Jalie 2908--finished!

At long last, not only are the Jalie 2908 jeans finished, but I have photos of them! The photos are pretty bad, but given that I took them with a broken camera in a rush in a sketchy motel in Indiana, they could be a lot worse!

The front:
Yes, Teresa usually stands on one foot and one side of a foot. And then she complains that her shoes fall apart. :P

The back:
This is a slightly odd angle. But it's all I've got, and you can see that I got the pockets on evenly, which is what I wanted to show off. And look! Both feet are on the ground at the same time!

Action shot:
I suppose this isn't very much action, but it's hard to think of anything else to be done in that motel. Jump on the beds?

The pocket lining:
This photo is blurry, but I didn't notice it at the time, and given that the jeans and their owner were left behind in Indiana, this is what you will have to live with until fall break in October!

Busy, but done

Well, I managed to finish Teresa's jeans yesterday, and, of course, I have no photo. And I am going out of town in less than two hours. I feel safe saying this publicly, since it is just me and Teresa leaving, and there will still be six blue belts and a purple belt and a shotgun left behind to guard the house. Haha.

So yeah. I have no photo (except I will say that they look quite a lot like the photo on the Jalie website; I'm quite pleased), and very little chance of getting a photo before I leave, since I'm not quite all the way packed. But the waistband fits quite well, and I am quite satisfied! If I get a chance, I'lll write another post and schedule it for some time this week, but I make no promises. I'm well aware that I'm falling down on both the sewing and blogging front, and for that I apologize!

Some progress,..but mostly not

So here's the thing. Everything is waiting on something else.

Teresa's coat fits okay, as I said earlier. However, I think the main fit problem is not the coat, it's Teresa. Her shoulders are very different heights. I have decided to use shoulder pads of two different thicknesses. So I have to wait for the other shoulder pad to come in the mail, as JoAnn's doesn't sell anything thinner than the ones I've got. (And I have to order them before they can come in the mail. Ahem.) The pictures I have are very poor, as the pattern is so busy that they coat looks weird and shapeless. It looks much much better in person.



Teresa's first pair of jeans are waiting on the hem. This means they are waiting on Teresa and me to both be free at the same time. This sounds easier than it actually is, because Teresa has an out-of-town visitor visiting her, and they are usually away doing touristy things. And I am tired, and I hate hemming, so I am perhaps not as pressuring as I could be.

Teresa's second pair of jeans, which I cut out a few days ago, is waiting on top-stitching thread. We have decided to go ahead with the rainbow top-stitching, but I am not sure where to get that locally, and am resistant to paying shipping on a spool of thread. I also have never actually top-stitched anything properly--how many yards of thread per pair of pants do you need, roughly?

I am sure you are wondering where the "some progress" part comes in. You probably have forgotten all about this sewing machine. Well, I sort of had, too. But today I dragged it out onto the front porch and cleaned it with some lamp oil. It seems to work much better. At any rate the wheel turns more nicely. I am going to let it dry overnight, then oil it and give it a test run. It would be super convenient to have a second machine set up for the top-stitching. (Um. That assumes I can get it upstairs and fit it into my bedroom. Maybe not.)

I may start a fourth project while I am waiting for the various things I am waiting for. This sewing is getting me down--in fact, I'm starting to worry that I may not be able to finish these things in time for Teresa to take them with her when she leaves.

Almost done (finally)!

Well, after much procrastinating and putting-off, I am nearly done with Teresa's J2908 jeans! I decided that it was simply not worth the effort to try and fix the disastrous waistband that the pattern came with. (For those who are not familiar with this pattern, it calls for a waistband made out of a rectangle of fabric. I don't think I know any member of the female sex over the age of 12 who can wear a one-inch wide straight waistband and not have it gap.) I decided to draft a curved waistband. It worked fairly well:


It's slightly uneven, and I'm not quite sure why, but I don't suppose it will really matter. Teresa tends to go for function over form, and she never tucks her shirts in, so not only does she not care, but no one will ever see anyway. On the last pair of pants I made with this pattern, the zipper showed whenever you moved, so I overlapped the edges of the fly a good bit more than the pattern called for. I didn't measure, I just eyeballed it. The zipper is hidden now, which I like--I think an exposed zipper on pants always looks like they're pulling and too tight.


I will admit that although I'm nor a huge fan of this pattern because of the aforementioned waistband issues, I do like the pockets very much. Teresa's pockets are lined with cute cotton, which I will post a picture of when I post a picture of them after they've been hemmed. I want to wash and dry them again before I hem them, though, just in case!


I also have been working on the coat I am making for Teresa out of this fabric. I made a muslin yesterday, and it fits fairly well, but I will have to do some significant alterations on the lower back because of her scoliosis. This was to be expected, though, and the coat does fit much better than I had feared. I will post before and after pictures of the muslin soon, although the fit is hard to see with the print I chose.

Playing catch-up

(Apologies in advance for any typos in this post. My keyboard is not behaving--my "n" key and my "u" key and my spacebar are all sticking. Sorry!)

I finished my Jalie 2908 stretch poplin jeans. They're okay. The hips fit well (after literally an hour tweaking the fit), but the waistband doesn't. It fits perfectly at the bottom and then gaps out at the top. This can be fixed with some tucks or darts in the front of the waistband, I think. However, what really bugs me about the waistband is that it looks like it's way too tight, even though it isn't. Partly, I think this is the zipper, which is weirdly put in, but it's also the button, which is very crooked for some reason. Oh well. At the risk of sounding lazy, I probably won't lose too much sleep over this, since my shirts cover my waistband anyway. This picture shows how the waistband manages to gap out and look too tight at the same time:

Teresa's first pair is coming along nicely. In an effort to make the waistband look less tight, I overlapped the front edges over the zipper more. See?
Hmm, that picture stinks. Maybe you don't see. Oh well.

My favorite part of Teresa's jeans is the pocket lining. I cut it out of some blue button fabric which would have been cute without the fabric's history. What makes the fabric special, though, is that our mother sewed Teresa a pair of shorts out of the same fabric when she was little. I was so pleased when I found the scraps. Now Teresa will have a pair of jeans that reminds her simultaneously of me and of Mama.

In something sort of sewing related, I won a blog giveaway! Andrea from Invisible Flower was giving away a skirt. I got it in the mail yesterday, and it fits very nicely. She also threw in four patterns, all of which I love! Thank you, Andrea! I doubt I can take a photo of the skirt that looks better than the one she took, so I'll just link to the giveaway post. Isn't it pretty?

Oh, and last but not least--I actually have a good excuse for my lack of posts recently:

How irritating

Well, I got Teresa to try on the wearable muslin I made for the J2908 jeans. Sadly, they're a little bit too tight for her, so it won't be quite as easy as I had hoped to whip up two pairs of jeans for her. That's okay, though, because I really do want them to fit right.

In non-sewing related news, our garden is coming along nicely. We have peppers, tomatoes, basil, oregano, Swiss chard, beets, mint, lavender, thyme, sage, a few leeks, and I think there's something else, but I forget what. Also, Teresa and I have been granted permission to take the canoe out alone on the Patuxent River. Also, I am officially a high school graduate. In other words, although I haven't been sewing much, life around here is good.

I'm just not feeling it

Sorry guys. I know I've been falling down on the sewing and blogging front. I'm exhausted, my next sewing step is hemming pants (shudder) and quite frankly, my current sewing project isn't that interesting. I've been working on the Jalie 2908 jeans pattern. There are rave reviews of this pattern all over the blogosphere, but honestly, I'm not feeling it. After sewing up my wearable muslin, I had to alter essentially everything except the legs. I altered the crotch seam and the waistband. My last pair of pants, one from Burda Young Style, didn't need nearly that much alteration. In fact, I made them before I learned to alter, and all I did was put some buttonhole elastic in the waistband. The hips fit fine. I am extremely tempted to frankenpattern the Jalie legs (which have a much nicer shape) onto the Burda hips and waist. Of course, this will take a little bit more alteration, because the Jalie jeans call for a stretch denim and the Burda doesn't, but I think it's probably less effort overall.

I feel like the Jalie pattern is just a little bit big around the hips and it might fit if I could make it a size smaller, but there's a pretty large gap between the R (which I cut out) and the Q. The difference in the hip measurement is around 2.5 inches, I think. That would be too small, I think.

Have any of my readers ever sewn pants? Got any tips to pass on? My first pair of pants worked so well, but my second was a total disaster, and now this third pair isn't working very well either. Why do I always run into problems when I try to branch out? *sigh*

Photo-less sewing update

Apologies for the lack of pictures in the last few posts. I would love to give you a good excuse, preferably one involving saving someone from drowning and thereby ruining my camera or something equally impressive, but the truth is that I don't really know where my camera is. So that's why I have no pictures.

On Saturday, I spent an impressive amount of time sewing. I got nearly all of a pair of Jalie 2908 jeans done. Mine aren't really jeans, they're made out of black stretch poplin, but whatever. Everything is done except the buttonhole and the hem. I am waiting on the buttonhole, because I am working on figuring out how to do a bound buttonhole. My regular buttonholes look extremely bad, and my machine doesn't do buttonholes, sadly.

Today, I worked on Simplicity 6699. I would have made more progress, but to my great distress, I decided I wanted to raise the neckline more than I already had. I wound up making it three inches higher! Today's patterns. *sigh* I think that part of the problem is that my shoulders are very narrow, but I also think the pattern neckline is lower than it looked on the envelope. I'm making this dress out of a white seersucker with purple and green and blue flowers on it. I think it will be perfect for summer.

Back to the drawing board...

...but only sort of. Yesterday when I was working on my Simplicity 8884 dress, I realized that there was a little hole in one of my pieces. I also noticed that the fabric shed (shedded? shud? :P) like crazy--there was a fine black dust all over my sewing table and all over my hands. I brought the fabric down to ask my mother if she thought it would keep shedding. She noticed something I hadn't, namely that the fabric was quite weak. It didn't take much at all to tear it. So I've decided that with the shedding and the weakness of the fabric (which is probably due to old age), I'm going to scrap the black version.

Teresa and I went to Jo-Ann Fabrics today. I've been planning to make McCall's 5525 for Teresa, so we bought fabric for that--a lovely green linen/rayon blend. I am going to line it with silk from my stash. What we haven't yet decided is whether or not to add a layer of windbreaker fabric. When Teresa visited Notre Dame, it was extremely windy, but we're not sure how representative that is. For the Simplicity 8884, I bought a dark blue lawn with flowers on it. I also bought some green, blue, and purple seersucker for another dress, New Look 6699 (pdf file). I also bought ten yards of tru-grid, as I was running out. The Jalie 2908 jeans are next on my to-do list, and I want to trace the pattern pieces on tru-grid, as I can easily see myself using several different sizes to make jeans for several different family members.

I hope to have pictures up tomorrow, but I have to babysit shortly, followed closely by youth group, so I doubt I will have time to put any up today.