Without Further Ado, I Present the Slit Plackets

First the good news! The slit placket on the last green kid’s shirt that I made came out of the washer and dryer with flying colors. It did not fall apart like the first one did. The fabric, the slit placket, and the interfacing did just great. The next step was to complete the shirt. But before I could do that I had to decide what design I wanted to embroidery on the shirt. It wasn’t so much my decision but the husband’s. I needed the husband to decided what design he wanted on his shirt, and then I would know what design to put on the kid’s shirt. If the husband picked a design I needed to try it out first before embroidering in on his shirt, and so the kid’s shirt became the best place to try a sample.

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The husband narrowed his choices down to two designs, a panda bear and a tiger. Since the tiger design was too large for the kids shirt, I decided to just put the panda on it and see how it turned out. When I finished embroidering the panda design, the husband like the design on the green fabric enough to pick the panda design without trying the tiger design first.

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After completing the husband’s shirt and the green kid’s shirt, I decided to go back to the first shirt with the placket that fell apart in the washer and see if it could be salvaged. With a little skill and a lot of luck, I was able to restitch the placket and get something useable from it. Since I had been viewing several panda designs, it was easy to pick a design for this shirt.

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After the husband’s shirt, the kid’s shirt and the trial and error samples with the green fabric, there were only scraps left, but enough to make a size 1 t-shirt with long sleeves. So, rather than putting the scraps back into the stash, I decided to just whip up this little t-shirt instead, and since all the embroidery thread and supplies were out I decided to try a design that was up for consideration on the kid’s green placket shirt. I like the design quite a bit and plan to use it again.

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Now that the my slit placket adventure is over, I am glad I went through it. I learned a lot and improved my skill of sewing slit plackets quite a bit. But, I am ready to move on and sew something else besides green fabric and slit plackets.

Slit Placket Trial #2 – To Infinity and Beyond

In a sewing room far, far away the slit placket saga continues…

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Applying everything I had learned from the first shirt, I stitched the next shirt placket very carefully. The resulting placket was once again not perfect but far more acceptable. Still not really pleased with the results,  I did some unpicking and stitched it again. It was better, but not quite there. More unpicking and another try. It was better yet again but, after the third try,  the fabric was starting to become unhappy with the unpicking and restitching. Flustered, I grabbed some scraps of fabric and tried the placket again with the scraps. Guess what? Perfect! Argh! Was the type of fabric causing my problems? So, I grabbed more of the green scraps from the shirt and tried again. The results were good but not as good as the previous scraps. One more try out of the green scraps and the result was perfect. Wow did I really master the skill that fast?

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Not believing that I had really mastered the skill on the third try, I decided to use some more scraps and do one more trial run. As I thought, it did not work at all that time. I had not yet mastered this skill. The result was terrible. Having plenty of scraps, I tried again. Nope. Tried again. Nope. Again. Nope. Rather than letting this frustrate me, I tried to learn something from each try. This really surprised me about myself. Usually, I would let this trial and error thing get to me. I would get angry with it, throw it against the wall and shred the pattern. After the fifth try, I finally make a placket out of the green scraps that was not bad. The next was better, and the last almost perfect. I then tried once more, folding it the other way as if you were sewing a girl’s shirt and it came out great. I decided trial time was over and returned to the shirt front.

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Unpicking my work one more time, I tried the placket again. The result was not perfect but it was the best so far on the shirt. Because of the wear on the fabric. I called it good. Before I take another stitch on the shirt though, I have decided to wash the shirt front to make sure I don’t get the same mess as the first shirt. I don’t believe that I have yet fully mastered the skill of slit plackets, but I feel like I am closer than I have ever been before. As with all of life, right now, luck has a lot to do with the success or failure of a slit placket for me, not skill.

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While the child’s shirt front is in the washer, I am going to start construction of the husband’s next shirt. I need a success story here. Hopefully, his shirt will just sew up and not give me any hassles. You know, it will be my third item I will have made using sew in interfacing. Wish me luck.

Slit Packets – Trial #1

To start, let me tell you what a slit placket is to me because I know not that that is what the sewing community really calls it. When I sew the husband a placket shirt, I make two facings and cut out the center of the shirt and sew the facings in. I call this a cut placket. When I make a placket shirt for a child, the pattern I have calls for one facing and to sew a slit, cut, and then fold the facing to form the placket. Thus, I call this type of placket a slit placket. Now, of the two, I like sewing a cut placket so much more because that is what I have been making for years but the time has come to learn a new skill and master the slit placket.

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As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the construction of the child’s shirt to try out the sew in interfacing was a disaster because of the slit placket. I went into the construction a little cocky because of the the success I had on the slit for the button in the back of the gray Mickey Mouse dress I had previously made. What I quickly learned was that the slit was easy to make but matching the fold is the hard part especially if the slit is not just right. I struggled my way through the slit placket construction. It was not perfect, barely acceptable. I know where I went wrong but I was done playing with it and pushed it to the side. I did not know if I would finish the shirt or just call it a practice run of the sew in interfacing and the placket.

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When I panicked about preshrinking the interfacing, I grabbed the half constructed shirt and threw it in the washer too. I had not preshrunk the interfacing before I sewed it in. Washing it would tell me about shrink in an already made garment.

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This comforted me that maybe the fabric and interfacing was not a total waste. I would learn from it and boy, did I.  The interfacing did just fine in the washer but the placket fell to pieces. It totally came unstitched. Now, the placket was totally unacceptable and I learned that I had done something really wrong, and I definitely had some more learning to do.

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While the interfacing was washing, I did not want to waste precious sewing time, so I decided to cut out the husband’s new shirt while waiting for the wash to complete. After having a blonde moment and cutting the front of the husband’s shirt not on the fold, I decided to cut out another child’s shirt with a slit placket from the fabric of my cutting error. Luckily, I had extra fabric and was able to cut out a new front for the husband’s shirt on the fold. When the first shirt came out of the washer and the placket was a mess, I decided to sew the new child’s shirt I has just cut out first. I will let you know how that turned out in the next blog post.

Just Sewing It In

It sounds pretty simple of course, but it is not really. Let me explain. I spend a lot of my sewing time having epic battles with interfacing. A commenter to one of my posts of interfacing frustration said to stop using cheap interfacing or to use sew in interfacing rather than the iron on interfacing that I have been such a fan of for years now. Since the only stores I have to buy interfacing from are Joann’s or Walmart, I can only buy what they carry, and they seem to only have the cheap interfacing. I could order more expensive interfacing on line but I don’t know what I will get without seeing and feeling it first. With that, I decided to try some sew in interfacing on the next shirt that I made the husband.

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When it came time to cut out a new shirt for the husband, I grew leery of trying the sew in interfacing on his shirt so I decided to make a child’s shirt first and try it on that instead. I figured it was less fabric and interfacing wasted if it didn’t work out. I did not think that you needed to preshrink interfacing so I cut out the shirt and the interfacing and started to sew. I did preshrink the fabric before I cut as I always do. Later, I read online many horror stories of people not preshrinking their interfacing first and I panicked. I then proceeded to wash all of my sew in interfacing, cut, sewn or not. It did shrink a little in the washing and drying process, but probably not enough to make a difference on this small shirt. I do feel better now though about using the interfacing and not having to worry about it shrinking after the garment is finished.

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As I basted the sew in interfacing to the fabric, I quickly learned that it was not as easy as I thought it would be. First, I tried using long stitches to baste the interfacing to the fabric but quickly learned that I liked smaller stitches better. When I remembered that pins are my friends, I found that rather than basting, I could just pin the sew in interfacing and the fabric together and I got a good result as I sewed, especially if the pieces were small. Next, I learned that you really have to watch the stretch of the fabric. You don’t want to let the fabric stretch as you sew it to the interfacing. They need to match and match flat. Keeping it flat was not as easy as it sounds either. For me, the fabric sewn to the interfacing wanted to bubble in the middle as I sewed the shirt together, which is what the basting or the pinning was not suppose to let happen. Argh!

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So, in conclusion, what I learned is that using sew in interfacing is a skill like any other with sewing. There is more to it than just sewing it in. Also, I learned that I need lots more practice with the sewing in of sew in interfacing before I can say I have mastered the skill.  So, I will keep sewing with it and learn this new skill of using sew in interfacing.

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P.S. The construction of the child’s shirt has been complicated, not so much because of the sew in interfacing but because of my inexperience and lack of skill in constructing a slit placket. I’ll talk more about that problem in a later blog post though.

Thanks for the Memories

My niece recently posted some pictures on her blog of her kids in clothes I made for them many years ago. It is always great thrill for me to see new pictures of the kids. But to see them in the clothes I made is extra special, and it sent me on a trip down memory lane.

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The first picture was of her two youngest boys. She has 4 now, by the way. The older of the two boys in the picture is wearing a jacket I made for her oldest boy’s 3rd birthday, 7 years ago. Both boys looked so cute wearing the jacket. With a little reminiscing, I remembered the construction of this jacket. It was the first time I had made welt pockets. I did not want just patch pockets on this jacket and I remember reading about welt pockets in one of my sewing reference books.

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I remember sitting at the sewing machine hurrying to complete the pockets because they were coming to see us, and we were going to a local craft show at the high school. I remember hoping that the little guy would like the airplanes on the fabric and that he would be able to zip up the jacket by himself. I remember being concerned about the zipper because it was a smaller tooth zipper than I wanted to use but the color was right.

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The second picture that my niece posted was of her youngest boy in a shirt I made for the oldest boy back when he was just one year old. All 4 of her boys have wore this shirt now. I am amazed it lasted this long. I made this shirt just after I got my very first embroidery machine. I used the scraps from a shirt I had just made for my husband.

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In fact, there ended up being enough scraps for two shirts in size 1. One shirt was embroidered with Mickey Mouse and the other shirt with Donald Duck. Donald Duck is my niece’s favorite Disney character so you can see which one the little guy is wearing in the picture. On these shirts, I put ribbing around the sleeves. Each time I see I picture of one of the boys in these shirts, I regret adding the ribbing. To me, the ribbing gives the shirt a feminine look and I have not added ribbing to the sleeve of a boy’s shirt since.

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I would like to thank my niece for posting the pictures and for taking care of the clothes, I made so that each boy could enjoy them and I could see them wearing them.  Now that she has 4 boys and the oldest is a tween and is becoming very particular about what he wears, I have not done any sewing for them recently. But, with as much as I love sewing for kids, it might be time to get back to the sewing machine and get some new clothes made.

And… ACTION!

I see where patterns are on sale again at Joanns and now that I have worn both of the shirts I made from my new Connie Crawford Butterick patterns, I thought I would report on the wearable muslins I ended up making from the patterns and how the garments/muslins are performing.

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B5503

The golden shirt I made from pattern B5503 is very loose and very comfortable and the fabric is so soft. It is a pleasure to wear but I do feel like I have a pup tent on sometimes. Even with cutting so much off the the length and width, it is still huge. This keeps me from wearing it to work or out to dinner but it has became one of my favorite hang around the house shirts. For some reason I’ve gotten tons of comments from people when wearing it about how much they love it so it must look ok on. As I said before, if and when I make this pattern again, I will use my basic sloper as the start and just use the design ideas from the pattern to spice up the shirt a little.

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B5583

The princess seams of pattern B5583 are wearing well. The first time I wore the shirt I was very self conscious of the princess seams. Would the princess seams show off my rolls that I so carefully try to hide? But, the more compliments I got on the shirt the better I felt about the way it looked. There are a couple of things that I will definitely change on the next shirt from this pattern. First, the front facings will be cut smaller. With such large front facings, I feel like the shirt has a steel breast plate in the front. The large facings make the front heavy and hot when wearing. Sitting becomes an issue too as thebreast plate bulges as you take a seat. Cutting down the facings next time will make this shirt a more comfortable fit. Next, for me the arms eye needs to be deeper. I feel a slight constriction when I reach in this shirt. This is an easy fix for the next shirt and it will make it easier to fit the sleeve in as well.  The final change is to take some of the fullness out of the back princess seams at the hem. I will need to give this some study before I make the cut on the next shirt. I may need that fullness to sit down in it.

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Embroidery

As far as embroidery designs go, check out the monorail design on the husband’s new shirt. Ooo, doesn’t he look sharp? It seems to be wearing very well and everyone including him seems to love it.

From Box Number Two…

With my first mystery box of fabric shirt done for myself, it was time to make the husband a shirt. From the second mystery box in the closet, I pulled this large piece of blue interlock knit out. Once again, I don’t know where or when I bought it, but I am sure I fell in love with it then as I have again now. It is a beautiful piece of fabric with a great soft feel and stretch.

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I cut the husband’s shirt out and then applied the interfacing to the fabric. The interfacing did not give me any hassle, which was nice. Do you think I have finally figured out the trick to applying interfacing? Or is the interfacing just teasing me, and will bubble and curl even more than normal the next time I use it?

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The sewing process for the husband’s shirt went smoothly. Before I opened up the mystery boxes from the closet, I had started a shirt for the husband but had not yet finished it. So as long as I was sewing the new blue shirt, I decided to finish up the first shirt at the same time. It is made from a ribbed green knit that has tons of stretch. Needless to say, with the stretch, the green shirt took more time to finish up than the blue one took to make. I only thought that I used a lot of pins on my shirt to keep the fabric from stretching. It was not even close to the number of pins I had to use on each seam of the husband’s green shirt to keep it from stretching too much.

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Embroidering designs on the shirts became a little more challenging than I expected, well at least on the green shirt. The only difficult part of embroidering on the blue shirt was picking the design. After looking at many designs, I returned to the my first choice, the Peanuts Snoopy as a World War I flying ace. It stitched up nicely on the shirt and it looks great. I love it, of course since it is Snoopy. Hopefully the husband will like it half as much as I do.

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The green shirt was made for the new Haunted Mansion design I had recently digitized for Halloween, but with the stretch, I just was not sure it was going to work out. Luckily over the years, I have learned and remembered some hard learned lessons, so I hooped up a scrap piece of the green fabric and tried the design out first. Due to the stretch, it did not work out. I hooped another piece of green scrap differently this time, tinkered with the design, and tried again. Still it was a No go. Disappointed, I looked though my designs and found a design I just loved, but have just never put on anything until now. So, I present to you superhero Tootsie Roll! The stretchy fabric still gave me a hassle with this design but since it was smaller, stitched from up and down rather than side to side, and had a much lower stitch count, I was able to make it work without too many problems. I think the design turned out cute and I like the chocolate buttons I chose on the shirt with the design.

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Now the dilemma, I want to finish sewing up the fabric from the boxes, but I am anxious to get into the stash and find a piece of fabric for another shirt to put the husband’s Haunted Mansion design on. So, what to do next?

And In Box Number One…

Now that I had a corner of my sewing room closet back in order and a pile of fabric for Good Will ready to go, I turned my attention to the the four pieces of fabric I left out from the boxes. After laundering the fabric, I decided to make me a shirt with the first piece.

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My shirt would be made from the blue print piece. I don’t remember when I bought it or were it came from, but I really like the colors. The fabric must have some lycra in it because it has a stretch in both directions. This made me cut very cautiously because I did not want to stretch the fabric out as I cut it.

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During the cutting process, I realized I did not have quite enough fabric to complete the shirt I wanted to make. But eventually I determined if I cut the back upside down, I would have just enough fabric but then the stripes would not match. I decided to go for it anyway! Since the shirt is just a t-shirt style to hang out in and the print is kind of funky, I figured it would not really be noticeable to anyone other than me anyway.

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I had to use a few extra pins in the sewing process to keep the fabric from stretching out but for the most part the sewing went together quickly. The fabric was nice to work with and I just kept in mind not to rush the process.

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With the shirt finished, I have wore it a couple of times and I just love it. I was concerned that with the lycra content that the shirt would be too warm, but it really isn’t. It is very comfortable. And it is very nice to have yet another piece out of the stash and being useful.

Let’s Make A Deal

Remember the old game show with Monty Hall called Let’s Make A Deal? I  loved that show! Remember how the contestants were offered either what was in the box, what was behind door number two, or what was in Monty’s pocket? That is how I felt the other day as I opened the three mystery boxes of fabric hidden in the bottom of the sewing room closet.

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When we moved into our current home, most of the fabric made its way from the sewing room into the spare bedroom closet except for three boxes that were tucked at the the bottom of the sewing room closet. These three boxes were quickly covered with everything else, patterns, fabric scraps, UFO’s, mending, ironing, and so on. At this point, they were more of a table in the closet than boxes of fabric. After the devastating trip to the stash a couple of months ago, I knew it was time to pull these three boxes out and see what surprises they held.

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On the day of the opening of the boxes, I had to start by clearing off the boxes to get down to them. This proved to be a big job in itself. After I pulled the three boxes from the closet, I opened them one at a time, and found gorgeous pieces of fabric that I forgot I even owned. I piled all the fabric into neat stacks around the sewing room, and then the hard part started. I really did not want to just poke the fabric back into the boxes and the boxes back into the closet, so, I decided to part with some of the pieces. After much touching of fabric and debating its possible uses, I had one third, one box, of the fabric put in the donation pile.

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As I sorted through the remaining pieces of fabric to keep, I ran across 4 pieces that really caught my eye and I decided that they would not be returning to the boxes at all. Instead they would be sewn up next. There was one piece for me a shirt, one piece for the husband a shirt and two scrap pieces of fleece, enough to make a couple of kid’s sweatshirts. The remaining pieces were placed back in the two boxes and moved to the spare bedroom to be counted among the rest of the stash.

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Although I am missing the table they had made, I am loving the extra space in the sewing room closet. Plus I am excited to get sewing on the beautiful pieces of fabric that I had found hidden in the boxes.

B5538-II

I read the pattern guide twice before I started the sewing process, and I noticed right off that it did not mention how to finish the princess seams. Because I am making this from a piece of cotton, I did not want to just leave the seams unfinished. Normally, I would just serge the seams to finish them, but I was not sure if the serging would show through or work with them ok or not. But in the end I decided to go ahead and finish the seams by serging and see how it turned out. I figured if this shirt was so fitted that the serged seams were an issue, I would not be wearing the shirt anyway.  At this point in time, I had grown weary of the pattern guide and just wanted to sew, so I tossed the pattern guide to the side and started sewing with this little voice in my head saying that might not have been my best move.

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The princess seams stitched well and after basting the shoulder seams and and the side seams, I had my first fitting. The fit was looking good so far. I did some minor adjusting to the seams. Wow, this was great. I did not expect it to fit so good, even the length was good. At this time, I dug the pattern guide back out to appease the little voice in my head and decided to sew the sleeves in as a true set in sleeve. I am glad that I did. It took more easing that I thought it would to get the sleeves in, but by using the basting stitches to ease the sleeve in, all went well. I also followed the pattern guide for hemming the facings. I have never previously had any luck hemming the facings the way the pattern guide said to. I usually just hem them and fold them over, but in wanting to see if the facings needed to be as large as the pattern called for, I followed the pattern guide and did the stitch and turn. The pattern called for an inch hem. My shirt ended up with a 1/2 inch hem to try and save some of the length.

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I picked some simple buttons for the shirt, or at least that is what I thought. It turned out that these buttons needed to be  sewn on in an X pattern. This created some challenges to placing the buttons and sewing them on, not to mention taking at least twice as much time to sew the buttons on as it should have.  Oh well, I like the buttons and now that they are on the shirt, it wasn’t that bad to stitch them on.

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I am excited to wear the shirt and see if the princess seams pass the wearability test. Hopefully I have a new pattern to add to my sloper patterns for the future.

The only thing that puzzles me about this shirt is how to iron it after washing it. Even during construction, the front princess seams were difficult to press. The princess seams start at the shoulder but then cup out for the bust, to then taper back in a little, only to flare out for the hips. So, the fabric does not lay flat for ironing. There has got to be a trick to the whole ironing of princess seams but it looks like I will have have to find the trick by trial and error.

This is part 2 of a 2 part post.

BURDA STYLE