Simplicity 5547 and other items

A very good friend of mine found a Simplicity 5547 pattern in a local charity shop and it looked very interesting being a shirt tunic top with raglan sleeves.

If you follow my blog regularly you'll know I've hardly ever used a pattern, preferring to draft my own using my body blueprint from SFD as a base. However, I liked the idea of the raglan sleeves so I decided to base the shirt on View 1 but added my own 'not so subtle' changes.

 

I've been wanting to make a plain white shirt for ages. A staple for my wardrobe that would go with anything and initially I thought this would be the pattern to use. I recently bought a couple of metres of Stretch white cotton fabric from Cloth Control for under £5.00 and it was a contender except that it had a gold stripe. Nothing wrong with the stripe, in fact it is a beautiful design but it wasn't the plain crisp white shirt I'd envisaged. That will have to wait for the right fabric. For now it would do well for this pattern. Well at least I thought it would.... Once I'd cut it out, I realised it was going to look like a nightshirt unless I did something dramatic to it.

So I looked through some embroidery designs to brighten it up and this is what I eventually came up with.

The design was put on the left cuff and the left collar point only with the main design across from the right shoulder. I added the coordinating buttons to hopefully pull the whole thing together.

The actual shirt came together quickly after the embroidery was finished. This part took a fair amount of time in the placement before construction and working out the order in which to make up the garment. 

I wanted the design to start across the raglan shoulder seam and finish in the buttonhole band which meant I couldn't finish the band until after the embroidery. Once I was ready I decided that top stitching the bands in place would spoil the effect so I hand stitched the plackets in place.

I am particularly happy with the cuff placket pattern matching and the collar was a perfect fit.

I also made the tails curve towards the side seams and put a couple of darts in the back to take up some of the bagginess.

Overall I liked the pattern and I will probably make another at some point.

I also made three other quick items during the week. Both were made better with the use of my coverstitch machine which is proving to be a brilliant addition to my sewing room.

The first is a plain and simple rib long sleeved T-shirt to act as a layering garment in winter. The close up of the sleeve ends shows the coverstitch wide needle stitch. This gives a professional finish that is also very stretchy.


















Next up is another T-shirt in a Ponte Roma knit fabric that I bought from a fabric shop in Bath during a recent visit. It is a beautiful soft grey with white swans and is very cosy and warm.

 

And lastly for this blog is a very quick nightie using the fabric I bought from a charity shop while we were on our trip to Australia earlier this year. I paid just AU$5.00 for nearly two metres of this butterfly flanelette fabric from Vinnies.  

We had travelled south towards the blue mountains and found we'd hit a colder area than we had planned for so the fabric initially came in handy as an extra covering at night over the duvet in our rented motorhome until we moved north again and found some heat. Now it'll keep me snug once again during the UK winter and I shall dream about our wonderful adventures.

All these three garments came from the same basic T-shirt design so were fast makes and not meant to be anything other than additions to my basic wardrobe.

I have some fabulous blue / black wool suiting fabric from which I want to make a longish jacket so that will be on my cutting table soon.

Thank you for reading.

Birthday gift and more sewing catchup

It seems the more I sew, the less I blog which is a bad situation to be in. Anyway here is my latest make but first, I'd like to share a recent birthday gift I received from a very dear friend and one of my biggest fans of my sewing and blogging. This was a big birthday for me and such a brilliant present that fits perfectly in my sewing room.

The photo doesn't do it justice but the frame totally matches my curtains. The background of the picture is made of tiny thread reels and apart from the machine having my name on it you can see the thread on the machine loops up to a heart before threading its way down to the needle. I just totally love it. This was just such a thoughtful gift and so appreciated.

Now on to my latest shirt....

I described this as a 'noisy' shirt to a friend who enquired because it's not exactly 'loud' but it isn't quiet either. The fabric reminds of those paper crafts where you dip it in liquid having spotted it with oils for some pretty amazing designs.

I can't remember where I got this fabric now but it's a quality 100% cotton and would have been too overwhelming in one colour so I used some accent plain fabric for the cuffs, shoulder tabs and inside of the yoke and collar. The collar came out a bit 'Elvis Presley ish' and wasn't intended but I know where I went wrong. I drafted the pattern from my SFD basic body blueprint where I then added my usual 1 cm seam allowance but instead of drafting a new collar and stand, I took the pattern from one of my original drafts which I now realise used the old standard 5/8" seam allowance [employed in the early days of my sewing career until I followed more experience tutors who taught me 1 cm in most places is much easier than the larger one and then having to trim down after - made sense to me].

Anyway the colar is now referred to as a 'design element' but I'll be more careful next time.

The cuff was another design element that I hadn't intended at the outset. I wanted the cuff to have the plain colour lining but I realised it would have more impact turned back in half. The only problem here was that being an afterthought I had already allowed for the 'turn off cloth' for the other way so there is a slight border effect around the edges which isn't very professional and certainly makes it look 'home made'. 

I've got a T-Shirt and some Yoga Pants for my new Tai Chi QiGong classes starting next month on my cutting table so that's my next project.