Sewing Easy Vogue

You call this easy?

I've only done very easy Vogue patterns before. Am I ready for the next level? I'm finding out with my vintage Vogue wraparound dress pattern.

Stretch cotton sateen

I found the perfect material at John Lewis in Reading. I hemmed and hawed over a few colourful floral patterns - unfortunately most of them were out of my price range at £16 plus per metre. I was just about to go with the inevitable navy (with small red and white flowers),  but at the very last minute I spotted a stunning pattern of large black flowers on a white field - and even better it was on sale!

I thought I should be able to manage this pattern because there were no buttonholes or zippers. But there are other ways to make sewing difficult, I've discovered. The sewing has taken me over two weeks, mainly because of the complicated bodice.

The fitted bodice is made up of front, back AND sides. And once the pieces were sewn together, I had to attach bias binding on the arm and neck holes and on the tie ends.

Wrap-around dress requiring 3 metres of fabric
and LOTS of finishing

Sewing, I have decided, is basically a matter of seaming and then finishing the edges. I'm ok at the seaming part, but I tend to lose patience when it comes to finishing. Most of the seams are in the inside anyway, where no one will see them! But tidy seams are less likely to come apart, and they are more pleasing.

The bias binding covered up the shoulder and neck seams very nicely, but it was time consuming to apply. First I had to stay stitch to strengthen the edge. Then I pinned on the bias tape, sewed along the fold, cut off the extra fabric, folded over and pinned the bias tape, basted the tape in place, then sewed on the right side of the fabric along the basted stitch. And then removed the basting thread. Phew!

Pin bias tape, stitch in fold, then trim off excess fabric

fold over bias tape, pin, then baste

I thought the whole basting business seemed a bit overkill - why couldn't I just sew the pinned bias tape in place from the inside? But after trying the shortcut method (on the less visible tie sections) I am now converted to basting. Basting holds the fabric exactly where you want it to be, which makes it easier to sew on curves and prevents pinches in the fabric. And machine sewing looks nicer from the top.

I will definitely do more basting in future if I sew more difficult fitted patterns. So much better than having to resew (or even worse, make a muslin).

That said, I still had to do a fair bit of resewing, because I somehow managed to sew the skirt on back to front! I blame that on the fact that I was hurrying to finish before lunch. And for some reason I only attached the middle part of the front skirt to the bodice. That was because I was in a hurry AND I'm hopeless at reading patterns - both sewing and knitting.

But I did finally manage to finish up sewing on the skirt in one day. And I even went a step beyond with the finishing and sewed bias binding over the waist seam. I know I should also tidy up the bodice and skirt seams, but the fabric includes a bit of stretch lycra (or spandex), so is unlikely to fray much. My perfectionist instincts have definite limits.

I still need to hem the skirt and attach the hook-and-eye closures to the side tabs. The pattern advised hanging the dress for 24 hours before hemming, to allow the bias-cut skirt fabric to stretch out. I probably didn't really need to do this because of the lycra, but I figured I could use a bit of a break from all that sewing.

Colour affection / colour disaffection

Colour Affection

I couldn't help it. I couldn't resist joining the 5200+ other knitters on Ravelry knitting the 'it' shawl of the year. Yes, I started Colour Affection.

Colour Affection © veera

For those knitters who have been living under a rock since this pattern was published in December 2011, and don't already know at least two people who are knitting it, Colour Affection is a garter stitch, 3-colour striped shawl which uses short rows to create an off-kilter collection of stripes. The stripes make it an extremely addictive knit, and it has taken the knitting world by storm (where it also goes by Colour Affliction/Infection/Addiction).

I certainly don't need another shawl, but who are we kidding, need has nothing to do with it. It is all about want. I want another shawl, I want stripes, and I want... no colour.

I am SO over colour. I want khaki, I want drab, I want beige. Here are the colours I chose for my Colour Disaffection: ivory, asparagus, thyme.

I'm trying a new (for me) yarn from my favorite online supplier, Holst Garn. The yarn is Coast, a 55% merino/45% cotton blend. More of a 3-ply than a 4-ply, but it will do. It comes in 49 wonderful shades, and I went with the least colourful combination I could find. I'm not sure if the asparagus and thyme will be enough of a contrast - but I guess I'm not really going for contrast here. I'm going for soothing, subtle khaki.

Boardwalk

I'm continuing the colour ban with Boardwalk, the new t-shirt pattern in Brooklyn Tweed's Wool People Volume 3. The simple shape is framed beautifully with garter ribbing on the bottom and sleeves, highlighted by a graphic garter rib feature at the neck.

Boardwalk © Brooklyn Tweed/Jared Flood

Brooklyn Tweed may scoff at summer fibres, but I thought this would be fabulous in a nice crisp linen or hemp. I'm knitting mine in Hemp for Knitting Allhemp 3, in a stark pearly-white.

After three weeks of knitting I'm only about halfway up the body, knitting on 3.25m needles (which must be the smallest size I have yet used for a garment). At least it is a nice mindless knit, and I might just finish in time for my trip to Michigan in September, where if I'm lucky I'll be able to wear it at the tail end of summer. And my khaki shawl should come in handy for those cool end-of-summer evenings.

Vintage Vogue

I grew up wearing clothes sewn by my mother. I suppose some people would have hated this, but I loved having a mother who sewed. As I got older and began to appreciate fashion, I started to pick out my own patterns, commissioning my mother to make the garments I wanted. Eventually I was given the task of cutting out the fabric and doing the hand-finishing. But she never taught me to use the sewing machine - probably because it never seemed necessary since she was so very competent.

Unfortunately, I now live an ocean and a bit away from my mother, so I have to do my own sewing. I'm still infinitely less competent than her. I've probably only sewn about a dozen or so garments to date, so I haven't had nearly enough practice yet to know what I'm doing, but I muddle through somehow.

When I moved to the UK I took along a few of my old patterns, including one of my absolute favourites, an Issey Miyake pattern from the 1980s. My mother had made the sarong skirt for me twice - once for high school and once for college.

Vogue Individualist 1693

For some reason this summer I suddenly had the overwhelming urge to have that skirt again, and it had to be in this summer's colour, navy blue.

I found a heavy navy blue Irish linen in a shop in the Lake District (there being no fabric shops in Oxford, I take the opportunity to fabric shop whenever it arises).

The weekend following my return I cut out the pattern. The pattern is so vintage it is an old size 10, about a US size 4 these days. I was worried it would be bit too small, so I added about a centimeter to the seam ends and hoped that would do it (this being a wraparound sarong style, perfect fit is not essential).

I was all ready to start sewing, but to my chagrin I discovered that I only had the first page of the instructions, and no idea how to assemble the pieces! All those years ago when my mother put away the pattern pieces the instructions must have been misfiled, probably with another pattern that she was working on at the time.

My mother was on holiday so I couldn't ask her to look through her pattern collection. Anyway, it was unlikely she would be able to find it - she's gone through many moves since I was in college, and she has a very large sewing room. So I did what anyone in the 21st century would do - turned to the internet.

I didn't have much luck at first - there were several listings for the pattern on ebay, but the sales had already been made. I was beginning to despair, but then I found someone on flickr who had photographed the cover and first page of the pattern notes. I hoped she would have the whole pattern, and emailed to ask if she would be willing to photograph the rest for me.

She turned out to be a craft star, and posted the images on her flickr stream the next day!

It took me several more weeks to find the time to work on the skirt, and several weekends of sewing, but I finally finished it up on Sunday. I learned some new techniques, with mixed success. My first buttonhole was a catastrophe, so I did the rest manually. But I was very pleased with my first flat felled seam. And it fits perfectly.

Since I managed the skirt so well, I'm now feeling motivated to do some more sewing. At the fabric shop where I bought the linen I also picked up a real vintage pattern, a Vogue reprint of a 1954 design. It is another wrap-around - a dress this time (so I can avoid the dreaded zipper). Time to go get more fabric and keep on sewing  (I'll try to find something other than navy).

Vogue pattern V8788