Sew for Victory: Triumph Over the Sweetheart Neckline!

Crazy that I didn't manage to take part in Sew for Victory last year! I'm always sewing things that would fit right in with Rochelle's wonderful theme and I loved seeing what other bloggers made for the sew-along.

So I'm very happy to have made something for this year's event.

My big challenge was to triumph over the sweetheart neckline, a quintessentially 1940's style that I adore but have never quite managed to make work for my frame. And by "frame" I mean narrow upper chest. Even when I have made the smallest size in the neck and shoulder area, the cut out area of the sweetheart neckline has been much too wide and has gaped, exposed my bra and/or its straps and just generally slipped around and looked bad.

Last June I made this same pattern...and it was a failure. It looks okay in the photos, but I've never actually worn it: it's terribly uncomfortable! To solve the gaping on that dress, I took in the princess seams and the armhole seams. That was somewhat effective to stop the worst of the gaping, but it made moving my arms a tortuous proposition.

A more technical post about how I solved the gaping problem for this version of Simplicity 2174 is coming soon, but today I just wanted to celebrate my victory and join in the parade of lovely makes.

The fabric is rayon challis from the latterly-out-of-business Waechter's Silk Shop. Rayon challis is my favorite summer fabric: it is light, it breathes and it doesn't much mind if you sweat on it. I have memories of a different sort of rayon in the 1990's. There was one very pretty top and skirt that I wore to a garden party. When a summer rain shower passed through, everyone got soaked--and my outfit immediately started shrinking right on my body! But today's rayon challis seems to handle gentle washing, line drying and pressing with grace. Of course I prewashed my fabric...just to be sure!

Besides the sweetheart neckline, I was also drawn to the cute pockets on this dress. I discovered when I made my previous version, and then again on this one (oh, why isn't the first time enough?) that these pockets are drafted to sit a little bit open from the main body of the dress. A very close look at the technical drawing confirms that this was the designer's intention. The top of the pocket sections are wider than the underlying dress sections, creating ease at the top.

See that tiny little bulge at the side seam where the pocket meets the dress? That's the ease I'm referring to.

Once the dress was stitched up, I found I didn't like that draping effect at the pocket. It just looked saggy and maybe a little...unprofessionally constructed? So I took them loose and resewed the pockets to lie flat against the body of the dress. Now I like the way they look and they are perfect for toting a cell phone. Or food ration coupons. Or war bonds.

I used a self-drafted tulip sleeve in place of the boring one provided by the pattern. You can read all about the tulip sleeve and find a tutorial for drafting your own in this post. The one thing I feel I should repeat about this type of sleeve is that it is SO comfortable! And sometimes it catches the breeze just so!

This dress fits the bill for a practical and feminine 1940's summer garment in my book--comfortable, cool and modest! Thanks, Rochelle, for the inspiration!

Welcome Home, Juki!

A couple of months back I was sewing along on my main sewing machine, a Juki F600 Exceed, when the machine made a faint clunk, snarled the thread, and sewed no more.

For a little while, I thought I might be able to figure out a repair myself. I've dabbled more than I ought in messing around with vintage and modern sewing machines and I have developed an inflated sense of my mechanical capabilities. Even armed with the service manual for the machine, however, I had no success in even diagnosing the problem. Down in the area of the hook, things looked and acted just plain wrong. I admitted to myself that this problem exceeded my fix-it skills.

But what to do? The nearest Juki dealer is an hour away, and I hadn't bought the machine from them, since they did not and still do not carry this model. Four years ago, I purchased the machine online from Sewing Machines Plus in California.

I had been aided and abetted in selecting this particular Juki by a lively and extensive discussion about the machine on Pattern Review. Luckily, I returned to the Sewing Machine discussion thread for ideas on how best to proceed. Member Nonette, who lives in Hawaii, suggested that I call Juki directly (through JUKI USA's website). She had also had an issue with her F600 about four years after purchase, and Juki allowed her to ship the machine directly to their technician, who had fixed it at no cost to her and had returned it to her good as new.

And that's just what I did, and just what happened with my machine! I would never have thought to go directly through the company so long after the purchase if not for Nonette's advice. If I had gotten the machine serviced locally by a non-authorized Juki dealer, the remaining warranty would have been voided and I'm sure it would have been at least $150.

The machine came back to me on Monday and is once again sewing like a dream. Even though I have a sizable stable of vintage machines, including a Pfaff 130 that is set up alongside the Juki in the sewing room and that I use regularly, I really feel a need for a modern electronic machine for many projects and tasks. I missed the Juki for sewing knits, for topstitching and edgestitching and for its excellent buttonhole capabilities. I kept sewing, but some of my projects didn't come out as well as they would have with the Juki on the job!

What was the problem? A broken hook drive cam, something I would never have been able to fix myself, since it required a replacement part. The bad news is that it broke--boo, plastic parts!--the good news is that Juki stood behind its product and made it like new again. All in all, I've enjoyed this machine quite a lot, and I'm very satisfied with Juki's service in this situation.

McCalls 6503 in Liberty Lawn

There is new sewing to show you, but gray skies and rain are conspiring to prevent me from photographing a couple of recently-completed garments.

So how about a few pictures from my lovely mother's surprise 70th birthday party a few weeks ago? That day was also a grey and rainy Saturday, but a very happy occasion, nonetheless.

My mother does not look within a decade of seventy, right?

Big birthday parties have not really been a thing in my family, but my stepfather and I decided the time to change that tradition had come. My mother is the last person who would agree to have a big party to celebrate her own big birthday, so we had no choice but to make it a surprise. And do you know, it came off without a hitch and she absolutely was surprised and delighted!

We told her she'd be having lunch with my husband, my son, me and her two sisters at a local resort. In reality, there were about forty friends and family members waiting to surprise her. Although I generally despise party planning, I threw myself into this one and I was so thrilled when it was a success.

I wore one of my favorite dresses made at the end of last summer, McCall's 6503 in a beautiful art nouveau Liberty Lawn print. The fabric came from Waechter's, which I memorialized in my last post, as did the hand-dyed bias silk ribbon trim.

I did change out the sleeve on this dress for a shorter puffed sleeve from another pattern. And I added inseam pockets. But otherwise it's a faithful make of this trusty pattern. Some day I'd like to show you better photos of the dress to brag about how I centered and aligned the motifs all the way around.

This dress is wonderfully comfortable to wear and the print does suit me well, if I do say so myself! With the hat, it felt suitably festive for our happy occasion. 

So Long, Waechter's Silk Shop

When a town loses any fabric shop, it's a sad day for those who sew. When my town, Asheville, North Carolina, loses a fabric shop with a ninety-year history and a unique focus on dressmaking, it's much sadder.

I don't think the demise of Waechter's Silk Shop points directly to any large trends in the sewing world. As far as I could tell, the shop seemed to be thriving to the extent that a brick-and-mortar plus online specialty retailer can reasonably expect to do. Not that selling fabric is what anyone would do simply to make money. But the immediate motivating factor for the end of this tradition seemed to be that the current owner, Joyce, decided to retire and made the business decision to close rather than to sell the shop.

It's one of my family's apocryphal stories, how my great-great Aunt Ethel, a professional dressmaker, saw Waechter's as the height of quality and selection. She visited the Asheville store, then on Wall Street, back in the 1950's and 1960's on behalf of her wealthiest and most discerning clients. I heard from Lucille Neilson, the owner of Asheville's other shop catering to sewers (The House of Fabrics, still in operation), how Waechter's used to keep the fine fabrics under lock and key, behind the sales counter. To see a certain piece of cloth, one had to apply to the snooty salesmen and have the bolt brought out ceremoniously for inspection.

In recent years, under Joyce's direction, Waechter's had maintained its focus on high-end, unique fabric, and had differentiated itself with a particular emphasis on sewing creative and special occasion garments for children. While sewing for children is not a particular interest of mine, I thought it was perhaps a canny area of specialization (what with all the doting sewing grandmothers and such).

Somehow I managed to visit the shop three separate times during its closing sales, resulting in the purchase of some nice fabric and, what's even more exciting for me, some terrific new tools and notions. For example, the display dress form on the left in the picture above. And a tailoring board. And a superior vintage tailoring point presser/clapper, ham and seam roll, from June Tailor. I think the June Tailor tools must date from the early 1980's, and cost the princely sum of $3 for all. Plenty of office supplies, the most enviable of which is a vintage postage scale.

The new display form looks right at home.

My thread collection has been fortified, I have 400 yards of black twill tape and I brought home more loot besides. Probably none of that makes up for the loss of the local store, but I do understand that things change and businesses come and go.

Waechter's will certainly be missed.

Souvenir T-Shirt Lady Skater Dress

Oh, to love jeans as much as most people do!  Life would be easier. Sometimes I like them okay (usually when I'm on the thinner side of my varying body composition), but honestly, even then they aren't my favorite. And for swing dancing, they make me extremely sweaty.

You've got to understand: I am usually cold. I haven't reached that time of life when overheating at random moments becomes a problem. I'm the one piling two sweaters and a shawl over silk long underwear and a t-shirt. So if I get too hot wearing jeans for swing dancing, I just don't understand how lots of folks do this very physical activity dressed in our culture's casual uniform.

For evening dances, of course I am going to wear a nice dress or a skirt, but for daytime classes at weekend workshops I need something casual, comfortable, packable, reasonably cute and, ideally, not too mom-like. Lots of the dancers at these events are in their twenties and thirties. I could actually be the mother of most of them. And I'm fine with that, but I just don't want it written all over my outfit.

Since I find a dress so much nicer to wear than separates, I made up a swing-dance-themed Lady Skater dress using an event t-shirt stolen from my husband. I've written about the swing dance mecca that is Lindy Focus before: a five-day extravaganza with nearly 1,000 attendees and culminating with a huge New Years' Eve celebration. I have my own t-shirt from the event, but it wasn't nearly enough fabric to recut into something else. Good thing his shirt was an XL. Any smaller and I wouldn't have been able to get the Lady Skater size 3 bodice out of it.

The non-Lady-Skater addition (I always have to tweak something, it seems!) is the sleeve, which was borrowed from an Ottobre Woman t-shirt pattern from the 2/2007 issue. I picked this sleeve because I have used it before and liked it. The binding at the bottom of the sleeve is eked out of the ribbing from the neckband of my husband's shirt.

Ottobre Woman 2/2007 Rose Top sleeve. This one is gathered both at the cap and the hem.

I've had good success with swapping in a gathered sleeve for another type of sleeve on a range of patterns. If they don't fit exactly, I tinker with the gathering until they go in. Probably not technically correct, but it usually works out well enough for my satisfaction.

The skirt portion is made from an active wear polyester knit with a high (12%) spandex content from Hancock's. I bought several yards of this at 40% off, and I am hoping to make some more basic items from it. With all that stretch, it is very, very forgiving and I hope it will perform better in terms of wear and pilling than a ponte-type of knit.

Since this dress is all about its activewear purpose, I had to include an action shot!

The leopard print leggings are McCall's 6360, and are blogged about here.

McCall's 6503 Butterfly Print Dress

Really, sometimes I think I should just stick with making this dress, McCall's 6503. 

First version, using the 6503 bodice with the ruffled turnback collar and waistband, with a 3/4 circle skirt:

Love the colors of this dress. It is very comfortable, too.

Mashup dress using the 6503 waistband:

Same basic shape overall as McCall's 6503, but the bodice here is Colette Ceylon and the skirt is Colette Parfait

The second full version, not shown, of the dress is really the best so far, made from a beautiful Liberty of London print and using the 6503 pleated skirt. Unfortunately it is yet to be photographed! I suppose I am hung up on wanting to do the dress justice.

So, this version is view D with a pleated skirt and a banded, stand up collar:

One new-to-me element is the neckline treatment. Isn't it nice how it opens up and frames a necklace?

At the back, the neckline hugs the back of the neck but doesn't get tangled up in my hair.

And, the full view of the back:

 The second new element for this dress is the self-drafted ruffled tulip sleeve.

If you'd like to develop a tulip sleeve of your own, I highly recommend this wonderful tutorial by Sew Many Seams. She does a thorough job of explaining the benefits of this sleeve type, construction options and clear drafting tips. I chose to make my sleeves both gathered and tulip shaped (covered in the tutorial), but next time I'd like to try an ungathered version (also covered in the tutorial). What I most like about this sleeve, as a now-mid-forties woman, is that it provides plenty of upper arm coverage with great freedom of movement. Actually, I've always liked my upper arms to be covered. With my narrow shoulders, some type of sleeve seems to add the illusion of greater breadth to the shoulder line. Also, I am so fair-skinned and burn so easily that covering the shoulders makes a dress more wearable for me, even and especially on the hottest days.

As you can see from the tights and boots, it's not warm enough yet to threaten much of a sunburn. Here is how I wore it for my substitute teaching stint yesterday, with a denim jacket:

I was dutiful and added inseam pockets, which I really appreciated during my teaching day. Unlike my first two versions of the dress, I installed the side invisible zipper this time. The dress can pull over my head, but it's probably a better policy to add the zipper and save the aggravation of the messed-up hair and possible strain on the dress over time.

The only thing I don't like about the dress, and it's not insignificant, is the fabric. Specifically, the tendency of this 100% polyester print to generate enormous amounts of static. I bought the piece from Hancock Fabrics for its charming butterfly print and nice navy, cream and green color palette. As I began to cut it though, I realized just how "charged" it was. Aside from its inclination to cling viciously to itself and anything else, it was easy to work with (it pressed well, and frayed only slightly).

 If you have any great tips for managing static cling, I'd love to hear them!

Not Quite Vintage: Burda Petite Fashion Blouse from 1996

Though I don't know when Burda stopped putting out its Petite Fashion magazine, I have happy memories of sewing from this publication back in the mid-nineties. Sadly, over the course of several moves, I must have decided that my old issues were obsolete, and I threw them out. When I spotted an Autumn/Winter '96/'97 issue on eBay, I bought it for old times' sake and also because I thought it might have some good basic styles.

I'm no expert in what's current, but these patterns really don't look dated to me. In addition to the 809 blouse I just made, I'd like to try out the trouser, A-line skirt, tunic blouse and raglan-sleeved dress patterns.  I've seen a lot of long woven t-shirt style tops lately. Here is one of the three versions of that "current" silhouette from this magazine:

I've written about my liking for the convertible collar a couple of times: DuBarry 5265 and Simplicity 9816. I'm influenced in this liking by insightful, hilarious Barb at Sewing on the Edge. In this great post, she talks about the convertible collar blouse as a distinctly feminine style that flatters a lot of women.

Barb also points out that a convertible collar pattern with some shape to it is hard to find, and that is certainly true. My DuBarry blouses have been successful, but I wanted to try a darted pattern rather than one with princess seams. The Simplicity 9816 has darts and looked good when I was standing still, but somehow I made it much too constricting in the arm and shoulder area--very uncomfortable. So I was looking for a fresh start with a darted pattern.

In the Petite Fashion magazine, Burda shows this blouse in a crisp white, in a blue and black bold polka dot, in powder blue silk and in a floral print cotton with a tiny ruffle around the collar edges. There are also (rather boxy) dress and nightshirt versions, demonstrating that this is a very versatile pattern.

Here is my version:

While I appreciate that Burda offers a petite range, I have found that these patterns still require significant alterations to the shoulder area to give me a good fit. After tracing the pattern pieces in size 19 (the smallest size this pattern was offered in, equivalent to a Burda 38) at the shoulder line to size 21 at the hip, I reduced the shoulder width in the front and back by 3/4". Fitting as I went, I discovered that I needed to take another 1/4" out of the shoulder width, for a total of 1". That's a big reduction!

The blouse is quite roomy. I may have gone overboard in tapering out through the waist and hip area, but I wanted the blouse to have an easy fit. I'm all tucked in for these photos, just because that seemed to look right with the skirt (and because I was headed out dancing, and wanted everything to stay covered). I also plan to wear the shirt untucked with pants.

I scaled the collar down somewhat. It had quite a pointed, nineties shape, so I blunted the front collar edges by about 5/8".

Trustingly, I didn't measure the sleeve armscye seam against the garment armhole seam and was subsequently disappointed to learn that the sleeves had a large amount of ease, far too much to set in smoothly. I still haven't gone back to alter the pattern, so I'm not sure of the exact amount of extra ease, but it may have been close to 3". I trimmed and basted and unstitched and trimmed and basted some more to get to a sleeve which could possibly be sewn into the armhole.

Next time, I will adjust the dart positions: the horizontal dart is too high and too long, and the two vertical darts need to be shortened at the top.

The fabric is a Burberry mini-houndstooth cotton shirting bought a couple of years ago from FabricMart. Back in the days when I spent actual money on buying clothing for my former professional wardrobe, I purchased a couple of Burberry shirts and their quality was amazing. I hope this shirt holds up as well as those (which are over 15 years old and still very wearable). I used silk organza as a sew-in interfacing on the collar, facings and cuffs.

The trickiest part of sewing a convertible collar is finishing the back neck edge. I've taken to making a short bit of self-bias binding and applying it to the neck seam. This has worked better for me than the current pattern instruction standard procedure of staystitch the back section, clip, turn in, trim and then try to get it all to line up at the shoulder.

I had several button choices on hand and nearly went with a standard cream shirt button. But then I decided these green plastic buttons--which are probably about the same vintage as the 1996 pattern--from my stash would be a little kickier. I made the whole shirt on my vintage straight stitch Singer 201 (and modern Juki serger), so I used the Singer buttonhole attachment to make the buttonholes. They came out very nicely, though my choice of thread color wasn't too great. It was the best I had on hand.