Under Construction

I'm re-thinking and re-arranging the blog, so please bear with me while it's under construction.

Filed Under: It Could Have Been So Much Worse

I love our dogs. Our girl, Shasta, is so sweet and Thor is, well, just like every other little boy...full of mischief.

Like this. I guess this is to be expected when you have to share your sewing room with two big, rowdy dogs.

Seattle Street Fashion

What's the first thing that jumps out at you when you scroll through these photos taken on the streets of Seattle?

You'd think that people here would rebel against the perpetually overcast skies by choosing bright, vibrant colors. Instead, they choose black, white, gray and the ever popular denim. What's up with that?

Take this girl, for example. Her outfit is well put together and she is undeniably cute, but, really, would a pop of red have killed her?

Plan C

Do you remember the Hong Kong finish I was going to use in my Simplicity 2150 jacket? Yes, I remember it, too. I also remember that I had abandoned that plan, Plan A, if you will, because the flannel bias strips that looked so pretty were phenomenonally hard to work with. So I advanced to Plan B, overlocking the seam allowances of the jacket, which I thought would be fast and still be interesting if I used contrasting thread.

Plan B was scary for me, because I don't have a lot of experience using my serger, despite having owned it for roughly 15 years. Maybe longer. The knife terrifies me. It's sharp and it moves fast and no one has ever made the mistake of calling me coordinated. So I worry about ruining garments and I worry about ruining fingers. That's the potential for a double whammy as I'm reasonably certain that, were I to cut off a finger while serging a garment, I would also ruin the garment.

Anyway, I pulled out my serger and stitched up a sample. Call me crazy, but that looked pretty darned good to me. Thus reassured that Plan B was The Answer, I started on my jacket seam allowances and...disaster. Okay, not on the magnitude of , say, an asteroid striking the earth, but, you know, almost. There were no tears, but it was close.

So it was back to the sample scrap, where I barely tweaked some of the settings and serged all the edges again. I serged slowly; I serged fast. I barely skimmed the edges with the knives and I trimmed off full seam allowances, all with beautiful results.

So I - stupidly...go ahead and say you; you know you're thinking it - tried it again on the jacket, again with disastrous results.

Take a look at the photos I've included below and tell me what you think, because I'm at a loss; I've serged the edges of my rather large sample scrap until it's roughly 4" by 4" and have been unable to recreate the abnormal stitching.

Any ideas on what might make my serger act as though it's demon possessed? 

 

And all of this brings me to Plan C, which is really Plan A...but without the flannel.

A Reassessment

Do you remember the Hong Kong finish was was going to use in my Simplicity 2150 jacket? Yes, I remember it, too. It's just a distant memory, as I haven't set hands on the jacket in over a week. It's occurred to me that my enthusiasm for the jacket project has faded in direct proportion to the fiddly factor of the flannel I was using for the seam finish. I really want to get this project completed - I need the jacket - so I'm dumping the flannel. Since I don't have a good place for cutting bias strips right now, I think I'm going to overlock my seam allowances. Unlike my sewing machine, Lily, I don't have a very good relationship with my serger, so wish me luck.

Dare I?

How yummy is this wool biker jacket?

Burda rates it advanced. Pondering.