Sewing Magic

It is 8:30 a.m. and it is already 18C.  It is going to be warm again.  All the windows are closed the blinds are drawn and because of the size and amount of heat that comes in off the deck, I will be covering whatever I can of the big bay kitchen window with tinfoil.  Some things, you just have to do.  But the landlord agrees, we need some shade on the deck.

Oddly enough, there was no knitting.  It isn't that it was too hot.  It is more that I just never got there.  All day long, I kept getting drawn back to some pretty special magic.

I sat down to sewing but I wanted to wait to sew skirt two to see if I really would wear one and to see if the way I made it would sit properly and would fit into my usual scheme of things.  There just wasn't any point making a second skirt if I was not going to like wearing the first. I pulled out all the pj flanellette and as I did so , a stray bit of fabric fell.  

Fabric is sometimes like yarn.  If it falls at your feet, and nothing else falls off the shelf, it might be a message.  This was a message.  I made pants of this fabric before my epic journey so I knew I loved the fabric, but I wondered how much I had left of the khaki green linen.  I measured it out and got an idea.

Since knitting  my version of Blanche

and liking the way that fits, I have wondered what would happen if I did the same kind of thing in a woven fabric.  I had a blouse years ago that had a passing similarity of fit as Blanche and that was a favourite, but without the blouse and without a pattern, I wasn't sure what to do.  After knitting Blanche, after all my adventures in knitting really, I think it all comes down to ease.  An unshaped, easy wearing garment needs a lot of ease, and if it is a woven fabric, it needs to have just a bit more.  It needs ease at the arm holes, ease at the hemlines, ease through the chest.  I realized that even for a woven fabric, what it really came down to was closing your eyes and having faith that you could do this without someone else's hand giving you a pattern.

So I sat down, did the cuts that a basic garment and this piece of fabric required and came up with a basic blouse.

I put it on, pinned it together at the buttonband and did a load of dishes to test if the ease was actually enough.  If you can't do ordinary tasks in it, you missed the mark, so dishes. I had to make the arm openings deeper, but that just meant taking out three more inches at the side seam, and I realized that while the neck is the perfect depth, it is a little wide.  I based it exactly on my knitting and that explains all the wide necks I get on knitted garments.  

The work today is to take the seam ripper to all the parts and transfer the pices to the waiting pattern paper with the problems fixed.  I have some striped linen shirting that will look super in an unshaped garment like this and I am already dreaming up a few changes and adaptations for other tops in the future. 

 Once I finish taking the pattern off this piece, I am going to make a bit of a sewn in dickey to fix the over wide problem and will finish the top so that it can  go right into service. The shelves yielded another bit of fabic leftover from Cassie's perfect skirt.

When that is done, it will be a really good wearable garment...That I invented all by myself.  Whoddathunkit?  Certainly, not me.

This will happen eventually, but today I need to sew some pj pants.  I don't intend to wear them so much as pj's as lounge pants.  It is one thing to wear rags when I am alone, but not when others are visiting. and there will be more visitors shortly.

There will be knitting later too.  It's kind of nice to save it for when it is too hot to think. Sewing takes thinking, constantly, knitting not so much. The sewing machine beckons and I will heed its clarion call.