I often fantasize about sewing when I haven't got a project on the go. I imagine it to be easy and fun and highly rewarding and not frustrating. In order to help with this fantasy I tend to stay away from patterns that seem time consuming and complicated. After all I do not wish to add to the abandoned, half finished line up that exists around this house. This Sunday, I set out to produce a top from some fabric I bought at Value Village that I doubted but was encouraged to buy because of the vast quantity and the low price. I picked a vintage pattern that I had on hand and set about to dazzle myself with this simple task. There were only 3 pattern pieces so how hard could it possibly be?
This is a lovely vintage doll that looked nice in the late afternoon light of the sewing room. She deserved to have her photo taken. She was the spectator to the debacle.
This is the pattern (blue top on the left) and the fabric.
This was when things were going well. One of the mere 3 pattern pieces.
So what went wrong? Well, in the span of just a few moments, the pattern revealed itself to be mis-sized. It claimed a finished bust size of 32 inches. This is simply not true. I stitched the shoulder seams together the wrong "right" sides together, then after tearing them out which was dreadful with this stretchy, nubby fabric, I promptly sewed the front and back together in the opposite fashion to the shoulders so the side seams now need to be torn out and even with an aggressively large seam down both sides to compensate for the oversize of the pattern, it's still way too big for the end result I'm looking for. Setting the sleeves in is a terrible idea when I haven't fixed the sizing obstacle. As you can tell from this photo, the light was still decent by the time I lost faith. This is the moment where I decided to capture the hideousness. You've just got to love the longer days. I commit to finishing this top sometime in the coming days. I hope I can post some redirection of this mishap. What is sometimes frustrating about sewing? Everything. Suggestions anyone?
1 comment:
Lisa
My sister was an avid seamstress growing up. My memories of this is of howls of anger emanating from the basement, tears, torn fabric, and weird looking results. Nonetheless she persisted. It was perplexing for me. Why you would pursue something that made you insane? Now I get that any decent craft makes you nuts, if it was easy there would be no satisfaction.
Maybe I could wear it. It might look fetching on my old fashioned body.
Love the new format.
Douglas
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