Sewing: UFO Roundup

You know the term "UFO" in a crafting context, right? UnFinishedObjects?

I have several. Today, I feel motivated to finishing and/or tossing them. Or finish, evaluate, then toss. We'll see how I feel tomorrow. I suspect it's because I've been reading about Kanban and Personal Kanban--I want to get some items off my Doing list. Column. Whatever.

So I finished a skirt in dark-grayish-blue silk crepe, that I started months ago. Finished except for the final press, and then I'll have to wear it and see if it works at all. That's usually why something becomes a UFO--I baste it, try it on, and lose enthusiasm.

And I bound the waistband of that blue wool crepe skirt that I mentioned.

And I started hemming and binding the waist of a black cotton...er...see, it's got a zipper, so it seems like a skirt, but it's really lightweight, almost a voile, so it seems like a slip. I can no longer remember why I started it.  Whatever the reason, it'll be done soon.

After all of those are done and either on hangers or in the donate pile or in the trash, I'll start sewing the cooking coat that I cut out perhaps a year ago.

Except that I know that there's a half-finished skirt in lightweight black wool crepe around here somewhere, really cheap wool crepe that bought to test patterns, but I can't find it. And somewhere there's a drop-sleeved thing in light pink linen that's too big and long to be a shirt, too short to be a bathrobe, too unstructured to be a jacket, and too pretty to be a cooking coat. I suppose it could be a swimming cover-up if I ever ever swam.

Look! Sewing themed cat picture!

That is all.

Image: By Ron Galili. Wikimedia Commons.

Sewing: UFO Massacre!

OK, not so much a massacre, but I finished two sewing UFOs, and actually wore them. Yay!

One was my third Sewing Workshop Liberty Shirt, a loose shirt with a front-to-back asymmetrical hem that Himself says looks like I ran out of fabric. I love this pattern. I fear that perhaps it has a late eighties or early nineties mood and may therefore mark me as being a style dinosaur, but I don't care. I love the completely finished bodice interior, the deep hem, the mitered edges, the cuff/vent things on the sleeves, the way that it's loose but nevertheless has a shape. It's a swinging tentlike shape, but that's OK with me.

My first Liberty Shirt, months ago, was a test garment in bargain-rack black cotton printed with big white daffodils--it has a disturbing floral vampire vibe. The result was flawed--shoulders too wide, sleeves too long, and I did one of the French seams backwards. I declared it to be a cooking coat. I slapped on some chicken-themed ribbon to tie it shut and a silver pig button as a throat closure, and now I can fry chicken while decorated with poultry, pork, and undead flowers.

For the second version, I shortened the sleeves and narrowed the shoulders using the instructions from Sandra Betzina's Fast Fit. At that point I should have made another test garment from cheap fabric, so naturally I used a high-quality black linen instead. I forgot when shortening that the sleeve length included three inches of foldover vent, so the sleeves ended up three-quarters length. But the narrowed shoulders came out just fine, so I pretended that I meant to do that. This one I actually wear outside, in the world.

I re-lengthened the sleeves on the pattern, cut a new version from tomato-red linen, let the pieces sit on a side table for weeks and weeks, and finally finished it this past weekend. And it worked! Woohoo! The shoulders could be taken in another half inch, but I'm declaring success. I think that this pattern qualifies as the elusive TnT (Tried and True) pattern, a pattern that I can merrily cut and sew at will, without any further fitting preliminaries.

Then I finished a HotPatterns Plain & Simple Princess Shirt, another TnT candidate, in a white linen/rayon blend. This is one of two white shirts that I declared to be "almost done" in February.  My estimates are unreliable.

I've used this pattern three times, but I put so much work into mastering the infamous notched collar all three times that I failed to consider other improvements. Next round, I'm planning to lengthen the bodice to allow for reliable tucking-in, give it a deep mitered hem on the bodice and cuff/venty things on the sleeves like the Liberty Shirt, and take in the vertical seams in by, well, a lot. I'll also create a short version of the sleeves.

There's no fashion risk in this shirt, because the collar already plants it firmly in the fifties and in my book anything that far back permanently counts as retro. So I'm imagining myself making an endless series of shirts that I can gloat over, Gatsby style.

I could have continued knocking off UFOs. I have two pairs of pajama pants, a pink linen shirt jacket, a denim skirt, and a blue linen shirt that each need only an hour or two of work to be done. I ignored them all and cut out a new dress in more black linen, using the Princess Frankendress pattern. I predict I'll have it done in a week or so. But tell that to the white shirt.

Sewing: Did the Buttonholes!

I hate buttonholes.

Those of you that don't read or talk about crafts online may not be familiar with the term UFO, or UnFinished Object. Every sewer or knitter or needlepointer or quilter other crafter that I've ever known has lots of UFOs hanging around their house, projects that were started with enthusiasm but never finished. There are infinite reasons for never-finishing, from not knowing how to do a step, to just rushing ahead to the next project. Or disliking a step, like, say, the buttonholes.

I have a shirt made from the HotPatterns Plain & Simple Princess Shirt pattern hanging in the closet, a UFO from perhaps five years ago. It's been waiting all that time for the shirt hem, the sleeve hems, and the buttonholes and buttons. I don't remember why it got stalled. The collar is wrong, but I didn't know that back then, and it is at least symmetrical and without wrinkles, so "wrong" is a matter of degree. It's not the fabric, which is a beautiful blue linen that I admire every time I see it. Odds are that something shiny crossed my vision and I ran away.

Yesterday I got another HotPatterns Plain & Simple Princess shirt (in lime green Brussels Washer, a linen/cotton blend) done to the same point, around 10pm. I stopped for a sandwich and, I thought, for the night. But the shirt, probably hearing fearful stories from the blue linen one, kept nagging at me.

First I stitched down the front facings, something I've been considering but thought would look funny. After pressing, it looked just fine. More nagging from the shirt, and I hemmed the bodice. I learned in the process that Brussels Washer is rather substantial, so that the front corners of the shirt (where you have two layers of fabric due to the facing, plus two more when you turn the hem down, plus two more when you turn it down again) were too fat. But I gave it a deeper hem to give the fat bit some space to relax, and topstitched and pressed it into submission, and it's wearable, if not perfect. (Edited to add: Oh. Yes. Now I see what I did wrong; you just don't hem a facing that way. Next time, I know which Outside Instructions to drag out.)

Having learned from that, I finished the edges of the sleeves with silk organza bias strips (a Hong Kong finish?), so that when I turned down that finished edge I ended up with only two layers of the main fabric, instead of four. (The thickness of silk organza doesn't really count.) That produced a much more fluid hem, and I'll remember the next time I make a version of this shirt in a substantial fabric. Of course, the white organza strip is also visible inside the sleeve when I gesture. I suppose I could buy a rainbow of single-yard pieces of China silk so that I can match colors when I do a Hong Kong finish in the future. Or I could choose to admire the crisp white line as a sign of a clean-finished interior. That's my vote today.

So nothing was left but the buttonholes. I hate buttonholes. I hung the no-doubt-still-nervous shirt up and went to bed.

And got up today, and took a bubble bath, and went out to lunch (Charcuterie plate! Fried chicken! Fruit bowl! Gluttony!) and went to the grocery and came home and played on the web and cleaned the kitchen and did laundry and folded laundry and played on the web and tidied the back room and all the while the shirt was begging, "What about meeeeeeeee?" Then I had a sandwich and played on the web.

At 7:30 I think the shirt resorted to hypnotism. I found the sewing machine manual, the fancy sensor buttonhole foot, and the card of small clear buttons left over from... huh. Probably from the blue UFO, now that I think about it. I put together a sample swatch of Brussels Washer and organza to match the shirt's facings, for testing buttonholes. I did five sample buttonholes and figured out juuuuust the right pressure to make the wad of thread from the first half of the buttonhole go under the presser foot without jamming when making the second half, but not so much that I distort the length of the buttonhole. I dug out the pattern to remember where the center front line was supposed to be. I basted a line of stitches at the exact position for the line of buttonholes. I put on the shirt. I marked the bust point and the lapel point. I measured the rest of the buttonholes. I inserted pins. I sewed the buttonholes (gasp) and cut them (bigger gasp; there's always the risk of cutting past the buttonhole and inflicting a mortal wound on the shirt) and removed the basted guide line and sewed on the buttons. (Everybody fall down now.)

See why I hate doing buttonholes?

The shirt is done. I started out to create a shirt with buttons. I created a shirt with buttons instead of a UFO. I'm not absolutely positive that I've achieved this since high school Home Ec. I'm only fairly sure it's legal.

Above is the shirt. The throw pillow that wore the notched collar in the photo of the last post was feeling left out, so they're posing together.

Bwahaha!