T-shirt

I was clearing out my camera's memory card, and I realized I forgot to ever post a picture of this T-shirt I made for J. (CUA, for those unaware, stands for The Catholic University of America, where I go to school.)

I didn't make the shirt, but I cut out and sewed on the letters. I know, not a very impressive project, but I haven't gotten much sewing done at all lately.

This is not the world's most flattering photo of J, but she is terrible at posing for photos!

When it's just not worth it

There are some things that are not worth the trouble it takes to sew them, in my opinion. For example, this shirt I bought recently with my aunt:

Don't get me wrong, I love this shirt! I would cheerfully have many more like it. But it looks like a headache to sew. In case you can't see cleary in the photo, the shirt has bubble sleeves with elastic in them, a shirred bodice, and a neck edge that is made out of a fabric shirred in a wave-like pattern. The idea of trying to get all those lines of shirring parallel and then sewing all the pieces together is quite daunting, at least to me. And given that I can buy the shirt for $15, it's a no-brainer. Since it's so stretchy, the fit issues that drove me to get into sewing clothes don't apply.

Other things I'm reluctant to sew include things with lots of buttonholes, like shirtdresses or button-down shirts. I find it extremely difficult to make buttonholes look presentable.

What are things that you'd rather buy than sew?

Where have all the sleeves gone?

I was messing around on Polyvore today, and I figured out why it is that I so very rarely buy dresses off the rack. Besides the fit issues, I mean. Most dresses haven't got sleeves anymore! When did that happen? I'm used to summer dresses being sleeveless, but it seems to me that now all the dresses are sleeveless, with a significant number being strapless.

Strapless is out of the question. As my grandmother said to my mother, and could just as well have said to me, "You can't wear a strapless dress! You have nothing to hold it up!" I have tried on strapless dresses before....not happening. Besides, I honestly don't really like the way most strapless dresses look. I find wide expanses of skin to be not at all attractive, no matter how nicely tended the skin may be.

Sleeveless...meh. I haven't got a huge moral issue with sleeveless dresses or anything like that. Nor do I dislike the genre of sleeveless as much as I dislike the genre of strapless. I have a couple of sleeveless dresses and shirts. I just greatly prefer that my clothing have sleeves, or at least something that will approximate the look of a sleeve.

I guess this is why I sew. In theory, I can make my dresses look like anything I want! Assuming that is, I can find a pattern that's close enough to the ideal to alter. Easier said than done. For example, I can't find sewing patterns that look like this or like this.

I guess I need to learn to draft. Hmm. I don't think drafting lessons and poor college student budget usually coincide, do they?

Thoughts on clothes

I'm trying to organize my clothes and plan for college. This isn't really sewing related, but tangentially it is.

Pants/shorts:
I have three pairs of pants, namely one pair of jeans, one pair of black twill pants, and one pair of black poplin pants. I have one pair of shorts, which I wear once a year for cleaning out our pond. I also have a pair of "work jeans" with paint marks and glue on them, and a pair or two of sweat pants. I also have my karate gi pants.

Shirts:
I am really lacking in the shirts department, I know. About a year ago, I realized I barely had any shirts. My stunningly creative way of dealing with this problem was to go to the craft store and buy several T-shirts. Yes, those uni-sex shapeless things that are basically dyed undershirts. We all have our problems. Mine are my shirts.

Skirts:
I have a lot of skirts, but many of them don't really work for day-to-day wear. The ones that do are a black knit ankle-length skirt (that can double as a dress), a white and black skirt that hits just below the knee, a blue linen skirt about the same length, a blue corduroy skort, and (for the days I really feel like pushing the envelope) a floor-length knit skirt made out of pink, purple, black, and white squares cut from T-shirts. (Examples of skirts that aren't day-to-day wear include a long black velvet sheath skirt.)

Sweaters:
Meh. (I've been saying that a lot lately.) A lot of my sweaters are getting old. I could probably use a few more of them.

Dresses:
I have nice dresses. I really do. I have three dresses I can wear on a fairly normal day--a flowered sleeveless one, the Simplicity 6699 I just finished, and a brown shirt dress from Kohl's, which is shorter than most of my other skirts and is therefore a bit more casual than the other two. I also just ordered another dress from Lands' End. (The thought of sewing that many buttonholes gave me a headache.)

Shoes:
I have a pair of black ballet flats, two pairs of slides (black and brown), a pair of workboots (which double as hiking boots, canoeing boots, and anything-else-that-might-get-messy boots), and one pair of knee-high boots, which are brown. Because of some undiagnosed walking abnormality, I rip every shoe I wear to pieces. For real--I think my longest lasting shoe since I went through puberty has been one year. Because of this problem, combined with my strictly limited budget, I have to wear cheap shoes. (Yes, I have tested--the high price/quality shoes fall apart just as fast as the cheap ones.)

Other clothes:
I'm pretty sure I have more fancy clothes that a college student really needs. I have more pajamas than anyone needs. I have a bathing suit, a bathrobe, many hats, and I'm blanking on other categories. Except underwear, but I feel no need to discuss my underwear on the internet.

So why am I posting this? Because it's your turn to chime in. What do you think I need to buy, or, if you think I can make it, do you have any pattern recommendations? This question is directed at anyone with an opinion--you do not have to have gone to college. It would be immensely hypocritical of me to limit opinion-giving to only those people who know what they are talking about, after all! So, ready, set, opine away!

(Now watch this post not get any comments at all..... :P)

May wrap-up

In May, I finished six sewing projects. The first one was A's prom dress. I'm still on the look out for photos of it in action, by the way. I feel a bit cheater-ish, counting this as one of May's projects, since I did the vast majority of the work in April, but I figure it all evens out in the end, especially since I have a project that was done 98% in May which I'll count as part of the June wrap-up.

The second project was pajamas for B. I drafted this pattern myself, and it turned out pretty well.

The third project was Simplicity 2690. Since I posted about this, I took the shoulder seams in a bit, which makes the shirt less floppy. Next time I think I'll just cut a 6 in the bust.

Fourth was New Look 6807. I am quite pleased with this shirt and will probably make it again at some point.

Fifth was pajamas for B's doll. Sigh. Let's say they eventually worked out and leave it at that.

Last but not least was my seersucker dress from New Look 6699. I like this dress a whole lot. I think I should have made the center front a little bit narrower, but it's okay. I may well wear this dress to my graduation party.

This wasn't a great month, but I did knock several projects off my to-do list. I'm pretty sure I added a good deal more, though. Oh well.

Pattern giveaway

No, no, not me! I would never give away one of my patterns! They're like my children. Really. Okay, not really. But close.

There is a pattern giveaway hosted at Kusine.com! Jessica is giving away a reprint of a retro Butterick shirt pattern from 1943. I've entered--are you interested? Hop on over and leave her a comment!

Good luck! (But not really--I want to win. I've never won a blog giveaway. :P)

NL 6807 and a test post

Apparently I can publish to this blog via email, which seems convenient. I thought I would test that out, while posting the photo of NL 6807 that Branka requested. So here goes!

Edit: Ha, it worked! Except I can't tag posts and I can't format the photos and the ad from the bottom of my email shows up along with the post. So I think I prefer the regular old way.

Weirdness....

I put my New Look 6807 top on this morning, and believe it or not, most of the wrinkles are gone! The shirt hangs up a bit in the back, but I think that's the fabric catching on my pants. Bizarre! I've never had something look so horrible on my dressform and then look normal in real life--they almost always look better on her than on me.

So that's done with. My next project is Simplicity 8884, a pattern I inherited from my grandmother. Sadly for me, not only is this pattern a bit big for me, it's also in much worse shape than the one pictured on the Vintage Pattern Wiki. Mine looks like this:
In case you were wondering, the pattern pieces are falling out the sides of the envelope--they're not underneath it. I'm not really sure what I did to this poor pattern envelope, because I'm pretty sure it didn't look like this when I got it. Oh well. Since, as I mentioned, this pattern is too big for me, I wound up altering every single pattern piece except for the sleeves. So I have a whole bunch of tru-grid pattern pieces that wouldn't have fit into the original envelope anyway. I keep them in a plastic ziploc bag, along with the instructions, the pattern shred-velope, and the real pattern pieces.

I'm making this with the short sleeves of view 2, but I'm lengthening it. I'm not yet sure where I'm going to hem it. I'm sewing it out of a black cotton, which I also inherited from my great-grandmother. I'm not totally sold on the combination of the fabric and the pattern. The fabric seems a little stiff and I'm worried it will look weird. But we'll see. If worst comes to worst, I'll call it a second muslin. ;)

Various random notes

This post will be a bit of a mish-mash. First, we'll start off with a photo of my sewing table:
Not too messy, but not that great either. Sorry the photo is a little blurry. The camera batteries were dying, so I couldn't take another photo. (You'll notice that dead camera batteries will be a nearly omni-present theme in posts with photos. My camera uses batteries extremely quickly and the rechargeable batteries we have are nearing the end of their lives and hold very little charge anyway. Sorry about that.)

Now, on to today's finished object, a pair of pajamas for B's doll Manny, made to match his. These pajamas were a mess and a half. The rise wound up far too small and the waist far too big, so I did some last-minute changes in the form of an added waistband, a good two inches taken out of the back seam, and some shirring to make everything a bit tighter. It looks pretty silly up close, but the shirt covers it up. And anyway, people, this is a pair of pajamas. For a doll. Let's keep this in perspective.

The other thing I worked on today was the shirt I "finished" yesterday, New Look 6807. I mentioned already how I'm not happy with the neckline. Although I raised it at least an inch, it's still awfully low for my comfort. I was originally going to rip out the neck band and add more gathers to the front to make the neckline smaller, but I decided to add a pleat to the center front instead. This kind of negates the gathers, but it saves a tremendous amount of time. It doesn't look that bad, either:
(As a matter of fact, the photo actually makes the pleat look a lot more bumpy and weird than it does in real life.)

So far, so good, right? Only sort of. I also mentioned there were some weird wrinkles in the back. I had cherished hopes that this was just an odd symptoms of the neck bagginess and that pleating the neckline would do away with this problem. No such luck--they got much worse, and now the back of the shirt is extremely wrinkly and bizarre looking. It's hard to describe, so I'll just put up a photo:
Is that not weird looking? I've never seen anything like it, even in RTW clothes, which almost never fit properly. My original thought was that the shirt needed a swayback adjustment, but now I'm not so sure. There seem to be an awful lot of wrinkles for that. The back of the shirt also gaps out a bit at the neck.

What I can't decide is how this shirt would actually wear. My dressmaker's dummy is covered with some sort of cloth which makes her anything but slippery, so fabric often hangs differently on her than it does on me. Her shoulders are also a little wider than mine. Perhaps the thing to do is to put on the shirt and wear it for a few hours and see if the wrinkles are less noticeable or something. To do that, though, I think I'll have to wait a few days, as it's currently about 55 degrees and rainy.

In the meantime, I'll do some internet research and see if I can find a way to fix this problem. This is definetely the most interesting fitting challenge I've met so far--all my other problems have generally been a matter of taking in shoulders or bust seams.

I think I know why sewing blogs die...

...I think it's the photos. I have a post on the prom dress all written up, but I'm waiting for photos. I have a top I finished today, but when I went to photograph it, I discovered my camera batteries were dead. For now, though, I'll tell you that the shirt is New Look 6807 and I'm not very happy with it. I love the fabric, which is a green and brown flowered knit from Fabric.com, but the neck is too wide and low for my taste, even though I raised it a good inch. There's also something very screwy with the lower back. I'd almost say it needed a sway back adjustment, but I've never needed one before. Can that happen, that one particular pattern will need a swayback adjustment? (People who were actually taught any of this, help me out!)

I'm not sure at this point if the shirt is salvageable. I think the back can just look weird and I can live with that, but I think I either need to find a way to raise the neckline or wear something underneath it. It's not that bad objectively, but I don't really feel comfortable wearing it myself. Maybe I'll find a friend to give it to or something, if I still feel this way after some tweaking.