That 1950's sweater

Ok, I know I said I wouldn't do this... but after two posts about making this kind of thing, I thought I should show you what it looks like when worn.
My patience for posing has decreased quite a bit and I have lost my appetite for stern faces. So, this was the best picture I took.

Sew your own 1950's t-shirt

So, you've made your pattern, now you can start cutting and sewing. 

You can basically use any kind of knit fabric for this pattern although I wouldn't recommend really flimsy, very stretchy kinds of jersey. Because this pattern actually has ease, you can use those odd knits which hardly stretch at all (you can sometimes find those on the bargain table of your fabric store...). When I use a fabric like that, I cut the top a bit wider by adding 1 cm between the fold of the fabric and center back/front.

When cutting, center back and center front should obviously be placed on the fold. The straight grain line on the sleeve is that vertical help line you drew. And I don't think I have to tell anyone that you can fold your fabric differently than just in half if that makes cutting more economical... Just make sure the folds are straight, preserving the straight grain (which is not really the right term in a knit, but you know what I mean.

Now, the sewing starts. I usually use the serger straight away on a knit fabric but you could also use a stretch stitch on your sewing machine.

The first thing to sew is that neckline.

I've made this top with and without fusible interfacing in the neckline and my choice in the matter depends on the fabric. If it is likely to roll, interface. If not, you can do without. The interfacing gives the neckline a more defined edge, without is a bit softer. Both work well.

If you use interfacing, use quite a thin variety which is suitable for knits (this will still reduce the stretch by quite a bit so if you want to use it, make sure your neckline is big enough to let your head pass through without relying on stretch).

Finish the edges of the neckline facings.

Press the facings to the wrong sides of the bodice pieces.

Pin the shoulder lines, with the front facing in place. 

Fold the back facing over the front facing and pin through all layers. Make sure to remove any pins under the facing.

Sew the shoulder seams, including those facings.

Turn right side out and press on the inside. Now you have shoulder seams and a neatly finished neckline.

Insert sleeves. Pay attention when pinning, there is a difference between front and back of the sleeve.

Sew side seams and arm seams in one go.

Hem bottom edge en sleeves.

Finished!

Make your own 1950's style t-shirt!

Do you like 1950's style cardigans, sweaters and the occasional t-shirt (those were not commonly used in ladies' wear yet)? Designs like this one?

Well, I do. Unfortunately, this is one of those styles which seems hard to translate to the present day. I have tried some original knitting patterns but the result was always disappointing. They are often a bit too short for me but what is worse, even if they're not, they won't sit well. The part from the waist down is usually knitted as a straight bit of rib knit. This means that although it will stretch over the high hip, it just creeps up. 
And it seems like such a nice day-to-day style, you know, to be worn without all the period accurate shape wear...

So, I did what I usually do. I tried to make a pattern to get the result I wanted. I took a bit of experimentation but I ended up with something I really like (the dummy doesn't do them justice...). The first two were made in winter, I used a fairly warm knit and gave them a nice high turtle neck. When the weather got warmer, I tried thinner fabrics and a different neckline (and different sleeve length, of course). And that neckline became my absolute favorite. 

If you have a tried-and-tested t-shirt pattern, making this pattern won't be difficult. However, it may require a bit of to get it exactly right for you. After all body proportions vary, as does posture and then we haven't even mentioned preferences.
I'll give you the pattern instructions in this post and I'll come back tomorrow with some extra information about fabric and construction.
Oh, and one more thing: my pattern pictures are not to scale. Proportions can be a bit off, in this case, they are on the sleeve. And unless I write otherwise, they are without seam or hem allowance.

All right. You should start with your tried-and-tested pattern. Preferably one with a marked waistline which is right for you and no darts. If yours has very straight bodice pieces, you may want to try your t-shirt on and check the fit at the waist, you might want to take the pattern in at the waistline to get a shape a bit like this. 

Now, if you are trying on the t-shirt anyway, have a careful look at the neckline. Does it sit perfectly or does it pull back it bit? Slightly gaping at the back neck while it sits high against your throat? It that is the case, you will need to make an alteration or my high, straight neckline will quite uncomfortable.

Put the pieces together at the shoulder line and draw a new shoulder line, mine was 1.5 cm to the front. Move center front and back as well and draw the new neckline (don't worry about getting it perfect, it won't be used in the end result).

Separate the pieces again mark a point 2 cm outside the under arm point (the point on the bodice where the armscye meets the side seam. If your pattern has quite narrow sleeves which pull into the armpits a bit, you may also want to drop this point by 1 or 2 cm.
Also mark a point 1 cm above and 1.5 cm out from the shoulder point. Draw the new shoulder lines like the blue ones in the picture.

Draw a new armscye. It should not cross the old one.

Now, slash both pattern pieces at the waistline and open up by 3 cm. Draw your new side seam from the under arm point to the lower waistline. 
Draw the bottom edge of the shirt. Mine is usually about 10 cm below the waistline but this is based on your preference. I also keep the bottom edge as straight as possible because I love to use fabrics with stripes for this design.

You can use the pattern like this if you prefer your usual neckline To get my favorite neckline, there is one more step:

Mark a point about half way on the shoulder line and draw a straight line from that point to center front and back. You want this line to be the same length on both front and back.

This neckline should be made with a cut-on facing. You make this by mirroring 4 cm over the line you just drew.

And now, you still need a sleeve pattern. The upper bodice is fairly loose fitting and so is the sleeve. This means you can get away with drafting a very easy pattern:

Draw a vertical line about as long as you want your sleeve to be. Square across at 9 cm below the top. 

Measure the front and back armscye are draw diagonal lines from the top of the vertical line to the horizontal one with those measurements.

Draw in the sleeve head. At the front, it should cross the help line at about 1/3, at the back at about 1/2. Measure the sleeve head and remove any excess length at the edges.

Draw the side seams, you'll want these to be fairly tapered.

Your pattern is now finished. Add seam and hem allowances to your preference.

Substraction cutting

Thank you for the nice comments on my previous post. I'm happy to hear from you!

Today, I thought I would show you something I have been trying out in the past few weeks. There's no time like now to try out strange new techniques and this is one I came across on Pinterest around the time that schools here in the Netherlands closed (I actually thought about recommending it to my students but I'm not their pattern making teacher and I don't want to mess up someone else's teaching...).

It is called "subtraction cutting" and it is a way of making clothes by which, instead of cutting the pieces you need out of a piece of fabric and discarding the rest, you cut away some pieces you don't need in the middle of a piece of fabric and what is left becomes the garment. The technique is the brainchild of designer Julian Roberts. Many of the pictures you will find on Pinterest and without a doubt on other platforms as well seem to be from people who attended workshops taught by him. But you don't have to be able to attend one of those. This is a designer who is interested in spreading his ideas and to that end his manifesto is available as a free download on The Cutting Class. 

To be fair, this is a technique which is at the same time very simple and very complicated. With a bit of help from the booklet and in possession of some kind of pattern for a basic top, anyone with a bit of sewing experience can have a go this. And is fairly likely to end up with a result that will look unique and creative.

However, it is hard to really get your head around. And harder yet to predict what your finished dress will be like. Normally, as a pattern maker, I know what it is I am making. Here, the insecurity is part of the process (it says so in the booklet...).

I made two dresses using deep stash fabrics to try this out:

This one was made from viscose/rayon jersey using a method explained in the booklet. The top part was cut and constructed normally but from the waist down, the rest of the garment (front and back) was one big piece of fabric. In that piece, I cut two sets of holes which were sewn together to create the draped effect.

This dress is wearable, especially after I cut away some fabric at the front hem (done before I took these pictures), but it taught me not to go too close to the hemline with those holes. Having a loop of fabric around your legs below the knee isn't very nice.

The second dress was made in the way you will see most if you do a search for subtraction cutting. It's pattern/fabric lay-out looks something like this:

This is not really the lay-out I used for this dress. This one has the bodice pieces on the bias and one extra long curved seam connecting the bodice pieces (but I didn't take a picture).

You use two pieces of fabric, each of about 1 meter wide (mine were a bit wider) and 3 meters long. You sew them together along one long side, place your pattern pieces and cut them out. Then, you sew the other long side and the short side close to the bodice pieces, so the whole thing looks like a duvet cover with holes in it. 

Then, you sew the bodice pieces together and connect the round holes (which have to be large enough for your hips to pass through) according to plan (the red lines in my drawing. 

And this is the dress. 

In most pictures of these dresses, you will see the points of the original tube of fabric turned out but I prefer them turned in. 

It looks the part but it's not really wearable because it has quite seriously too much skirt. In part, that is my fault because I made that long, curved connection between the bodice pieces. That became an insanely long side seam...

And of course, because the skirt is such a complicated, interconnected thing, you can't just cut it down or hem it up.

After these dresses, I've started doing some quarter-size tests with different arrangements of holes and bodice pieces. I'll show you those later.

in 2020

Hello there! 

I haven't even looked at my blog for quite a while but I had to look at the last post here to realize just how long that while was... There are several reasons, some of them even good ones but I won't go into that right now. 

At the moment, I have a bit more time for things like blogging for the same reason many of you will have a bit more time on your hands right now: Covid 19. I would guess that is also the reason why my dormant little blog gained some new followers over the past month. So, I thought it might be time for a modest re-start. 

As I have told before, I live in the Netherlands. Here, we are not in complete lockdown but schools, sports facilities, restaurants and many non-essential businesses are closed. 

Since my current jobs are those of textile teacher at a fashion trade school and route setter at a local climbing gym, my work has pretty much stopped. We try and do a bit of online teaching but fabrics need to be handled to be understood... On the other hand, the school has teamed up with a hospital nearby for the production of facemasks. Using specialist materials are carefully controlled construction methods, we make masks which are suitable for hospital use. Volunteers from the school (some students but mostly teachers) and the hospital work on this together but never with many of us at the same time because we also have to keep our distance.

So, that takes up a fair bit of my time too. 

As for blogging, I don't think I will pose for a lot of pictures now but I thought I could show you what I'm working on at the moment. And do the occasional tutorial. I was thinking about showing you how to make my favorite retro-style t-shirt/sweater pattern using a normal, fitted, t-shirt pattern as a sloper. It's not difficult and I love this thing so much I have made six versions so far and I'm planning more as we speak... To be fair, I think I made the first one in the winter of 2018/19 but I still love it!

Other than that, I'm open to suggestions. What would you like to see from me for your sewing inspiration? 

Sewing tips (assuming I have any which aren't all over the web yet)? 

Vintage pattern tutorials? By which I mean actual "draft like this" instructions from vintage magazines. 

Do you want to talk Pattern Magic and other unusual pattern making techniques? In fact, I will definitely talk about one unusual pattern making technique soon but if I know I'm not the only one who likes that sort of thing, I will elaborate about it. 

Or do you prefer more pattern tutorials (for whole garment or for details) which are also suitable if you don't have (much) experience with pattern making? 

I won't promise to deliver everything anyone asks for though...

An actual bikini!

So, I ended up waiting for pictures again. And last week I ended up being very busy. In fact, I already know the coming month will be a very busy one. I will still try to keep up the blogging but I don't expect I will be able to do more than one post a week. 
At least I now have pictures from two more things I made during the summer holiday from my teaching job.

In the swimsuit post, I told you I was inspired to try and make more swimwear, in different styles. And that I had to wait for new swimwear elastic to be delivered. This is what I made once I got my hands on that elastic. A bikini!

My sister bought this fabric, lycra with a print of reeds or leaves of grass on a background which is a gradient from black to white via turquoise, years ago. A year or so later, she gave it to me. The colours suit me, so I thought it would be nice to put it to good use now.

I used the darker parts of the gradient for the bottom and the lighter ones for the top. I didn't pay to much attention to the placement of the, very random, print. Maybe I could have made the cups look better if I had, but I'm not so sure about that.

For the bottoms, I used the same low-leg cut as one the swimsuit. I picked a nice height for the top by playing around with the top edge of high waisted underwear I had made before. Which didn't turn out well. I was too low and I cut off the top edge elastic and put on a wide-ish band of the fabric instead.

For the top, I used my tried-and-tested bra pattern with the horizontally seamed cup. This works as a strapless bra but here I added halter straps (which are not very supportive but they don't have to be). 

I made things more difficult for myself by using an alternative method to apply the elastic at the edges. For this, you sew the elastic to the edge on the inside and then under stitch only through lining and elastic. The good thing about this is that you avoid extra stitching on the outside of the garment. The downside is that it is fiddly, takes more careful planning and handling and even with that, it can still go horribly wrong if the amounts of stretch of fashion fabric and lining are too different. In this case, the lining had a lot more vertical stretch which caused all sorts of problems with the bottoms. Fortunately, I could fix those when I had to cut off the top edge anyway. To avoid more drama, I stitched the elastic on the top edge of the wings of the top in the normal way.

So, now I have a bikini! With a foam cupped top no less. I may still make another set of swimwear: the most practical one, a bikini which would work well under a wetsuit. In fact, I already tried to make bottoms for those but in that case, I had issues with a not sufficiently stretchy lining and I haven't tried again yet.

P.S. There's just nothing like trying to show off a bikini in pictures to make you feel REALY self-conscious! ;)

a nice little skirt

And now from the sublime to the ridiculous... Well, not really. Just from fabulous to very simple fabric, from quirky chique to casual and from simple but precise tailoring to an easy fit created with unusual cutting.

This was the last item from my piled-up photoshoot. You can kind of tell from the pictures. I didn't really take it serious anymore, which is probably a good thing. 

After finishing the African wax print dress, I decided to make something from a left-over bit of black twill (I think I used it for jackets for E before). It was just a small piece so the only options were a shortish skirt or maybe shorts. I chose a skirt.

Of course, a casual little skirt needs pockets. And this fabric is very jeans-like and I know from experience that the colour fades quite a bit after washing. I wanted a design which would suit the material... 

After a bit of sketching, I came up with a this pattern, built up from curved panels. It's a short skirt (for me), a bit of an A-line, with pockets, a faced waistline and a center back zipper (it's a bit wrinkly because I had been wearing it for a while).

For the past few years, most of my skirts were either at least half-circle or narrow and past the knee. All very pretty and feminine but not great for every occasion. I still love those skirts but I guess doing more sports is starting to influence my style a little bit. I could not have made a longer skirt from this piece of fabric but I also think I needed a casual little skirt like this in my wardrobe.