That's a Wrap Skirt!

Sorry for the brief absence! This weekend was a whirlwind of expected and unexpected adventures. I've got a lot to discuss now, and I bet you're just dying to hear it! First thing's first, though: all of the pajama pants are now DONE! Here is SM, modeling the scorpion pants we all know he needs now:

Now his legs are protected by a swarm of venomous arachnids!

My pants are also done, and I really like them, but I'm not great at taking photos of myself so you will have to wait a bit to see them! In lieu of a finished product, here is a random photo of my pincushion sitting on top of the fabric:

Artsy!

Now, once I was done with those pants, I scurried right along to my next sewing project, that flowery pink wrap skirt from the Sew Everything Workshop. Because I wanted to wear it to a party on Saturday night, this was my first sewing project ON A DEADLINE. I work well under pressure, and I can happily say that this was no exception. I tackled a few major new concepts with this project: darts, easestitching, and a sewn pull-through hole for the waistband ties. I also took a lot of pictures, because I *loved* how the fabric looked in the morning light from the window in my sewing room.

This is my first practice dart on a spare piece of fabric. Gorgeous, no?

I'll happily admit that I fell right in love with this fabric from the moment I saw it. A few weeks ago I got it into my head that I needed a flowy white skirt with a pink floral pattern on it, but I also didn't want it to be too busy. The color on this print was exactly what I wanted, and that unique white silhouette pattern seems like the ideal way to balance fancy with subtle. I adore patterns of all kinds, but they're hard to wear, and I'm always looking for ways to look interesting and unique without smacking people in the face with loudness. Anyway, I was happy to learn to sew darts on a fabric I loved, and here is the final, pressed result in the skirt:

Crisp!

After sewing the skirt's four darts and hemming the sides, it was time to add the waistband. I'll admit that I would've liked the ties to be a little longer, and they don't look perfect on the ends, but overall I think they turned out OK. The most interesting part was sewing a little hole for the ties to go through on the side. I had a little trouble translating the instructions to what was actually going on in the garment, because the hole was stitched at the seam of two pieces that would eventually be folded in half. Once I realized that the stitch that created the hole was the seam between the two pieces, I figured it out pretty quickly, and here is the result:

After this, I had to attach the waistband/ties to the body of the skirt, but the seams didn't quite match up the way they were supposed to:

 I have helpfully illustrated the seams that are supposed to align. Given this little conundrum, I decided to try out a technique that the pattern didn't explicitly call for, but which seemed appropriate: easestitching. I used the method recommended elsewhere in the Sew Everything Workshop, and put a single stitch with a very long thread about 1/2" from the edge of the "longer" piece (the the skirt body). I then tugged on these threads and used them to evenly distribute the wrinkles in the skirt body until the seams roughly lined up:

 I pinned it here and stitched, and... Voila!

Semi-Victory!!!!

The seams... Sort of lined up! Anyway, they are even, and it looks fine in the finished piece, even if it's not picture perfect. I made the very silly mistake of pinning the wrong side of the waistband to the right side of the body the first time around, and I didn't figure it out until halfway through the seam. Aside pulling that out and starting over, the rest of the project was relatively simple. Putting in the VERY LONG stitches along the top and bottom of the skirt and through the waistline was kind of a pain, because the fabric tended to get a little bunched up and wrinkled, and this got worse the longer I sewed continuously. Because of this, the tail end of the stitch, around the end of one of the waist ties, does look a little wonky. Does anyone know how to prevent or alleviate this problem? Pressing the finished product helped a lot, and it looks pretty flat and tidy in the end.

So, all in all, I'm very proud of this garment. It's the first thing that I chose and made completely for myself, and I wore it to that party Saturday night and got a lot of compliments! I'm still sorting through photos of my outfit from Saturday night, but here's a sneak peek to give you an idea of the finished skirt:

Glamorous!

My Very First Sewing Project! (Pt. 2)

Welcome back, friends, and Happy Mother's Day! It's time to hear a little more about my first foray into sewing. When I last left off, I was just getting into the first stitches of my roommate PS's pajama pants, and overcoming the initial hurdles of getting used to my machine.

It's... *gasp* ... My First Seam! Aww, isn't it cute... and kind of crooked and weird?
That's a seam only a seamster could love.

Anyway, as you might imagine, a lot of the sewing in this particular project is nice and straightforward: one big seam for the outside of the legs, and one seam for the inside. I think the hardest part about most of it was remembering which pieces were the fronts and which were the backs. I foolishly kept putting away the layouts and patterns and then dragging them back out again to remind myself. (By the way, I'm on my third pair of pajama pants now and learning from my mistakes - I hang all my unsewn pieces on the wall on a pant hanger, with their patterns!)

So that was all well and good, and then out of nowhere came my next big hurdle: CURVED SEAMS. While I loved the logic puzzle of constantly trying to figure out exactly what I was sewing (pants look really weird when they're inside-out and still missing their outer seams), I made some very silly mistakes in the haste of dealing with instructions more complicated than "Pin, Sew, Repeat." So we're going to play a little game: SPOT THE PROBLEMS!!

Funnily enough, I think I was actually taking this picture at the time because I was proud of nailing my first curved seam.

I feel like I'm forgetting one or two, but I know I made at least two errors here. The first one is pretty obvious if you're a sewer: See that vertical seam in the middle of the crotch, parallel to the curved seam I just sewed? Yeah... I sewed it closed, to the side. It's supposed to be open! That seam is a little awkward now.

The second mistake may not be obvious unless you've read the pattern: notice how little seam allowance there is in there? (That's the distance between the stitching and the edge of the fabric - it's supposed to be 3/8 of an inch) Yeah, so the pattern calls for you to trim the allowance in the curved area down to 1/4 of an inch... but just the curved area. The ones on the side are supposed to stay untrimmed (natural?) and get pressed flat like a regular straight seam. Welps. What's cut cannot be uncut, and I hope PS will forgive me for some slightly-less-than perfect PJ pants. Sewing a project for all three of us is an interesting prospect: whoever I make pants for first gets pants first, but they sort of get the pants with all the mistakes. I guess it's kind of like being the oldest kid in a big family? Anyway, here are middle-pants-getter SM's slightly-better seams, for comparison:

I probably need to stop doing this.

Uh, so that picture probably isn't super helpful if you don't know what you're looking at. It is the same seam as above, but from a different angle and with the pant legs spread out to the side. The creature's mouth is made of the two perpendicular seams (inside the legs) which are properly sewn open here, and that little forehead stripe is where I left the seam allowance wide so it could be pressed open.

Anyway, after all that fun stuff, I ended up with two pairs of what I like to think of as pseudo-pants:

That is to say, they are shaped like pants, but don't have waistbands and aren't hemmed yet. Also, due to the dark pattern, SM's look like giant drop-crotch clown pants in that photo, and that's pretty cool. As of the writing of this entry, PS's pseudo-pants have gotten a waistband, and my pants are all cut and ready to be sewn. But that's a story for another day!

I'll leave you today with a bittersweet and hopefully inspirational story. I work at a children's clothing store (whose name I won't mention because I'm about to be slightly critical of our merchandise, which is for the most part excellent.) Essentially my favorite customer right now is a little 4-or-5-year-old girl named Malia (I am guessing at the spelling). She came in a few weeks ago with her grandmother and spent about an hour and a half deliberating over dresses and trying on, I think, nearly every one in the store. She's absolutely wonderful: smart, shy, thoughtful, and full of initiative and personality. Every once in a while a kid comes in who is clearly doing all the legwork of shopping for themselves, and there's nothing to prevent me from talking to them like they are the customer. That is a very fun experience. Anyway, Malia came back a few days later with her mother for a few minutes, and as far as I can tell this was just so that Malia could introduce the two of us. She poked her head into the back room while I was working on sorting shipment, and sort of excitedly pointed me out to her mother like "Oh that's the guy who helped me!!!" I was honored, and the two of them came back a few days ago to buy some gifts for friends and some new pajamas for Malia. While I was ringing them up, another customer commented on how beautiful Malia is (she really is!) and how she looked like a princess (she kind of does!), and I thought this was cute if a little weird to say. Then I looked at the pajamas Malia was buying. They were covered in princesses! White, blonde princesses. Malia is neither white nor blonde. Malia is (as far as I can tell, and this is probably an unfortunate generalization) Indian. She's got dark skin and black hair. She's amazingly gorgeous, but the princesses on her pajamas don't look anything like her, and I think that's a little sad. I think that Malia should have princesses and whatever other sort of model of beauty or success that she wants that look like her. So I've added that to my list of clothes to make someday: pajamas with princesses of every color, size, and shape on them, for every little kid who wants to be a princess. So... here's a question: what do you think kids need to see more of in the world around them? What should be on their clothes, in their movies, in their books, etc.?