My Weekend Project

It was inevitable, I guess. New granddaughter .............sewing children's clothes.

The weekend before last we were in Arizona to introduce our granddaughter to her great grandmother. Needless to say, it was a very special time.

We just happened to be near one of my favorite quilt stores ever, Quilters' Store Sedona, so my daughter and I had to stop in to check out their fabrics. They always have a wonderful selection of batiks and unusual Western motifs. They also have a large selection of patterns. Daughter fell in love with a pattern from Indigo Junction, Pint-size Pinafore. We found the perfect fabric for a pinafore and I took it home with me.

I haven't made very many clothes since my wedding dress - a few things for my daughter when she was young, but it has been many years. Fortunately pinafores are not hard to make. Being true to form, I immediately made some adjustments to the design. Old techniques popped up in my brain and by the end I was sewing with little reference to directions.

The pinafore turned jumper turned out fine, as you can see. I think the thanks for that goes to a dear friend from my teen years, Millie Kovach. She was the mom of my best friend, Georgette, and she was an awesome seamstress. Millie taught me everything I know about sewing. I would appear at her door with a Simplicity pattern and some fabric. She would give me a big hug and commence to share with me shortcuts that professionals know while explaining garment construction in simple basic terms. I learned those fundamentals well and this past weekend I felt as though Millie was looking down from heaven and smiling as I stitched up Judy Kate's pinafore. Thank you, Millie, for those precious gifts of your time and knowledge.

Linking to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday blog. Check out what others have been doing!

The Jacket is finished!

The jacket is done! Well, okay, maybe the sleeves aren't hemmed yet. Here is how it turned out.

In the end, I found the rayon batik extremely challenging to work with. Even with pinning the fabric intensely, it seemed to move around quite a bit during stitching. I want to try the pattern a second time with cotton. I suspect it will be a lot quicker to stitch up. I was in our local quilt shop, Ivy Thimble, yesterday and discovered they also had a sample of the jacket on display. Theirs was in cotton and the fabric draped quite nicely so I am definitely going to follow up on this. I told Trish Dispenza, the owner, about my experience with the rayon batik and she agreed that the fabric is extremely slippery to work with.

As I made my jacket, I found my independent streak showing up. When I was learning to sew as a young child, the Mom of a close friend worked as a seamstress in a garment factory. She taught me how to take a pattern, assess it and then streamline putting it together, based on logic and intuition, making adjustments as you went. Those lessons stood me well when I designed and stitching my wedding dress more than 35 years ago. Now, that same process clicks in whenever I look at a pattern.

So it was with this jacket. There are a number of things that I would do differently a second time. The directions, as written, were fairly clear - I only misread them once. I just don't care for the way the hem and facing are machine stitched. I suspect that I shall hand sew on cotton, or use a decorative or contrasting thread to turn at least the stitching along the front of the jacket into a decorative item. If I ever try silk or another fabric similar to this rayon, I will try a bit of light interfacing for the front/neck with no stitching and then try handstitching the hem.The cut of the front jacket edge is also a little strange. I instinctively changed mine as I made it and checked out the 'correct' way on the Ivy Thimble version yesterday. I definitely don't care for the way the pattern is drawn.

Having not made an article of clothing in years, all in all I have to say that this was a good experience. (And, that duct tape mannequin I made several years ago finally came in handy!) I basically like the pattern, A Little Somethin' Jacket, and would recommend it. Quilters' Store and Gallery in Sedona, AZ, where I bought the pattern, was offering a class in assembling the jacket. I suspect that might be helpful for many if one happens to be available in your area.