New Look 6470 - Variant

Hey guys, I'm sewing again!!!! After extensive procrastination about what to sew, and multiple forays into the stash cupboard over a period of weeks, last night I had one of those whirlwind sessions of matching patterns to fabrics, putting them into bags, and piling them in the corner ready to be sewn.  Its a big pile, with absolutely no theme and mainly driven by a need to fill gaps in the wardrobe.

And as I sewed my project today, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how lucky I am.  Lucky because I got up this morning, couldn't figure out what to wear, took a dislike to my entire wardrobe of clothes, fancied a new dress, and was able to go into the sewing room, pick out a pattern and fabric, alter the pattern to fit my vision of what I wanted to wear to work tomorrow, sew it up and have a new outfit.  I think sometimes I take it for granted that I can do this but today as I sewed away quietly and calmly, I realised how far I'd come in my sewing journey. 

Today's dress comes to you partially courtesy of RuthieSews, though Ruthie doesn't know this yet. 

My overlocker is  misbehaving at present.  Its been to the engineer three times and is still chewing up the fabric and failing to cut properly despite a thorough overhaul and new knives being installed.   I also find the cover hem difficult and rarely achieve a result I am happy with.  A fair number of my pending fabrics are knits, and the poor relationship I am having with the overlocker was putting me off sewing them up.  However, Ruthie wrote a post on her blog about binders and walking feet earlier in the week and I started thinking about how I could use the walking foot and choice of stretch stitches on the regular machine to sew parts of my garment.  Which is what I've done here.

The sleeves were set in and the side seams sewn on the overlocker, everything else, including the hems, was done on the sewing machine.  I am pleased with the finish I managed to achieve and will definitely be using the walking foot and sewing machine more frequently for knits.  It did allow the knit fabric to feed evenly and smoothly through the machine with no need to pull or drag.  I just realised that I didn't alter the foot pressure (which I would normally need to do for a knit fabric sewn on the machine) and I had only the tiniest amount of waving in the hem, but it was so slight that a press with a warm iron and some steam sorted it out completely.

The back neck and the sleeves/hem are done with a twin jersey needle.  The top threads are Guterman, the bottom thread is woolly nylon.  The latter has to be wound onto the bobbin by hand but I've never experienced any problems with using it on the machine and it gives a touch more stretch to the twin needle hem.  The camera bleached out the colour on the close up but I've included a small photo of the hem of the dress so you can see how smoothly my walking foot managed the hem. 

The shoulders were sewn together using a super stretch stitch (the one that looks like really tight zigzag at an angle on your machine's stitch panel).  I had a bit of slippage on one of the shoulders where the cowl facing was folded back over the seam.  I think that was mainly sloppy pinning on my part though.  It took a while to unpick but I found if I sewed the shoulder seams first, leaving the facing loose, I could then pin the facing into place more accurately and just sew over the previous stitching to make sure it was in the right place. 

I put the sleeves in flat using the overlocker, then whizzed up the side seams, across the underarm and down the sleeves, also on the overlocker, then changed back to the sewing machine, put the double needle back in, did a double fold hem, and double stitched it.  Because the top was very tight fitting and I wanted a bit more ease (and also to avoid the  "overlocker ate my fabric" scenario) I sewed the side seams with the fabric running parallel to the knife but not being cut by it. 

Gave it a press.  Put it on Twiggy.  Took the pictures.  Hung it up with the jacket I'm wearing with it tomorrow.  And voila.. new outfit for Monday. 

Now, the pattern.  This was a top pattern which I've made several times before and really like the cowl neckline.  However, I had 1.5 metres of fabric, the top didn't take anywhere near that, I wanted a dress, and I thought an A Line would be cute (and easy to draft).  As I usually do, I drafted the skirt part so the top of the drafted skirt tissue just had to be lined up with the waist line marked on the pattern and could be just pinned into place if I wanted to turn the top into a dress again.  I find it saves on both tissue and tracing time doing it that way.  Plus I love having lots of interchangeable bits of pattern, ready fitted, that I can play "build-a-garment" with.  

I didn't think I'd get sleeves out as well, but there was a strip of fabric below the dress when I cut it out that was just large enough to get short sleeves out.  The sleeves hit just above the elbow which is a comfortable length. 

The fabric is a faux silk jersey.  The colour is a dusty dark airforce blue/grey (the colour isn't showing all that accurately in any of the photos) and its been in the stash for a while, having been bought from Fine Fabrics in Harrogate at least two years ago, and possibly longer than this.  I think its poly or viscose and it has a very heavy drape for the fabric weight (its quite thin), and is reasonably stretchy.

And final two shots show the dress with the jacket I plan to wear with the dress tomorrow, and also how the dress looks with a plain cardigan.  Please excuse the wrinkles in the cardigan... I dragged it out of the laundry for the photo shoot as its the only bright colour cardigan I own.  I think I like the dress better with the cardigan giving some interest to the dress, which is quite plain and dark on its own.