Here is my first project on my new machine. It's a super simple elastic waist gathered skirt that hits tea length on me when worn at the waist (36" length). I purchased this bright and cheery poppy border print at Fabricland a few years ago specifically for a project like this and I'm happy to have finally made it. It's too long to be twirly, but it feels nicely breezy and light to wear.
I wore it to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) to draw like I do most weekends. When dressing I realized that the only spring shoes I had were a pair of shoes I use for interviews with 2" heels. So I went out wearing a very ... obvious... skirt and being pretty close to 6 feet tall. I noticed that I had no problems with crowds compared to usual, haha!
Up to this point, my personal sewing machine has been inherited from my maternal grandmother. It was ordered from the Eaton's catalog in 1964 or thereabouts and was a stylish dark/light taupe contraption weighing about 35 or 40 pounds. It had been used to teach sewing lessons and to create and mend the family's clothes. This was particularly important to my grandmother as she apparently loved her fashion back in the day and was known to wear platforms and cat eye frames with her saris at work as an elementary school teacher in India. However, most of the time she wears the traditional Punjabi salwar kameez* and buying them ready to wear was not an option financially as a new immigrant, nor were there places to purchase these outfits in 1960's Toronto.
Fast forward to the late 2000's. As my grandmother's eyesight worsened and as she started purchasing more of her clothes at department stores, it was used less frequently and exclusively for straight stitching over the last 20 years. Consequently, almost every other function on the machine from dropping the feed dogs, to a basic zig-zag stitch had seized.
I have been sewing on a variety of friends' and my mother's machines for all my previous projects and have been putting off actually doing anything on my own simply because my machine was so painful to use. I can't tell you how many times I plugged the unlabeled plugs in and nearly had a heart attack as the machine roared to life and started sprinting without stop because I had connected to the pedal outlet and not the machine outlet. Bobbin thread breaks? Haul 30 pounds of steel up and hold it with one hand while inserting the bobbin with the other. Changing feet wasn't an option because the needle and the feed dogs had come out of alignment, making zippers a no go.
I finally gave in and went sewing machine shopping. I pass this store every day to and from work and had only stopped by once before for 10 minutes. After buying a machine and stopping by frequently to get different needles, threads and bits advice for the last month or so, I can 100% say the owner Joe is an absolute sweetheart and his off hours staff is lovely too. My budget was around $400-500 for a preferably mechanical basic but long lasting (20-30 year) machine. I tested the Babylock Grace which was very nice but out of my price range. I also looked at the Husqvarna 116 which is essentially the same as the 118 without speed control, self threader and with one or two less stitches. I chose the 118 primarily because of the speed control as I really love sewing with heavy fabrics and it seemed like it would save me heartache in the future. Luckily Joe had a second hand version that was nearly new.
Emerald 118Husqvarna
Having finished one basic gathered skirt, the only issue I had was that it really liked to pull the bottom layer through the dogs much faster than the top. This happens on all machines, but after hemming about 3m the difference was ridiculous. I didn't take the foot pressure down to 0 (I left it at 1), which may have solved that problem, so we will see how that works in the future. I also find it easier to just thread the needle the regular way vs. using the auto threader, though perhaps I'm not using that feature quite right.
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*Pronounced to my ear more like "salvar kameeje" where the -var is emphasized and sounds like car,
and the -je is pronounced like French words ending in -ge. Salwar refers to the pants, and kameez (like chemise) refers to the tunic or top.
I'm so excited today! I just received Vogue Special Design 4831 in the mail from an Amazon seller. And let me tell you, I definitely did not pay this much for it! I didn't even know people sold vintage patterns there until recently. I guess Amazon really does sell everything now. I don't have any immediate plans for this beauty at the moment, but I'm very excited to make it some day. I'm particularly attracted to the print version with short sleeves- the long sleeves seem like almost too much fabric.
Let me introduce you to Advance 4786, an evening dress pattern with the option for a
sheer or lace upper bodice and a draped skirt. I can't get over how modern this dress looks- the shaped drop waist (as in, not just a v-shaped) is something I've never seen on any other vintage dress pattern that I can think of.
Shorten it up, add some straps and you have a summer dress. Or even just make the skirt on it's own. The back isn't quite succumbing to "coffin clothes" syndrome, but it does look like it could use some more drama to match the front. I'm not sure a matching drape in the back would be welcome (...let's avoid gathers at the fullest part of the behind, thanks...), but a shaped back bodice/yoke would be a nice touch.
Anyhow, onto scanning vintage patterns. This summer, I had the great good fortune to be working somewhere which a) had a plotter and b) had plotter with a built in scanner. Because of this a) I was able to print some patterns for free without cutting and pasting (YAY!) and b) I was able to scan a bunch of my oldest and most likely to be used patterns. Many of these are 90-60 years old, and are so delicate I can't stand using them- both because they rip and that's a pain to work with, and because they rip and they're a piece of history. The best way to scan the pattern pieces would have been to use a large format flat bed scanner, however those are few and far between, not to mention scarily expensive. The work scanner was one like these below, only oler. The scanner feeds in a u-shape.
I ended up using a clear plastic protective sleeve (which came with), meant for scanning drawings which have trace paper taped on top. I put a blank page in first so the pieces could be seen more easily as the scanner was pretty grungy from transferred ink inside. This gave me a scanning area of 2x3 feet, which isn't anywhere near large enough for many skirt pieces as you know. Happily, the pieces can be folded once and still be easily seen, markings and all.
What I plan to do after this, is to use AutoCAD to trace these and do preliminary adjustments digitally according to my body block. I should mention that a step I would like to do before that is to scan a traced copy of my plastic wrap-and-tape body pattern (post on this to come later, and idea courtesy of Kathleen from Fashion Incubator- awesome site!), and overlay to two to get a good idea of what changes need to be made. The idea is to eventually get a few patterns of various styles that fit well scanned and CADed to make a "library" of sorts. Once I have that I will be able to find a similar pattern in the library, and overlay on the new scanned pattern for an even better idea of what I need to do to get a better fit.
This is a project that I had been wanting to do for sooooooo long! For those of you who aren't up on your sci-fi British television, and more specifically the show Doctor Who, the T.A.R.D.I.S. is the time traveling spaceship belonging to a human looking alien with two hearts who has a particular soft spot for Earth. It looks like an emergency police call box, is partially sentient (and has named herself Sexy), and is a magnitude larger on the inside than on the outside. The Doctor, a companion and potentially a variety of friends (Oh Jack, why do you never show up anymore!) go on various scary/heartwarming/mysterious adventures though space and time.
Anyhow, this all started when on a whim I searched Doctor Who on Spoonflower, not expecting to find much of anything. Instead I found pages and pages of results. Now, I would love some mildly tacky TV theme fabric, but at $17.50/yard (yard! not even a proper meter!) plus shipping it was all a bit too rich for my tastes. I have to say though, the 10th Doctor apron fabric and the tesselated TARDIS are pretty hard to resist.
The two lino stamps on the left for the TARDIS and light rays, and a foam stamp for the vortex on the right.
Instead, I headed to the art store and bought all the pieces needed to carve some lino stamps and some water based screen printing ink in silver and gold. A few evenings were spent carving the stamps, and now I can print as many TARDIS-es as I could ever want. MWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! HAHA!!!! HAHAH!!!!! *cough, cough* (I may have gone an bought some metallic blue paint. You know, for cards, and white fabric, and, well, everything and anything else that may ever need a TARDIS on it.)
The next stop was the fabric store to look for some appropriately blue all natural fiber fabric. I was wandering everywhere from the upholstery to the quilting sections muttering to myself and making the sewing store ladies scratch their head. I had never really looked at the content of broadcloth before and had just assumed that it was just cotton so that was where I headed first. It was only 60% cotton and the rest was polyester. I was lucky enough to find exactly what I was looking for in the end. It's not heavy enough to be quilting weight, but it is heavier than broadcloth. Is there a name for that?
As previously mentioned, it was the end of the bolt, and it ended up being in three pieces. I printed the two larger pieces in the pattern in the first photo, and then printed the ends of the short piece in two different types of border prints as seen the right photo above, and the photo below. When I had started out, the plan was for a fluffy maybe layered, maybe not, gathered skirt, however I'm not happy enough with the print to wear it out in public. I really want to, but I think these are slated to be epic pjs worn around others only when I know they are aware of, or share my obsession so when I inevitably start scampering around singing the theme song, or make the dematerialization noise they won't be too, too startled.
So in the end, was it any cheaper? Extremely. Admittedly, the printing process from fabric purchase, to washing, drying, ironing, stamp carving, stamping, to ironing again took several days and was more labour intensive than expected, and the print is nowhere near perfect. However, it is definitely unique, an actual random pattern, and quite pretty if I do say so myself. I tried to cheap out and made homemade felt stamp pads, and while they worked, I had to either stand on, or kneel on the stamps to get enough pressure to have decent transfer. Also, because I was standing, and would occasionally lose balance while on the stamp, it would tip and leave a mark from the wood block as well. I have since purchased a brayer and will hopefully be printing a "good" version of this fabric for a dress or skirt in the future.
For about 4m of fully printed fabric:
$15.00 -lino handle and blades
$7.00 -30x15cm sheet of lino
free -blocks of scrap wood and gorilla glue
$4.00 -on sale100% cotton fabric (reg. ~ $8)
$2.75 x 2 -on sale Speedball water based screenprinting ink in 75cc tubes in gold and silver (reg. ~ $6)
And to conclude, I leave you with a song I unexpectedly found while searching the work server, The Timelords with their song "Doctorin' The Tardis".
