Sunday, June 26, 2011

Blogger probs

I dont know if anyone else is having these problems but I cant comment on anyone else blog at the moment and my followers have dissapperared . Any hints out there people . I am getting pretty fed up with this at the moment.

Monday, June 20, 2011

vogue 8522






I decided to make something for myself as the weather here in Melbourne is VERY cold at the moment and I was feeling pretty "old hat" This jacket is very simple to make and uses only 1.5 meters of 1540 wide fabric. I had a lovely peach tweed in my stash and I bought the green tweed at The Fabric Store in Brunswick street Fitzroy . They were both expensive but as the jacket is so economical on fabric I feel fine about that!! I made View B and lengthened it by 7 cm as I am very long waisted. I did this by following the curve around the fron and adding on to thewbottom. This worked very well and was very simple . I followed the pattern directions except that because I made thes jackets in a loose weave and I wanted them to feel more like sweaters than a tailored jacket, I elected to support the shell fabric( which I thought might bag with wear) by quilting it to the lining  in the Chanel manner . This worked very well and allows the fabric to mould nicely around the body below the bust. To do this I made up the shell and the lining , attached the collar to the shell and then bagged on the lining . I left a gap in the bottom back to turn it right way out . When it was right way out I hand stitched the sleeve edges to the lining edges and closed up the turning opening . I then matched the side and centre back seams of the lining and the shell . I stiched them together" in the ditch"  using a walking foot so as to avoid slippage between the two layers .The stitching started about 2.5 cm from the neckline and stopped the same distance from the hem . I then repeated this proces five times across the back and 3 times on each front with a 6 cm gap between each row of stitching. On th outside these rows of stitching disappear into the weave of the tweed. The closure for each jacket is a lining covered snap .The T shirt undere the green jacket is my personal pattern made by copying a well fitting RTW one . It is made in a fine Merino wool jersey

Pleather Biker Jacket Kwik Sew


Oh boy , I really didnt know what I was getting into when signing up to sew this jacket . Its the Kwik Sew Biker jacketkwik Sew 3764 . Making it in wool would have been a piece of cake but in pleather with a fake fiur facing and collar not quite so easy. The jacket pattern  isnt lined and I have decided that it needs a lining.
The biggest issues with pleather are that it cant be pinned except in the seam allowance and that sewing with anything other than a walking foot is impossible .I found out later in the process that a teflon foot is also good and solved the problem of inserting zippers which a biker jacket has in profusion ! The other issue is that for all intents and purposes it cant be ironed.
All the zipper openings for the pockets and sleeve vents are faced with lining fabric and then the zips are placed inside the box shoped openings . Because ironing isnt an option I needed to control these facings with understitching which isnt alluded to in the pattern. I sewed the zip tapes onto the facing using my teflon foot and then used strips of Tear Away stabilizer under my zipper foot to top stitch the zips in place from the outside using my zipper foot. . This worked quite well but.I later decided that I wasnt happy with this and actually used strips of pleather bought by the meter to cover up this stitching and top stitched again using the teflon foot and was able to actually do this the width of the foot away from the zipper opening . This meant that my stitching was much better quality.