Found them

Between paper marking I walked around my sewing room and found where I had hidden my missing pair of gift socks from myself.


Literally had to retrace my steps. There is too much random stuff flying around in my head this week and bouncing off the inside of my brain.


So here they are, evidence that I just don't watch the news ...


They are actually more or less the same size - I think it is the angle of the shot that makes the one in the foreground look larger.


Back to papers.

What's also going on

The calendar is telling me this morning that once again I am not going to fulfill the resolution I made last December 25th at about 11:00 p.m. to be more organized this Christmas. 


I will be lucky to get my marks in and next term ready by then and at least two of my white shirts done.


One thing I have been doing is knitting for a bit in the evenings. My idea is to try and make one home-made thing to go with the bought presents at least. Here are the socks I have made for my 11 year old niece:

And the scarf I started last night while I was watching Dancing with the Stars (my mom called me especially to make sure I didn't miss it - they are all super indignant about Bristol Palin - with Sarah strategically posed behind the judges so she is in the shots - will some one please pack up that crew and send them home- permanently) for my 10 year old niece Sophia who is still in the pink and purple stage.

I also made some really nice socks for my daughter but I can't show you those. 


I put them away in a safe place so she wouldn't find them in case she came over and started looking around my sewing room and I can't find them anywhere.


Not anywhere. 


I do this all the time before Christmas, hide things away and then end up hiding things only from myself. I have torn the place apart this morning and all I can say is that they must be in a really safe place.


Busy day today, will have another go later.


I have yet more marking to do and am on alert for the mailman. My daughter is having trouble finding a snow suit for the baby - she is a size 2 at top and a size 3 at the bottom (see how young this nonsense starts?) that is warm enough.


So I have volunteered to "whip one up" and am waiting on patterns from both Jalie and MacPhee Workshops so I can get started. Which ever one comes first is the one I am cutting.


In the meantime the Case of the Missing Christmas Socks is going to bug me.

Shirt thoughts

Thank you to all of you who left sympathetic comments about my collar stand.


The interesting thing about this focus on white shirts only is that I am thinking a little deeper about the details rather than going on to the next thing like I usually do.


I have decided to do a collar band only shirt next and to try out Gigi's method . It seems to me that her system focuses on my area of difficulty and it would be interesting to see if that helps.


I am also considering the issue of interfacing, I used a sew-in woven, narrower seam allowances (I trimmed them down but obviously working with a narrower seam allowance to start with might make things easier to manipulate) and how much I need to topstitch.


I have had a good look at the wide presser foot on my Pfaff 7570 and the wide opening in it that is used to accommodate the 9 mm. zig zag. Of course the kind of control I need around that tiny curve at the front of the band is hard to achieve with this much open space in the throat plate, I suspect a straight stitch plate and a straight stitch foot, both of which would increase the proportion of metal holding down the fabric, would help. I should probably get one each of those. In the meantime I might try my grandmother's Featherweight which has a lovely straight stitch.


We're not resting until we get this collar issue dealt with, or at least I'm not.

Not my best work, but who said I was perfect?

I am very pleased with the progress of my first shirt blouse after a husband-going-away-sick-dog-70-papers -to-mark few weeks. 


The fit is perfect. My square shoulder alteration combined with the D cup sizing built into the pattern seem to be a combination that works for me without much alteration intelligence on my part. This is a combination I will look for in future.


I was worried, and rightly so, about the collar on a stand. I have made these before with mixed results and this time I followed Pam's highly recommended method . 


Check Pam's instructions out if you want to see a skilled professional doing a slick treatment that turns out perfectly.


If you want to see how imperfect me executed this take a look here:

This is actually my worst side of the collar but it makes my point.


This method has you sew the collar to the band, stitch the under side of the band to the shirt, and topstitch the band down. 


It should work. 


You can see however that I had the problems I expected which were about that pile up of fabric layers at the spot where the front of the shirt and the collar band meet. I figure there are about six layers happening here in about a 1/4" space.


This is the kind of sewing challenges that you can pull off if   you have a lucky day, but you can't call on lucky days to happen just because you want them to,


What you see here all looked fine at the pressing, getting ready to sew stage, but once that needle and presser foot started happening things moved around. I also tried very hard to get a nice edge stitch going on around the curve and that too is pretty iffy.


Which brings me to a large and universal question. Why do some methods work for so well for some sewers and not for others?


I have run into this before. Approaches that some sewers swear by that I can't get to work for me. Serging on clear elastic would be in the category for me, for instance. When I try that the stuff gets sliced to nothing and then sprongs around the room.


So this approach to attaching the collar, where basically the collar/band is just supposed to slip on, makes sense but requires some careful work in small spaces.


I usually don't do to well in confined spaces.


So next shirt up I am going to try another approach. And after that probably another one. One of my goals with this is to get this whole collar thing to a point that I can rely on myself to do this so it turns out, without a lot of angst.


It is a question of finding a way to do this that is compatible with how I work as a sewer. 


Right now I suspect the method that has you attach the band first and then slip in the collar has potential. This is the burrito system David Coffin uses and I have in my book Sewing Magic which he worked from too. Might do that next, we will see.


In the meantime I am going to finish this shirt and treat it as what it was, a learning experience. Chances are the general public is not going to see this collar glitch quite the way I do.


We all know this blog is not one of those that you go to for ohs and ahs. I love those blogs and you know which ones - they give me something to aim for, but it does record the struggles of someone who loves to sew and is just trying to get better.


I am reminded too about an older woman who inspected something I had made, with great effort, in one sewing class.


"Don't worry dear," she said, patting my arm. "Only God is perfect."


Well who can argue with that one?

On a good dress and those voices in your head

What a couple of weeks.


First my vet called and the expensive bloodwork they had sent off to Toronto for Rascal came back. 


Summary is they spent a week treating the wrong thing, and were almost ready to suggest he be put down, but missed what was found when I had the tests re run Saturday. With the right treatment now he is more or less back to his old self. I think it is hard to diagnosis dogs since they can't talk. 


This experience makes me wonder about all those times a little voice is trying to tell us something and we push it back down because it doesn't make sense. 


Maybe making sense isn't the best thing to be doing all the time. I think paying more attention to gut feelings, not swatting them away, is going to be a job I set out for myself.


Secondly I got a call from an acquaintance of mine to ask me if I would be a guest at their table for a Black tie and Bingo fundraiser. A lot of places have these to raise money these days. Basically everyone dresses up to the nines and they give you dinner and then you all play bingo. A lot of laughs actually - seeing all those men in their bow ties with daubers.


Since it was a fundraiser to raise money for student scholarships  (a cause dear to my heart) I went, but of course had to think of what I had to wear - fortunately I still have my Vogue meet the Queen dress so I hauled that out.


I felt perfectly dressed and was so pleased in my generally non-glamorous lifestyle to be able to wear it again.


This made me think of the whole issue of fancy dresses.


I don't know about you but I get horribly stressed whenever I have to make something for an event like a wedding or some kind of do. I always feel too pressured, can't find the right pattern or fabric when I need it and generally don't like what I wear.


I decided last night to take a new approach and make sure I keep something in my wardrobe  really dressy on standby. So often I see a fancy dress in Vogue and say I would like to make that but don't know where I would wear it. From now on I am going to just make it and consider myself set for whatever shows up. That would take the pressure off sewing to deadline and give me time to enjoy the process.


Lastly. best news is that I have three days I can see ahead of me for white shirt sewing interwoven with final paper marking from my students.


About time.

You are absolutely right

A couple of comments have reminded me of something I should have mentioned and thought of.


A French seam and faux flat felled works only if you are dealing with a light, shirt weight fabric. Anything heavier and the traditional flat felled would be the seam of choice.


I had no problem doing  the topstitched French seam thing with my current cotton broadcloth but would go back and use a straight up flat felled when I am working on my pique shirts.


Appreciate the reminder.

Seam thoughts - and one possible solution

I have done some seam thinking, about sewing white in general, and about the conventions of shirt-making. 


These are my thoughts, and the results of my experiments:


1. First of all, unlike other fabrics your seam treatment has the risk of really showing through from the right side when you are working on these shirts.  Your old 5/8" serged seam is going to look messy unless the fabric is fairly thick as well as white.


2. This means a narrow finished seam  of consistent width, because any unevenness is just going to show up badly.


3. As the ultimate basic white shirts may be in your wardrobe, and therefore worn for quite a while if you avoid really dated details,  they need to be fairly sturdy.


These three factors led me to one conclusion - time for flat-felled seams and time for French seams. 


The question of what treatment to use brought me back to the differences between how tailors and home sewers sew - something  that I read about when I did my "what's the difference between a shirt and a blouse?" research a few posts ago.


A flat felled seam is the one that is used most often in the straight seams of men's shirts. 


This of course involves sewing the seam, wrong sides together, trimming one seam allowance and turning the remaining seam allowance under a bit and edge stitching it down.


This treatment lays the seam allowances on the right side of the garment. It is used in men's shirts in all seams, although I have noticed in many ready-to-wear shirts the seam where the sleeve attaches to the body is done in the reverse, where the felled seam is often made with the seam allowances on the inside, which leaves you with only one, rather than two stitching lines showing on the right side.


After much experimenting I made the front and back princess seams on my shirt with flat felled seams but decided to do them the reverse way instead, like an armhole seam. I felt with the puffed sleeves that having the bulk of the seam allowance topstitched to the right side made them too bulky and too tailored for the look of the rest of the shirt.


Here is what the seams looked like, felled, from the wrong side of the garment:

And this is what that seam looked like from the right side of the garment:

If you take your time these seams aren't hard to do, although I found with the curve over the bust I had to  put aside my felling foot (something David suggests you use in his book) and do it with my own careful trimming and pressing.


This wasn't bad but really the hard part was the very even trimming and pressing. 


As a result this got me to thinking about French seams which are so much easier to do, and part of the sewing vocabulary of seamstresses, women, rather than tailors.


So for my next experiment, and the shoulder seams, I sewed a French seam instead and just topstitched the edge of it down to look like a fake flat felled seam. Here is what that looked like and I would like to know if you can see the difference:

Looks pretty much the same doesn't it? The only difference was no fussy trimming ( you just have to make sure that the two seamlines you use to make the French seam, the first one with wrong sides together, and the final one with right sides together, add up to 5/8") and no fussy pressing.


And making things easier in my world means my chances of getting it right are hugely improved. I think my stitching was more accurate on the faux version.


Who says I have to sew like a man anyway to get a good strong white shirt when I can sew like a smart woman?