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.

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 Hong Kong Finish

Since my denim jacket, Simplicity 2150, is unlined, I'm choosing to use a Hong Kong finish on most of the seam allowances. I love the way this plaid flannel looks, but I have a word of advice for you. If you ever feel the urge to cut bias strips of flannel to make your own bias binding...lie down until the feeling passes.

A Denim Jacket

Right now I'm working on Simplicity 2150, View A, which I'm making in a wonderfully stretchy denim. Having just come back off a two-year sewing hiatus, my fitting skills were a little rusty.

I posted a question about trying to fit my suddenly much larger bust (despite having lost weight...who saw that coming) over at Pattern Review, considered the responses, then thought about it for a week before getting serious about making the required alterations.

Based on my high bust measurement (34"), I cut a size 12 at the shoulders and tapered out to what was probably about a 16 (I can't tell for sure because my pattern range ended at 14) at the waist, then back down to a 14 at the hips. The fit in the shoulders is beautiful.

Inexplicably (to me), just making the FBA solved almost all my problems and I only needed to make some very small adjustments to the seamlines to get an acceptable fit at the waist. (Note: Since I'm still in the process of losing weight, I will not be too concerned if the finished jacket is a bit snug. It will fit eventually.)

So now I have cut into the denim and actually sewn the front princess seams. I'm feeling pretty gung-ho and would like to make faster progress, but my back is thoroughly trashed and is slowing me down. I'll post photos of my altered pattern pieces hopefully later today. I need to dig through my fabric stash to find my black linen backdrop.