Black Peacock Suit part 2

Black tortoise suit more like. My sewing mojo took an early Christmas vacation and only came back last night so sorry for the total lack of posts here. I think it only returned because I spent the afternoon showing a colleague's wife (who sews, hooray!) around town. We had a great time and I got lots of bargain fabrics, mainly plain coloured knits so I will be playing with those next. They're all in the washing machine right now!

Anyway, the skirt is complete, really happy with this pattern (BWOF 01/2008 127). The panelled front and back pieces make it easy to fit. The only changes I made were to swap the waistband for a faced waist, just because that is my personal preference and to interline the skirt with some leftover silk organza that matched. Why make a simple skirt when you can make a complicated one. Here I am wearing it with the RTW black jacket that will surely have fallen apart before I have got around to finishing it's replacement! The photo is a little dark I'll try and get better ones when the suit is finished.

Edited to add better skirt pics :

The jacket has been giving me lots of problems, all caused by the same thing. This is blindingly obvious to me now, and will be to all of you, especially quilters, but if you apply thick interfacing and canvas to a piece of fabric and then add multiple lines of topstitching, it shrinks! I should have started with bigger pieces and trimmed them after "quilting". I've had to really fiddle with the cuffs and collar to get them to work properly (no fabric left to redo those pieces) and only now is it starting to look like a real jacket. I also managed to find some interesting zips shopping today so I really do hope to get this finished soon. Yeah yeah I know thats what I said in my last post about a hundred years ago.....

The row of pins is marking where the multiple rows of topstitching will start. The instructions have you topstitch the pieces before joining them, but I knew it would be impossible for me to match the lines so I ignored that. Usually I ignore BWOF instructions at my peril so I hope this doesn't come back to haunt me later.

Black Peacock Suit

This is my latest project - actually it's more likely that I will wear the pieces as separates rather than a suit.  I like wearing my brown brocade skirt with brown boots so much that I decided to make a black version to wear with my black boots.  Also my RTW short black jacket is really on it's last legs so I decided a new one was in order.

The skirt is almost complete, I just need to hem it.  I used BWOF 01/2008 127, a panelled pencil skirt, omitting the back welt pockets.  It's a great pattern, I'm sure I will use it again. Here is a picture of the fabric I am using - a black brocade with blue and green peacock feathers.

For the jacket I am using an old BWOF pattern - 02/2004 - 112, a sort of biker jacket.  
I'm making this in black wool with brocade topstitched collar and cuffs.  There is a lot of prep needed for this pattern as it requires all the jacket pieces to have batting applied to the topstitched areas.  I decided to sandwich a piece of canvas between the fabric and fusible interfacing, with the fusible interfacing covering the whole jacket piece.  
For the brocade areas I used a thicker interfacing so these parts are slightly more padded.  Now all that is done I have started topstitching the brocade areas.  

Hopefully it will start to come together quickly now the boring but necessary prep work is out of the way - more soon.....

The Pucci Dress Saga

Thank you all for your supportive posts regarding my Pucci print dress - I feel much better now, but trust me the dress did look terrible on me, maybe if I were a foot taller or 30lbs lighter it would be OK. I think you are all right that someone with a small bust would be fine in it. Lindsay T summed it up quite well in her hilarious comment;

"Your dressform looks like Mrs. Doubtfire. Tee hee hee."

So what is the best thing to do after a wadder when your confidence has taken a big knock?  Make something easy? No of course not - I decided to make another Pucci print dress - this time as a surprise for a friends birthday. I know, certifiable aren't I? 

I decided to make the jersey dress from BWOF 02/2008 - 103. 

I love this pattern although I don't know if it would work on me, my friend though is very petite and I am really pleased with how it came out. I was really careful cutting it out to make sure one of the large yellow dots didn't end up in the wrong place!

 This was quite an easy pattern to put together once I had figured out with the paper pattern pieces how the twist part needed to be assembled. The BWOF instructions were quite good except for the first part which read "between the asterisks..." Well there are no asterisks which was exceedingly annoying!

The finished dress

Top detail

Skirt detail (I have no idea how the pattern matched so well - a happy accident!

Twist detail

I also turned my dress into a skirt. I just reshaped the back skirt panel to make it a little less full and used one of the front wraps as the skirt front. I added some elastic at the waistband and a narrow hem and voila - one expensive, simple, comfortable elastic waist skirt. Mrs Doubtfire would be proud. Emilio Pucci, not so much!

Dress Disaster!

I had such high hopes for this dress while making it and I feel so stupid for not spotting the glaring error earlier. I was making the popular Vogue wrap dress, 8379 in some (admittedly loud) print jersey, really nice fabric.

Here is a picture of the fabric.



Here is a picture of the back of the incomplete dress. So far so good. Now this is a pretty random geometric print and I only just managed to cut all the pattern pieces with the fabric I had - other than cutting the back skirt on the fold in place of a seam, I didn't think about layout at all.



Well I should have. Here is the sad state of the front of the dress - seriously I could not have placed those white bands there if I had tried! It looks even more noticeable on me than on the dressform. The fabric is too good to waste so I'm going to ditch the top and turn it into a skirt, hopefully I will manage not to mess that up.

Wedding Pictures

I was working in Vietnam all last week, only getting back on Saturday so I have really missed my sewing machine. Still, a little break after the marathon wedding outfit is probably no bad thing. Would you believe HK had freakishly warm weather throughout October and it turned out to be way to hot to wear the coat! I carried it around for the wedding and then checked it in over dinner. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and whizzed up a wrap. Never mind, we have been invited to another wedding later this month so I'll try again! The purple shoes won in the end and matched the bridesmaids outfits!



Next on the list I have 2 jersey dresses planned, I just have to decide which to attempt first;
The very popular Vogue 8379 wrap dress in a grey/purple/black/white Pucci print jersey;

The newish McCalls pattern 5752 in a purple butterfly print silk jersey;