While I’ve been gone

It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been busy with a lot of pattern testing that I can’t share yet and a costume project that I can share, but didn’t take many pictures of, and a few other smaller projects one of which I will share in a different post.

For the costume project, I took apart a suit and two jumpsuits to make them tearable for a friend’s sketch show. This is the only picture I took, but it reminds me of Flat Stanley and makes me giggle a lot. The suit ultimately needed to be made into a jumpsuit and then the front needed to tear away from the back.

My old Brother SQ9050 kind of died after this project. I broke about 10 needles during the project and it struggled through every bit of it. Afterwards, the feed dogs just stopped working completely. RIP Jane Eyre. Rochester, my serger, will be in mourning forever… I do want to see if I can fix Jane so I can use her as a backup machine or even use the different stitches. I don’t want to take her into a shop, though, so it would be purely DIY. I did that with my serger at one point and fixed the timing. I think the connection to the feed dogs is probably where to look. And I looked briefly at the Brother site and saw that parts are available including new feed dogs.

Meet Brienne of Tarth. She’s a Singer Heavy Duty 4452 that I purchased off Amazon.

Brienne of Tarth is aptly named because she is a workhorse and can take anything I throw at her. She has a metal frame and a fast motor meaning I can go up to 11,000 stitches per minute. So far, I love this new machine. Moving from a computerized to a manual machine is a bit of a learning curve, but not impossible. My first machine was manual, but I didn’t really remember a lot from that time. I also think I didn’t really learn what I could about the stitch settings and am taking my time to learn with this new machine. I thought at one point I would save up to get a Pfaff, but I think that is out of range for now. The positive of this machine is that is extremely affordable. I’ll do a full review after I work with it for some more time, but so far is is doing a far better job than my Brother ever did.

I started off with a simple project of some fabric bins for the first project with Brienne.

I used this tutorial on Birch Fabrics to make them for my friend. I did change the shape slightly into a rectangle due to a cutting error, but I love the rectangular shape. I also used fusible foam instead of a heavy interfacing so they stood up better. I have fabric and foam left to make myself a couple of fabric bins.

This past weekend, I made a Concord top and redid my tester version of the Belmont leggings so they fit and I cropped them off in hopes that Spring may arrive here some day…

The fabric is a bamboo jersey and is quite lovely. Grey seems to be a theme lately with me since I just cut out another grey project and have two others planned. I’m not entirely in love with the colour or lack of colour, but can see potential for layering and pairing with obnoxiously bright neon colours. I am also working on a grey Seamwork Jill Coatigan:

The fabric is a gorgeous heavy wool knit blend with stripes on one side and floral on the other. I decided to go with the stripes on the outside, but have the floral showing on the collar. I ran out of fabric as well so I had to cut the pocket and the tie I decided to add from a dark wool. To make the whole thing less blah, I will be finishing the inside seams with a lime green bias tape made from the fabric in the bins above. 😀 I shortened the coat by about 10 inches for two reasons: 1) I am super short (5’3″ at last measuring) and the hem would have hit me at mid calf when it is supposed to hit mid-thigh; 2) And then when I was cutting it out…. I had to shorted it again to get the main pieces to fit on the fabric and they *just* fit. This actually might hit me mid-thigh now…which makes me wonder if they made the pattern for a person with Brienne’s proportions… I’m excited to share this later on this month on the CSC and then again here. Cross your fingers it all goes well.

I also recently made a new knit dress, but I will share that in a different post. 🙂

In other news, I received my first sewing magazines in the mail from Ottobre. The CSC editors were offered them for free. I have a few favs from them and at the top is that pink babydoll dress on the right hand cover of the Spring/Summer 2018 issue. I just have to get some tracing paper and then I should be ready to go.

I have some pretty intense costume projects coming up for improv performances at festivals in the summer and early fall. I will need to plan them out and I’ll share the process here. It’s pretty exciting, actually, since we have a costume budget! But it is a budget so I will have to think carefully of the plans for it. After all the costumes are created, we can use them for more festivals in the future as well as runs of our improv shows. The troupe is pretty excited about all that. Speaking of the troupe, if you are at Toronto Comicon this weekend, check us out:

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