I know I’ve been quiet lately. I really haven’t been that productive, honestly…it’s been difficult for me to find time to craft this fall! But I do have a little progress to show, so here goes…
1. The skirt fitting class. The lessons are all up, the chats are done, and I spent most of it feeling behind because of how long it took me to fit the muslin. But I know I wasn’t the only one in that class having trouble with it–and mine was relatively easy compared to some. I did finally get the muslin fitted pretty well, I think, and so since I had some unexpected time off yesterday, I made my master pattern.
To give you an idea: I made my muslin from McCall’s 3830, a basic straight skirt, in a size 14. The black lines are the the original waist and darts. The red and orange ones are what I had to do to make it work– 1″ seams on the side or more, tiny little darts, the waistband lines up with the red line, and I had to make a contoured waistband to use as my default because a straight one was way too gappy. (I did have a larger view of the muslin with the two lines, but I seem to have accidentally deleted it from my camera. Oops.)
This is my master sloper pattern that I made yesterday. At my mom’s brilliant suggestion, I put it on heavy non-fusible interfacing, because that would be more durable than paper, easier to store than posterboard, I can see pattern lines through it, and I can iron it! So, theoretically, if I make a skirt from this pattern it should fit quite well.
Given all that I have going on, my original plan (which I formulated about halfway through the class) was to get my sloper made, and then put this aside and try fitting another pattern with it later. I don’t think that’s going to be happening, though– some of the ladies in the class had the idea during the last chat to do a sewalong to work on our second skirt muslins, and the teacher said she’d try to stop in and check on our progress every so often. So I kind of feel like I should do that while I can still get the help.
Item #2: I was house/dogsitting this weekend, and my plan was to use the time to get a good chunk of my bedspread quilt for my new bedroom done. I actually did make some rather good progress, considering that the plan evolved into also hanging out with another friend who came down to keep me company while I was alone in the house/helping her a bit with her Halloween costume/taking a couple of hours to go to a flute recital. (My first flute student from back when I was in college is now a college senior majoring in music ed, and she had her recital on Saturday!) My quilt top consists of 15 blocks, which will have strips between them, and then borders and stuff. But I got all 15 blocks sewn together with little drama, other than thinking I’d lost half of the pieces to block #4. But I kept moving through them, and my suspicions that they’d gotten stuck with another piece proved true. (#14 to be exact. That’s what I get for trying to sort them and watch FlashForward at the same time!) I also got all of the leaves fused onto the blocks, and started appliqueing a few of the stems. But I didn’t get very far on that, because the lighting in her living room wasn’t the greatest and my machine hasn’t had a working light for years, and I was getting rather tired by this point of Saturday night anyway so I gave up and watched the last of my Star Wars trilogy run without sewing. This is a sample of two of the blocks, just to get an idea of how they work together. I think I’m really going to like the way it turns out!