Fabric followed me home!

Despite promising myself I would sew from stash this year, some fabric (and yarn) followed me home yesterday. I suppose it was inevitable since I took mum out to Lancaster and Preston to visit Fabrix and Abhakan respectively. Mum got a large number of fabrics in shades of blue… and I bought plain coloured knits, denim for jeans muslins and linen for a summer dress and a blouse. No photos as the fabrics are all at various stages of the pre-wash process. As the weather is reasonable I am having a massive pre-wash session of all the fabrics I am considering using for the next four or five months so the house is festooned with fabric lengths. A 500g bag of unmarked, and unloved acrylic/mohair mix yarn followed me home too. I don't know exactly what this is destined to become but it was such a wonderful deep cerise colour, and such a good bargain (£6.99 for 5oog) that it just leaped out of its basket and onto my fabric pile as I stood waiting to pay, and begged me to take it home and make it into something nice. I pride myself on being kind to orphan yarns and unloved fabrics so of course I adopted it straight away.

And having spent all day today doing the garden, cleaning the house and washing the car, I will reward myself with a day sewing tomorrow. The Marfy blouse went a bit wrong and I want to fix it. The sleeves didn’t fall right and felt really uncomfortable despite being a very loose sleeve. I also messed up the cuff by altering it too much so it was too small to fasten. I discovered all this AFTER I had trimmed all the seam allowances.

After a great deal of fiddling and discussing the matter with mum, she suggested that the sleeve was too short. I am hoping that adding length to the sleeve will fix the problem, and have already inserted two inches into the tissue pattern this evening and am hoping to be able to get a new muslin with the longer sleeve cut out tomorrow. Though this will depend on whether my muslin fabric, newly pre-washed, is dry in time. I can’t remove and re-cut the sleeve in the current version. Instead I am going to cut the sleeve off at the elbow and then make a band to go on it that will fall just below my elbow (if I get the length calculations correct). I am not entirely sure whether this kind of sleeve is still current or not, but needs must and all that. Of course if I’d flat measured the tissue, I would have found all this out long before I got to this stage.