A pretty addition to my wardrobe

I made a garment bag for my wool skirts!

I suffer from quite a plague of moths in my room and have been able to decimate their population by using the diamond traps with the glue strips.  In my experience lavender and cedar wood do not help.  The traps cut down on the male moths but can't catch the female ones.

I made this bag out of polycotton, a cut up bed sheet if I remember correctly, that I wanted to use for toile material.  So far the moths had not gone for polycotton so I hope that this will continue.

I measured the fabric by laying the wool skirts on their hangers on top of the fabric. I found that I didn't have quite enough width of the pink polycotton fabric so I had to use strips of this lovely patterned quilting cotton.  I am really happy that this gives the whole project a great look.

Plus: I've again made a feature out of a bug - that pleases me very much!

I could sew the invisible zip to the cotton strips first which made handling the whole thing easier.  I overcast the raw edges after sewing this together.  Luckily it was really easy to turn inside out through the zip opening.

I left the sewing threads long and pulled these ends onto the right side with the help of a hand sewing needle.  You get great sharp corner with very little effort when you just pull on those threads to pop out the corners.  No poking or pushing required!

I re-inforced the central seam above the zip and then only poked a little bit of it open so that the hanger fits through.  I am fairly certain that no cheeky moth can crawl through.

To make the garment bag that little bit safer I also included a piece of anti-moth paper - though I am not at all sure that these work.  Still, I had some left so why not.

That's two wool skirts that are at least zipped into a bag that moths would have to eat through. I hope they don't.

I sewed a little more

[Oh darn: this draft is from some time earlier in the year. Oops, forgot]

I have made a bit more progress on a couple of things. But nothing seems to get done easily, let alone quickly.

Issues with two skirts:

My black and white wool skirt still needs the inside corner of the vent sorted out, I'm not happy that I haven't done that yet. And I thought I was done with my second self-drafted wool skirt, the one in the heathery pinkish-red.  It isn't!  Sneef!

I had blind hemmed the bottom of the wool fabric hem to make sure it would lie flat. Then I hand sewed the lining to it. Well guess what: now the lining pulls at the skirt in plenty of places and I basically have to re-do that.

Or pull the blind hemming back out and I'd have to un-do and re-do at least some of the sewing on the lining for that too. It's not exactly a win-win situation - I'll have to do quite a bit of work either way. I do have the feeling that the blind hemming could continue to be a problem. Bother!

Update: I finally got started on this and it didn't even take long. Does it ever? You just build up this problem in your head and it seems insurmountable!  I put lots of pins into place and released the lining - sewing it back was the work of a half hour at most.

Here is the problem of the black and white skirt:

Folding the hem the wrong way at the back vent looks terrible!  Really amateurish.

Here is the inside:

I did plumb up the open bit a little so it's easier to see in a photo. But the fabric might have done that by inside when wearing so this definitely couldn't stay the way it was.

Another update: I finally got over the "but I've already hand-sewn it on!" feeling and re-did it. Again, it didn't take nearly as long as anticipated.


I don't like the asymetric jersey top in the Brushstrokes pattern, I can't see myself wear it because it doesn't look very nice on me. I am losing weight at the moment because I'm counting calories but it doesn't seem to affect my waist line in the slightest so the problem with this top will continue. Plus I'm bound to put weight back on at some point.

I need to get a photo taken of me wearing this to illustrate the issue:

 

Also: it doesn't help that the lining now turns towards the outside which you can see in the badly fuzzy photo on the left. Grumble.

- - -

I long wanted to make a dress with a waist seam in the shape of an inverted V or chevron. This shape might be called 'swallow wings'.  I didn't have the right sort of pattern and thought I could draw this myself, but I never did.

I found New Look 6183 which has this waist seam but it also has some rouching along the top of the front side panels where they meet the centre front panel. I wasn't keen on those but I tried the original side panel piece when I tried out my toile, and then folded the side panel piece to suppress some of the excessive length so I could sew this other side with less gathering.

I liked the lesser amount better because I feel that it won't show up my big tummy as much as the original rouching would.  Not sure if that's wishful thinking.

 

There are no bust darts: the top pieces are gathered under each bust. This is a style I have not tried before so it'll be interesting to evaluate.

I had set aside a cheap viscose fabric that I got in a closing down sale. This is a fabric that irons wonderfully well and drapes quite well too.  It is a fabric that's quite light though and the flimsiness means that this is slightly difficult to sew: both my overlocking and the straight stitches wrinkle up and make the seams pull.

A good press makes this a bit better but doesn't fix it altogether.  Rough skin on my hands also gets stuck on this fabric and I find that I have to drag it over my ironing board because it clings to it as well. I've never encountered this problem before!

These problems mean that I got rather disenchanted with carrying on with this dress and feel that I need to try the pattern in another fabric. It would be interesting to see if which gathering I prefer in a less light fabric.


So glad I managed to sort out the vent on the black and white skirt, hopefully I'm making progress with other things too. Fingers crossed.

Onwards and upwards!