sewing bandwagon

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/scMQTSN

So I have been a member of the Cashmerette Club https://www.cashmerette.com/pages/club since like January or so, since it started this past year, and they’ve sent out a pattern a month, and it’s been awesome. Not every pattern has been like, a hit for me, but the major attraction to the company is that the pattern company founder has measurements very similar to mine, and while she’s not the fit model, she’s close. I’ve been hampered in my attempts to sew over the last few decades by patterns all being designed for a B cup, and up to a 38″ bust, and when i started learning to sew I was a 44″ bust which seemed like I could just make it work, but by now I’m a 50″ bust and it’s not even close. So I resented paying for patterns I’d then have to take apart and fix entirely with adjustments before I could use, but I didn’t know enough to make my own instead… Well, these ones fit me, and I was prepared to make adjustments and mostly just have not needed to. (Garments and patterns usually fit me too small in the bust, too large in the shoulders, and then the whole armscye is wrong, and then the fixes needed aren’t apparent. When you start off with a pattern that you can print off in a 20G/H and grade to a 22 in the waist then you suddenly find out that no, you don’t have narrow shoulders or freakishly small armpits. If the bust fits, the rest of the garment just… fits, and it turns out you don’t have a problem figure.)

so anyway. I wasn’t able to sew for most of the summer, after having gotten a fun start, so now I’m getting back to it. i’m going on a nine-day trip in late January and I have gotten it into my head to sew most of the garments I’m bringing. I probably won’t succeed at that, and it turns out I do actually own suitable garments for like half of the thing, but I’m going to try and we’ll see how far I get. Meandering about the plan behind the cut!

So we’re going someplace warm, which I’ll talk about later, and I don’t have a lot of warm-weather gear. I like dresses and want to sew dresses, and we’ll see when it comes time to pack if those are actually what I want to reach for! But in the meantime.

I had already made a muslin of the Honeybourne Dress https://blog.cashmerette.com/2021/08/ahead-of-the-curve-introducing-the-honeybourne-dress.html, which is not from the club but is from the book Jenny put out that I got for last Christmas– a woven, gathered-skirt, darted-bodice dress. The muslin fits beautifully and is comfortable but is made from muslin so it’s off-white and there are few places I can or will wear a white dress; I will dye it at some point and then it’s likely to become a favorite. it’s cheap muslin so it crinkles funny and I’m not about ironing, so we’ll see how it holds up once it’s worn and washed several times. I’ve only washed it twice so far. Dyeing will change the texture too, so. That’s an experiment to make this winter! But after the success of that muslin, I immediately cut out a second one in linen, and then carried the pieces around all summer and did not sew them, so that’s Suspect #1 on my Get Shit Done list for this wardrobe sewing thing.

An aside for non-sewists: fabrics come in two broad categories– wovens, which don’t stretch, and knits, that do. For busty sewists, tops can be shaped in two main ways– darts or princess seams. There’s a third way, curved side seams, but that largely only works super well on knits. By this point, I now have patterns in all three major construction techniques, and generally understand how they go. I keep telling myself I don’t need any more patterns because, as the pattern company admits, it’s better to just pick a pattern that fits you and hack it to have whatever fashion detail is the new hotness, than get a whole new pattern and make all the rounds of muslins and adjustments you need to– but, since these patterns so reliably fit me without major adjustments, I’m not as inclined to be sensible. They’ve been good, in the Club, though, at not just giving you too much overlapping/redundant stuff.

I have almost no trousers patterns though. Which is fine; i can buy trousers that fit, because my lower half doesn’t have the statistically-not-actually-that-outlier boobs problem. I just have Flat White Lady Ass which is actually sort of what a lot of trousers companies cater to. And I get it; the target market of Cashmerette is people who are bustier than the B cup most patterns are drafted for, which it turns out is the majority of people, but that selected-for demographic is not as eagerly clamoring for trousers patterns.

Anyway I’m bringing purchased trousers on this trip, and then a bunch of blouses and dresses I make. My second dress, I think, I am going to muslin the Kineton dress https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/kinetondress/, and then make a short-sleeved one in a linen-rayon I just bought, though I’ll have to piece in some solid linen-cotton for some of the panels because the fabric store ran short on the print.

But for my first progress pictures– I found all the pieces to the Honeybourne, re-marked the darts on the bodice, sewed the darts and shoulder seams on the machine, and stalled out again, and then because I am smart and nice to myself I brought the pieces upstairs with me and then last night on the couch watching a friend livestream Witcher 3 gameplay on Death March difficulty wearing only the towel you can pick up in the interview scene in Vizima, I brainlessly sewed both sleeve seams, quite easily gathering the sleeve caps to fit, and then went on and sewed the bodice side seams, and now I have an assembled bodice. I might machine-finish the seams, but it was a huge extravagance for me to just let myself do them by hand instead of saying “no it’s a waste of time it’ll be faster on machine” and then never doing it.

So– [image: image]

[image description: brick red fabric, close up, with a line of smallish slightly-uneven black stitches crawling across it, the needle with trailing thread sticking out of the last stitch] It’s not the most beautiful hand stitching but it should be sturdy. [image: image]

[image: looking down onto my torso, my head mostly out of frame to the left, I am wearing a slightly-baggy brick-red linen garment with a very even shoulder seam and the neckline finished in serged stitches.] It fits…. well it probably would fit if I put a proper bra on. I’ll have to check that today. Might need to go over the shoulders and take them in a bit, but then might not; I sized this up slightly to be loose, as the pattern is drafted to have a back zip and I hate back zips because of my fucked-up (but normal sized!) shoulders.

🤩 I should make a version of this with a front zip someday. We’ll see! Meanwhile I’m intending it to fit sort of loose and hoping it looks “breezy“ instead of “sloppy”, we’ll see. (Your picture was not posted)