Cape coat for Autumn

Autumn is my favorite time of year, and in particular, I love all of the clothes that go with it that we miss so much all summer. 

This project combined two of my favorites, sweaters & outerwear, into a pretty and practical cape coat.

I used pattern Kwik Sew 4031, but modified it a bit by removing some of the overlap in the front because I didn’t have quite enough fabric to make it as shown.  I worried quite a bit about this, but as you can see it ended up being a non-issue. 

The fabric is a luxurious Missoni sweater knit from Michael Levine, Inc. in Los Angeles. This is not the recommended fabric type-- the pattern calls for a woven or substantial knit- this is a bit stretchy-- but it worked just fine. 

Since the fabric is so lovely, I decided to splurge on the trim and use leather tape from MJ Trimming- the application required a great deal of care (there is no going back with leather!) but it came out nicely. The leather tape is quite nice as well- very soft and flexible, and the seams are glued rather than sewn, making them nearly invisible.

Another change I made to the pattern was to bind the shoulder seams and tape the neck seams, both to keep them from stretching out of shape and to make the whole thing as pretty on the inside as it is on the outside.

The closure is very clever- it is attached by screws.  I like this concept because I can change it if I want, but the screws are really a bit long to be practical; I had to pad them on the back to make the closure lay against the fabric on the front.  In the future (once I have lived with it for a while) I may attach the closure permanently to the coat with rivets and caps- we’ll see.

Now if only the temperatures would dip below 70!

September 15 is Make A Hat Day! Or not.

Did you know that today is Make A Hat Day?  Well it is!

In honor of Make A Hat Day and Autumn (which is hopefully almost here in the San Francisco Bay area where it has been between 80 and 106 degrees lately) I decided to break out the fall fabrics and make a hat.

After spending a little time at Joann's Fabrics perusing the pattern books (did you know that Burda has patterns for lederhosen in the men's section of their catalog?) I decided that Vogue 9044 "Patricia Underwood Hats" was the way to go-it has five nice style options, and I went with View A, in the upper right.

I decided to use some vintage Linton Tweed for my project- I have been dying to sew some of it up into something- I thought a hat would be the perfect small project to give it a whirl.

Things did not go as planned. 

Excuse the bad photo- it was both late and dark!

I am sorry Vogue patterns (you know I love you!), but this pattern is NOT graded well.  

Every size, from XS to L, is the same height- it gets wider as it gets bigger, but no taller. This means that my hat ended up being 5 inches from top to bottom (which, according to the photo should land just above my ears), while my head from the top to just above my ear is 7 inches. 

The photo above shows how short it is even before I stitched on the inner band that goes around the bottom- this is a half inch seam, so the final hat would have been even shorter. Does the nice lady in the pattern photo have a really tiny head?

Here is where it ended up.  :-(

P.S.- the pattern includes four other hats that may potentially be lovely and fit perfectly.

Labor Day Sale Roundup!

Labor Day sale notices started rolling into my in box this morning, so I thought I would round them up here! 

Fabric
Mood - 15% off Suiting, today (Friday Sept 4) only, online only
Michael Levine - 20% off entire site, Friday only Extended to Monday! (ends at 9pm PST) with coupon code LABOR2015 
Fabric.com - up to 30% off on selected fabrics
New York Fashion Center Fabrics - Save 20% on everything with code LABORDAY20
Elliott Berman Textiles - Sept 5-8. save 20% with code LDAY20
Gorgeous Fabrics end of summer sale - save 20-60% off on almost everything through labor day!

Supplies
The Sewing Place - 15% off site-wide through Monday 9/7

Learning
Craftsy - Up to 50% off classes and supplies

Patterns
Simplicity Patterns - markdowns on all out-of-print patterns
McCall Pattern Company - Sept 4-8, all McCall, Butterick & Kwik Sew patterns are $3.99 and Vogue patterns are $5.99
Burda Style - 50% off on select patterns


Did I miss any?  If you know of a Labor Day sewing sale that I didn't include, leave a comment and I will add it!

New Patterns from Named Clothing!

In case you haven't heard, Named Clothing's new fall line of patterns is out! Called "New Black," Named describes it as a back-to-basic collection of wardrobe staples, with a modern urban edge.

Images from Named's web site, namedclothing.com

I am a sucker for outerwear, so my favorite is the Harriet Lumberjacket (which I plan to make).  I also like the Lexi A-Line top- I love the clean lines and think it would look great with wide-leg trousers (which I have been obsessed with since last fall). I am not so sure about the Mimosa Culottes... I wore culottes--then called "gauchos"--in about fourth grade, so I think I am ruined for life on them.

I love Named's style- I am not a frilly person, so I really enjoy their simple clean designs.  This past spring I sewed three Inari Tee Dresses from their "SS15 Ticket" collection, and before that I made their Mai Zip Jacket (FW14 - Ritual Collection) and I absolutely adore it!

Blue Cropped Jacket

For some unexplainable reason, I absolutely love coating fabric.

On a recent trip to my sort-of-local fabric store (Britex, in San Francisco), I found a small remnant of lovely light-blue cashmere. I bought it because it was so pretty and soft, but for a while I couldn’t think what to do with it- it definitely wasn’t big enough to make an actual coat.

Then a sewing friend and I got to chatting about cropped jackets and how much we love them, and it occurred to me that a cropped jacket would be the perfect way to use the fabric. The 1 & 1/8 yards that I had to work with was plenty for a tiny jacket, and even had enough room for little design flexibility.

I designed this using the pattern from my lace top as a sloper. I decided to go very cropped and short sleeved with the intention of wearing it over the long blouse. Because I didn’t want the button-line on the jacket front to match the button line on the blouse, I made it double-breasted. In the end I had quite a bit of fabric left over!

The outer shell is, of course, the cashmere coating, and the lining is a pretty silk charmeuse from Thai Silks in Los Altos, CA.

I had planned to make button holes (foolish girl!), but making button holes through two layers of coating doesn't really work. I moved on to covered snaps, but they looked messy ... in the end, I was thrilled to find gold snaps at Pacific Trimming- they look planned and just a little bit fancy. 

And can I just take a moment to say how much I love the Britex fourth-floor remnants department?  (and, BTW, they have a remnants contest going on now if you live nearby) Britex is chock-full of absolutely gorgeous fabrics, and their remnants are gorgeous too (of course). I always find something interesting when I go there, and it always inspires me to make a great project… in my future courtesy of Britex fourth floor- a black car coat made out of alpaca faux fur that reminds me of a Steiff teddy bear.

Channeling my inner Charlotte Olympia

This past April, I attended Pattern Review Weekend, in Los Angeles. Yes I am a total slacker and have been stalling on making this blog post ever since then.  Any-hoo... as a part of the weekend, there was a contest to make a handbag!

I love both challenges and handbags, and I love to make crazy stuff, so I decided to channel my inner Charlotte Olympia and get to work on a small bag shaped like a pincushion.










The outside is pieced leather over an interior plastic frame, and the pincushion men are made of silk samples that I purchased from Spoonflower and have cotton poplin heads. 

The interior is lined with quilting cotton.

Many people at the Pattern Review event asked how I made the bag, so here is the basic low-down.  

For the basic structure, I used a purse frame set, consisting of two plastic spheres and a hinged metal frame that the plastic pieces fit into. 

I attached a plastic disk (kludged together from cut-up sippy cup lids) to the bottom of one sphere so that my bag would have a flat bottom and I could attach feet to it (the feet went into the four holes).

Once I had the framework of the bag constructed, I made a pattern for the leather outside by smashing aluminum foil around the two bag haves (because I am fancy like that) and marking how wide I wanted the pieces to be. I needed five leather sections, so I measured around the edge of the sphere halves and divided by five, and then just drew a line up to the center point of each piece.

 

Once I had done that, I flattened and cut out the aluminum foil pieces and used them to make a pattern.

From there is was just sewing- I pieced the leather together and attached it to the plastic frames by drilling tiny holes around the edge of each frame (the plastic was very soft so I did this with an exact-o knife) and then sewing the leather cover to it.

To make them men, I printed their faces on cotton poplin using a laser printer (the ink will stay in place if you press it with an iron), and constructed their bodies out of printed silk squares.  Their construction is very simple- each corner of the square is folded right-sides together and sewn for a bit, and then the body is turned, stuffed, and a stitch is run through the middle of the body at the waist.

I attached the men to the sides by drilling holes into the plastic frame and sewing the on.

Voila- the most fun bag that I own!

Named Clothing Mai Zip Jacket

Just in time for spring (ok it is 85 degrees here)!

Varsity-style jackets have been very popular this winter, and when I saw the Mai Zip Jacket pattern on Named's website, I fell in love. 

For the body, I used a black and white plaid wool/cashmere blend coating, but since I am not a huge fan of the black and white plaid, I dyed it. This was pretty risky, since the fabric could have felted, shrank (although I did dye more yardage than I needed just in case), or the dye could have taken unevenly, but I lucked out and it came out great! 

I underlined the body with black silk organza, and used that to trace the pattern and pattern markings on to.  For the misc. smaller bits- the collar, zipper side pieces and pocket linings, I used some basic black wool.

The sleeves are leather, and although this was not my first time working with leather, this was my first time purchasing an actual hide, and that was fun! There is a leather store, LeatherWise, about an hour away from me, and although I was not able to go there in person, they gave me great advice on what to buy from them on-line.  They had many different color and texture options available, and it was tough to limit myself to just what I needed for jacket sleeves!

The lining is silk charmeuse quilted to lightweight quilt batting.  I wasn’t sure how this would work out; I was afraid that either the charmeuse would get ripples in it between the lines of quilting, or fluff from the quilt batting would get into my sewing machine and cause problems (I didn’t add a backing to the batting, as I was afraid that this would make my lining too thick). I made a generous test sample and found that the fabric/ quilting combo actually worked quite well- the batting is flexible enough that if the charmeuse rippled between rows you could just stretch out the batting in whatever direction you needed to fix it, and it also held together well and did not make a mess of my machine.

This jacket went together well- I had never sewn anything this complicated before so I did follow the directions carefully.  I hand-basted pretty much everything (lots of plaid to match up), and just took each step slowly and carefully.  I absolutely love it, and can't wait to make a summer version!