long long time ago when I first wanted to make something with knits. Maybe it needs to be lined? I think that's why I bought the off-white fabric! This geometric autumnal knit fabric has a stretch factor of 47% and 20%. At one stage, I made a scarf from a quarter metre of it, it's 150W but it was awful!! Now, having done this stretch analysis, I know that the off-white fabric would not be suitable as a lining because I think that ideally linings and main fabrics have similar stretch factors. The off-white is coming in at 90/32.

This grey marl is a cut-off from a job I did on a friend's summer dress. I don't have much of it, 30x80cm (x2). It has 35% and 32% stretch factor.

Although the picture looks grey, this is a black fabric. It is slippy and shiny which is probably why it came out greyish or silvery in the picture. Dunno if it could be silk, I bought it in Róisín Cross Silks in Dún Laoghaire. Stretch is the same in both directions: 40%.

This pink/salmon coloured knit is quite light and has stretch factor 35% equal in both directions. I used it to make a Sewaholic Renfrew top. It wasn't really appropriate for that fabric as it was too light and the recovery was quite poor; although the recovery when I tested it just now was coming out fine.
Recovery is when the fabric "bounces" back to it's original shape - in the test I'm doing the pin placed at 5cm which had been stretched would either bounce back to the 5cm mark quickly (="good recovery") or would be slow to unstretch. As a rule of thumb, fabrics with poor recovery should not be used to make clothes - they become saggy quickly.

Job Done!

So am I any wiser?
This has definitely helped me to understand knits a bit better. I'm not sure yet how to put the information into practice but it is good to have the knowledge to hand and to have got "stuck in" with knits in this way.

Online course for Stretch Fabric Pattern Drafting

Last week, I signed up for an online course with BurdaStyle Academy: Pattern Drafting and Designing for Stretch Fabrics.
I've made myself two dresses which i *adore* and wear a lot. I can't find any pics of them on this blog so I may never have blogged about them. I wear them all the time, the minute they are out of the wash, I am wearing them again. Basically just a "long-sleeve, high-round-neck top, past-the-knee skirt"-dress. Very suitable for the Irish climate. No pullovers required, no mixing matching of different items. One garment and I'm dressed.
This is the pattern I used for the dresses:

I didn't do the funny split at the elbow, and I lengthened it a bit. But I've since sold the pattern.
I've bought more fabric to make another dress. But have been humming and hawing over blocks I have from a year or two ago, not sure if they'll fit, checking the measurements etc. So to give me a little push, I decided to take this online course.
I'm very happy with it for no other reason than it shows that I should be more confident about my pattern-drafting, there's not that much to it and I am totally able for it. So watch this space... pics of stretch-fabric garments ahoy.
But first... an audit of the stretch fabrics I have in my stash.

Onion Bag

I bought a bag for storing onions. Like this one:

And it's been a really useful, tidy, functional addition to my kitchen.
When Derrybeg Farm needed to make up a hamper of goods to promote Community Supported Agriculture, I thought to contribute an onion bag. I had bought just the fabric for the job!

Bought on sale from The Eternal Maker: Abstract Onions by Kobayashi

It's a simple drawstring bag pattern. I think I used shoelaces for the drawstrings.

The shape/size/dimensions of my bag were influenced by the scrap of fabric which I had.

The professional bag which was my inspiration does have a zip in the size for easy access of onions if the bag is hanging, I didn't trouble myself with this. I wonder if the winner of the hamper minds! And if the bag gets used!

Clasp purses

Moving on from my experiments with zipped and boxed pouches, I finally wanted to grapple with clasp purses. You know those ready made purse handles that can be bought in haberdasherys?

I had saved a tutorial from the Village Haberdashery for this project: Emily's frame purse tutorial. I now see that it was written over two years ago! This is how long it takes sometimes to get around to doing projects!!!

I can't remember exactly where I bought the clasp I have, but I quickly realised it was a different style to the one Emily uses in her tutorial :(

See? Mine has holes in it whereas the other clasp has a groove where I assume the fabric gets squeezed in. I think I remember at the time I was buying it, that I had a notion it was more "authentic" to sew a purse on to the clasp than to "squeeze" the fabric in between the grips... sigh.

Ok, so now I don't have a tutorial to follow, but there was a sheet of directions with the clasp. Multilingual directions.

The English is translated from German by someone who doesn't sew, for example "stitch the left edges of both bag pouches together" - they mean "wrong sides of fabrics facing". Also the English says "Layout has a 1cm seam allowance all around", again, from reading the German, and also the French, I conclude that the pattern doesn't include this allowance but that it must be added!!!

So I get some beautiful velvet and some beautifuller satin and I set about cutting it as per the pattern instructions on the sheet.

I don't succeed with the purse. The fabrics are too unmanageable, especially considering this is my first time grappling with this purse clasp :(
Also, it appears that the clasp would be visible on the inside of the purse, that the lining wouldn't conceal it.
I decide I need to use fabrics that don't fray so I'm not dealing with turning inside out etc... This is a new thing I'm exploring in my sewing-life... fabrics that don't fray! I'm planning on making more babies bibs and they would be made much easier if I could avoid turning inside-out etc, but that's a different project!
So I go to my stash and find some oilcloth and some fleece. Oilcloth for the outside and fleece for the lining.
And I try to sew these shapes on to the metal clasp, threading through the holes.

Can you sense my frustration with this? Ok, so the thread I have looks flimsy, but when I tried to use a thicker thread (it was wool actually), the larger needle I had to use didn't fit through all the holes - the holes at the bend of the metal are squidged and misformed and smaller :(

But I persevere... and end up with this... (yes, I know it's turned inside out around the body of the purse, the non-fray concept comes into its own at the point where the fabrics touch the clasp)

The pattern cutting instructions were just not helpful, they should have addressed something about the section around the hinge. There was no help for cutting the fabric to take account of the hinge, what they said was "complete the bag pouch at the line ends as required".
So I think I need to go back to the Emily tutorial, and follow her steps for drafting the purse shape and hope that it will then fit in with the different metal clasp that I have.

Why is it so difficult?! Should the clasp manufacturer not provide an instruction booklet if it proves to be so useless? This is why we need to go to classes, to learn from each other, to share experience and avoid all this frustration.

Zip zipper zipped

Zipper pouches are everywhere. Craft stalls, christmas markets, homemade shops... invariably there's a zipper pouch for sale. Cool patterns, cool coloured zips. Looking so easy to make. Sometimes lined, sometimes badly finished inside. But always instilling the "I could do that" feeling in me.

lovely examples on chic-a.com

Until I give it a try... and I am just not happy with the edges of the zip, or the general standard of finish.
So today, I tried to take it on myself to tackle the problem. To get top grips with the zips.
One of my Christmas presents, a book called Handmade Gifts includes instructions for an "Oilcloth Wash Bag". It suggests - as does a cushion tutorial I found - to add a little strip of fabric folded over on each end of the zip. I suppose my end result turned out fine... maybe I'm just being too picky.
I kept going and made another two zipped pouches:

I really like the fabric! It's an oilcloth I bought in Murphy Sheehy in Dublin. Oilcloth is usually meant as a tablecloth!

Only the largest purse of the three I made is lined. I used the same lining fabric for the end-strips at the zip ends (it's blue)... but would prefer in future to use fabric that matches the zip. Well... it would depend on the project I suppose but for the middle purse, I used a purple zip and purple fabric for the ends and I like how that turned out.
I like the purple zip but I think I was right to also use purple thread for it. I top-stitched that purse which I didn't do with the others, the machine really struggled to walk the oilcloth through, I had to tug it along.

Learn from experience

Use the length of a zip you have as your start point. Too often patterns and tutorials say "use a 12in/30cm zip" etc. And invariably the zips you have won't be in the right colour or the right size.

So the zip I had is 7"/18cm in length.
The tutorial recommended cutting the fabric to exactly the same length as the zip. I did this for the largest pouch and I didn't like how it ended up. So this time around, I decided to make the fabric a little longer than the zip... after all, I'm gonna use those zip end strip things.

Tip: if you have one, use a set square to draw the lines exactly perpendicular to each other. I don't do this enough with my sewing projects, expecting the edge of the fabric to be straight and therefore perpendicular to the edge and hoping(!). So to avoid blind hope, use a set square.

Zip is 18cm, standard seam allowance tends to be 1.5cm (although not for such small projects but anyway, it made sense to me as I was doing my calculation), plus a little .5cm - so add 4 in total. Fabric to be cut at 22cm (ignore the " symbol in diagram). And I randomly chose 15cm as the height - based on my eye judgement! Often the most useful calculator!
Then I found a scrap of fabric - jersey as it happens - to match the zip colour - and cut a strip as wide as the zip:

As per the recommendation in the two tutorials I was following, press the edge of the strip, about .5cm

and fold a strip each around the ends of the zip, then continue as normal! It just extends the zip, I guess. And makes it tidier.
I was so unconvinced, that I made the third pouch without these zip ends.
But it does actually make for tidy ends.

Tip: When sewing the sides together, be very careful to line up the top edges, especially if the zip has been topstitched.

I didn't and these two examples show how badly finished my pouches are

From a distance, the purses look good!