Ponte Roma One Seam Pants success!

I'm afraid Louise Cutting wouldn't be impressed by the One Seam Pants that I made from her pattern using my JoAnn's Ponte Roma knit fabric, but since she is going to be doing some classes for our Albany ASG group this coming weekend, I decided to make a pair of these pants for my March Garment a Month Challenge because my original Barb Callahan Damask Jacket doesn't need to be finished until I take a class with her at the Worcester Expo next week, so that jacket is going to be my April challenge garment.

When I first made this pair of pants, they were so big that I almost could put two legs in one pants leg, but I am quite happy with the my pants fit after I went back and made some changes to the pattern yesterday (lowered the waistline, shortened the hem, and took 1" out of the center of the pants leg since there's no side seam) because they are now much more like the fairly straight legged pants that I like to wear rather than the looser pajama type pants that I think that pattern was originally supposed to produce. Louise later provided a pdf file with instructions on how to change that on her website, though, so I guess I'm not the only one who doesn't like wide legged pants.

I also want to try making these pants in rayon and will have to reduce the amount I took out of the width in order to do that since that fabric doesn't stretch and I'd also like to make pants that look more like her original design, but think first I am going to use some of my Arlene's tracing paper to make a copy of this pattern the way it is since I can see myself making lots of straight legged one seam knit pants, esp from JoAnn's Ponte Roma, since it worked so well this time. Based on my experience with the pieces of Ponte Roma I have bought at JoAnn's, though, there's no telling if the other pieces in my stash will work the same.

I was pleased to discover a box full of rayon fabric in my stash this morning along with quite a few other pieces of rayon that were kind of "hidden" on my shelves since I've long avoided working with this kind of fabric as I have working with knits since both are far more difficult than the much more stable fabrics that I usually use for my clothes, but since I do like WEARING clothes made from rayon and knits, I'm just going to have to learn how to sew them, and thanks to my wonderful Pfaff's dual feed foot, I feel like I have a much better chance of doing that than I did when trying to sew Ponte Roma on my Bernina, even with the walking foot attached.

March MAGAM project

My pattern for March is one from my stash designed by Barb Callahan called Damask Jacket and it has what she calls a swing back and what I call a back peplum. This is yet again a muslin since I've never made this pattern before so I used a piece of cheap fabric from my stash. Not sure what it is but it doesn't seem to stretch even though I thought it might be a knit however I thought the black and white design might be good for spring.

I cut and basted my jacket together yesterday morning after comparing it to my Sure Fit dress kit pattern and am not unhappy with the way it fits although the striped fabric does strange things in the back peplum. I like it enough to keep going through and perhaps wear to the Sew and Quilt Expo in Worcester MA next month so the designer, the teacher of my first class, can see what I did with her in pattern.

Pintucks and edge finishes

When I first started doing the twin needle stitching on my jacket collar yesterday, I tried taking each thread through as many separate guides as I could, but put both through the one thread guide right above the twin needles on my Bernina 1230 and that seemed to cause things to jam up, however once I took them out of that guide, it seemed to work OK. Guess I should also try running both threads through all of the same guides, though, to see how that works.

I also couldn't figure out how to set the tension on my machine since when it was on normal, my two rows of stitching just lay flat on the surface of my sweatshirt fabric and tightening the tension up didn't seem to change that much, but when I loosened the top tension, that did the trick, I guess because that meant the bobbin thread was pulling harder, however I didn't want to adjust the bobbin tension unless I had to and luckily didn't.

I'm still debating about adding more rows of pintucks on the back of my collar, but am afraid that would be too much, however since I'm using fairly big stitches, as I did with most of the sewing I've done on this sweatshirt fabric, it wouldn't be too hard to take out, so I may try adding rows of stitching between my original rows today, I'll have to look at it again before I decide.

The worst part about this project has been trying to figure out what to do with the edges of the jacket since even though it's OK to leave boiled wool edges raw, this sweatshirt fleece doesn't lay flat or look all that nice when used that way, however when I tried to zigzag yarn to the edge of the back yesterday, even though I was using a walking foot, the bottom got all stretched out, so I cut that off and decided to try using a regular three thread serger stitch around the outside of my jacket since I knew I could reduce or increase the pull of the feed dogs on that machine. That worked OK, aside from the corners which I still don't know how to do on a serger, so have to figure out some way to get rid of all those serger tails.

The bottom of my jacket still doesn't lay as flat as I'd like, though, esp. on the sides where it's supposed to go from a short front to a longer back, so I think I may end up evening those up if I can figure out how to mark the bottom edge of a jacket. 

I use my old Singer skirt marker for marking the hem on dresses, so may be able to use it for a jacket, if I can figure out some way to make the marker level with that jacket hem. Since I only have white powder for my skirt marker, that probably won't be visible on my white sweatshirt fabric, but I once read about people using cinnamon in their pounce pads when marking a light colored quilt, so maybe I'll put some cinnamon in my marker and see how that works.

Afraid these may be notes that interest no one but me, at least not in this detail, but someday I can go back and read what has and hasn't worked and that may actually be the best use for blog in my case since I am so new to garment sewing, but maybe a few other novice sewers might happen to read what I say and learn a few things from me as I have from so many other bloggers in the past!

February jacket collar and edge

Not quite done with my Feb. MAGAM entry even though I already sent in a photo, so thought I'd share what I've been trying to do to finish it so I can start working on my March garment.

To prove what a novice I am at clothes sewing, when I wanted to try doing some twin needle pintucks on the neck of my new white sweatshirt jacket this morning, I had no idea how to do that, even though I've often read about twin needle stitching in the past, proof that I need to DO rather than just read about things I've not tried before.

I had to do quite a bit of experimenting before I could figure out how to thread the machine and adjust the tension before I could start sewing those pintucks, but am fairly happy with the way it turned out, however am now debating about whether I should add even more pintucks since the collar is still kind of wide and doesn't stand up quite as much as I'd like.

I also did some experimenting with how I was going to finish the edge of this jacket, even though I'm still not entirely sure I want to do anything since that might make it much less drapey, but it does look kind of unfinished as it is.I definitely can't just do the blanket stitch around the outside as I had planned, though, since this fabric is so flimsy that the edges don't lie flat at all when I use that stitch on the outside edge. Know I could put some kind of washaway stabilizer under it, but don't think the stitching would show enough to make that worth doing.

Think I'm going to see if I have some off white yarn that I can couch along the edge as I did with one of my old polar fleece jackets, but I need to use thin yarn so it's not as obvious as the thick fuzzy stuff I used on my other jacket. I hope I have something like that in my stash since I hate to have to go out and buy things when I already own so much, but I usually can "shop" in my own house rather than in a store thanks to my huge stash of sewing related items, including the twin needles that I bought ages ago but I never even opened until today.