A quick repeat and the return of Operation: Outerwear

I have kicked off my sewing this year with an easy project made as a gift. The fabric for this was a total purchasing error on my part. Suffice to say that to my dismay in December I accidentally ended up with 2m of very light, slubby knit in a shade of pinky-peach that I despise and never wear. However, my mum does like and wear this colour, so when I was whining to her about my fabric-buying idiocy, she said she really liked it and I should make something for her with it for her birthday later in January.

I decided to use a pattern I've made up a couple of times before, the free Swoon Scarf Neck Cardigan, as my mum always liked the two previous versions I made in late 2014 (one for me, one as a gift for my sister-in-law). My own version of it is still in rotation, although I wore it so much the first 6 months I owned it that it looks a little shabby these days.

Pale pink Swoon Scarf Neck Cardigan. It's a little oversized on Flossie and therefore doesn't hang too well.

Inevitably, my mum needed a different size than the two previous versions I've cut so I had to print out the pattern and stick it together again, which was no more fun than the previous two times I've done it. I also glanced over the instructions because I wanted to double check the order of construction and was reminded all over again of the hilarity of the pattern creator thinking I am going to French seam a knit. Just. What? Why would anyone ever do that?

It's so weird that the actual cardigan is so great but the pattern instructions and some of the details of the pattern pieces are so peculiar. Why is the crosswise grainline given and not, you know, a grainline I can actually use? Why would you EVER suggest French seaming a knit?! Why are you given a half a sleeve piece and told to cut it on the fold? (Not that I put the sleeves on the fold, I've made an actual sleeve pattern piece every time.) And other burning questions.

At any rate I do like the outcome, it's a free pattern so I am not going to bitch all that much about the peculiarities of it all, and more importantly my mum really liked it once I took 8cm off the length of the sleeve, which I hemmed on myself in her absence, for her little short T-Rex arms. (Her interpretation of the same requirement: I have monkey-like long arms and hers are the normal length! :D) In fact she liked it so much she told me I could make her several more, which, no. I love my mum very much and I was happy to make her a gift but I am not a cardigan factory. D:

Burda 08-2010-110

Meanwhile I would currently describe myself, rather cautiously, as being in a reasonable state of health. Also, the weather here has swung from unseasonably warm in December to record-breaking levels of wet over Xmas, and now, finally, to something approaching normal for the time of the year, which is to say, moderately cold and wet. This inevitably leads me to the thorny problem that I STILL don't own a casual winter jacket. Thus, since I am well enough to get things done at present, I have kicked off Operation: Outerwear, and started tracing the pattern today. Hopefully I'll get to the point of a muslin over the weekend.

The pattern I'll be working on is this lined, rather boxy jacket from Burda 08-2010, pattern number 110. My biggest concerns at the moment are doing my normal bust size manipulations (FBA and also lowering the bust point) on that French dart as I've not worked with one before. I need to check with my fitting books on how best to proceed. Other than that I'm mostly trying to convince myself that making a jacket like this is really not that much worse than making a woven shirt. If I can make a decent shirt, I can make a jacket, right? And three of my favourite and arguably most successful things I've ever made for myself have been woven shirts! So it'll all be fine, right? :D? :D? D:

The other thing I keep telling myself is that it really doesn't matter if the fit is only mediocre. Sadly, my existing RTW coats are all varying degrees of appalling in how they fit me, so nearly anything is going to be an improvement on the worst of them, and I don't have to achieve very good fit to have produced something that is about as good as the best of them. I realize this is a rather low bar to aim for -- "not worse than a really terrible thing" -- but it's a starting point!

My last line of internal pep talk is to remind myself if I'm going to start sewing the things I really want to sew (more structured clothes, more fitted clothes, outerwear, blazers, fewer easy knits) then I just need to start somewhere. Best case scenario: I end up with a jacket for whatever remains of winter! Worst case scenario: I never manage to make a wearable jacket, I'm down by some fabric and other bits and pieces but have learned lots of really useful things. That is not a great outcome, but I could live with it.

In which I make a gift (Swoon Scarf Neck Cardigan)

Ultra-fast and mostly bragging post, just because the Swoon Scarf Neck Cardigan I made for my sister-in-law for her birthday turned out so well. Is it mean to hope she can't fit this in her bag to take it home to Australia and leaves it behind so I can steal it back?

Swoon Scarf Neck Cardigan in black jacquard wool

I ramped the exposure all the way up so that you can just BARELY see the detail of the fabric. It's a really nice quality black wool mix knit with a self jacquard pattern and it is just SUCH a great fabric. When I made my purple version of this pattern I used a gorgeous fine drapey knit. I do love the purple one (I really do, I've worn it a million times already and I get SO MANY compliments on it) but the change in fabric makes this one really special too. It's quite a heavy, almost structured fabric and it makes this cardigan hang more like a very light jacket. I actually think it looks better on me than hanging on Flossie, but I think it's a bit weird to take photos of myself wearing her gift! Anyway, I hope my sister-in-law likes it as much as I do!

Yet More Knits

I am still on a knit sewing rampage! Here are the first two of this week's garments.

First up, a cardigan in the lushest (and also most expensive) knit I have ever owned, which I bought half price (but still £7.50/m!) from Fabrix in Lancaster last year. I have been trying on and off to find a cardigan pattern that worked with it, to no avail. Then recently I saw the free Swoon Scarf Neck Cardigan pattern made up on... someone's, idk whose, blog and immediately thought it was a great match for this drapey, soft fabric. I particularly loved that rather than the usual boxy shape, this particular cardigan pattern uses princess seams to shape the bodice, and at the same time it's a very simple pattern with few pattern pieces, as you would expect from a free pattern.



By the time I tried this on I was already in love with the outcome because the fabric was so beautiful to handle. However, I actually also LOVE how this pattern turned out. I have a somewhat similar drapey RTW cardigan that I love from LTS that I have been looking to replicate forever. The only thing I've seen that comes close to my original is a StyleArc pattern, and I kind of hesitate at paying the indie price premium PLUS shipping from Australia AND only getting a single size for a cardigan pattern.

I used the sizing on the pattern to pick my size (in my case, a Large) and found it fit very well. (As always though, I am PROFOUNDLY irritated by pattern writers who don't provide metric. AARGH.) The sleeves were quite long on me, but that is much more easily fixed than if the sleeves are too short. I love the irregular hem.

Swoon cardigan in purple. I know the hem looks crooked at the back, but I swear it isn't.

So, the outcome of this pattern is really great, in my opinion, but it's not a perfect pattern. Don't get me wrong, it's a GREAT free pattern, but I would have been disappointed in it if I'd paid actual money for it. The problems really are the pattern-as-PDF-document and some minor technical pattern details. For one, the PDF layout is wasteful of paper. For another, OK, this sounds really nitpicky, but putting together PDFs is my LEAST favourite part of sewing from e-patterns, and this is probably the worst from a putting-together standpoint that I've ever used among garment pattern creators. Mainly the problem is that rather than labelling each PAGE and how it fits together, the pattern creator labelled the join of each PATTERN PIECE, which is just needlessly confusing, and I think more time consuming to fit together.

On the pattern itself, the pattern creator bizarrely chose to provide only a cross-grainline which is totally unhelpful for the purposes of laying out on your fabric. Since the front "scarf" piece is cut at an angle (and not quite on the bias, it's weird) it's actually quite important to have a proper grainline. I mean, it's 5 seconds work to add a proper grainline to work from but this is a basic part of a pattern that I don't feel I should have to do myself. Also, the sleeve head is symmetrical, which I don't love anyway as a sleeve design, but I dislike even more that the pattern piece for the sleeve is provided as if you're going to cut it on the fold, which would be such a weird and inefficient way to lay this out on fabric. In fact, from the way the pattern instructions are worded, it seems like the pattern author thinks you are going to cut out each piece individually from a single layer rather than laying it all and then cutting, and to of course therefore there's no such thing as a layout diagram provided. I noticed that this is the pattern creator's only adult pattern, so I'm wondering if she's just not used to the conventions. At any rate, the sleeve issue too was an easy fix, insofar as I just traced a whole sleeve using the half piece that the pattern provided, but again: fine with a free pattern, would not have been excited if I'd paid for it.

Swoon cardi as modelled by me, pls excuse my totally inappropriate turquoise top.

On the plus side, once I got past the mild problems with getting the pattern ready, everything went together absolutely beautifully. I especially love the way the scarf neck is constructed.

One thing I will say is that all the volume at the hip makes me look quite pear-shaped, which is quite amusing for me as I am actually the TOTAL opposite in shape. I guess if you're already a very pronounced pear you might not find that particularly desirable.

Overall, I think I have to say that I would recommend this pattern as a free pattern, but be prepared to have to grit your teeth through some of the initial stages of using it.

The other thing I made was another pair of yoga pants from a different pattern but in the same fabric. I hadn't entirely planned to wear another pair of purple yoga plans QUITE so soon after the first pair I made using the Silhouette 3400 Three Piece Yoga Pants pattern. Then I sat down on my garden wall and ripped a hole in one of my older RTW lounging pants on a nail I hadn't seen. Oops. Further yoga pants were therefore required.

Rather than make another Silhouette pair (wear update: the Silhouette pair are very comfy and I like them a lot but I really DON'T love the waistband treatment, which allows far too much freedom to the elastic and therefore results in it constantly getting twisted and shifting about) I decided to look through my pattern stash for a different pattern. I know I have like, a dozen options from Burda and Ottobre back issues, but my eye was caught by Simplicity 2369. I think every sewer in the western world has made this raglan faux wrap top & dress pattern. I am dead keen to do so too one day and bought the pattern ages and ages ago. Mostly, people have ignored the knit trouser pattern that came with it. They are super wide-legged and otherwise utterly basic: two pieces, elasticated waist done in a casing. I mean, I don't blame anyone for overlooking them really! Since I again really didn't care that much about this part of the pattern, I cut it out straight from the pattern sheet rather than tracing in a size 16, which is approximately my Simplicity size.

Simplicity 2369 as modelled by a hanger and me. I tied my shirt up like that for the photo only, promise.

They are SO wide-legged, it's like my knees have parachutes. I also probably could have sized down by one size because my fabric is super stretchy. However, they are SUPER comfortable and the fit is actually really great. This is hilarious to me because I've spent SO LONG being told that Big 4 trouser fit is TERRIBLE OMG THE WORST and yet they're the best fitting trousers out-of-the-envelope that I've tried so far. I mean, I know, these are wide-legged unfitted knit yoga pants so there SHOULDN'T be fitting problems... but I spent 30 minutes re-doing the crotch seam on the Silhouette pants and when I compared my revised Silhouette crotch seam pattern piece to the Simplicity pattern pieces, it was almost spot on. Maybe I have the actual body type that they draft for! I guess I deserve a break since my upper body is IN NO WAY the body type they draft for.

I would actually love these trousers in a really drapy and slinky knit. This fabric is just a little bit too firm for the style, and hangs too stiffly over my legs as a result. Still, it's FINE for a pair of lounging pants and I am pleased with the outcome.

Next up: a zipper hoodie from Ottobre 05-2014, which I am SUPER excited to sew. I also have a 3m piece of red jersey that I am mad keen to sew up, but I'm in at least two minds about what to sew with it. I don't know if you've been reading Michelle's great recently released pattern round-ups, but last week she mentioned the Gillian Wrap dress. Something about it REALLY grabbed me, so I bought the pattern while it was on sale, thinking I would make a red wrap top. Then I kind of went off the idea because the PDF is SO HUGE, ugh, more sticking and pasting, and I read the instructions and could not make head or tail of the waistband thing (probably it makes more sense when you actually have the pieces in front of you? Probably.). Then I made the Swoon cardigan and half-decided I immediately needed another one in red... except the fabric isn't great for a cardigan and certainly doesn't have the lush hand and drape of my purple one (I keep DROOLING over this fabulous mohair sweater knit in blue/green I found on a website that I could make another Swoon Scard Cardi from but I can't bring myself to pull the trigger on it. I've already WAY overspent my sewing budget this month). If I don't make either the Gillian or the Swoon cardigan, I definitely think I am looking for a more complicated sort of knit top. I don't want to make yet another basic tee even though, tbh I wear my basic tees constantly. Decisions, decisions