such bad parents!

We designed and sewed up this baby together, and then didn't even give it a name!

I was getting ready to put a link to all the lessons from this series in the sidebar over there when I realized we're still calling it "green coat-type dress project". Ick. That's no name for Momma's pride and joy!

It's okay. We'll remedy this right away. 

I happen to have another 2 1/2 yard piece of greenest featherwale corduroy that I'll send to whomever comes up with the most appropriate, or prettiest, or just fittingest name for this cuteness we created together.

And then we'll be such good parents.  (I wish it were this easy in real life.)

Comments will be closed on Friday, November 6, at 10 p.m. eastern time, and we'll announce the winner bright and early Saturday morning.  Okay, let the naming begin!

~Erin~

design observed :: final

At long last, here we are, ready to put the final touches on our dress. 

First, we'll put a pin where we want the top of our pleat panel opening:

Take a deep breath, and cut the opening bigger:

Then trim the pleated panel to fit the opening.  It needs to be two-seam allowances wider on the top and sides, and, since we're doing a double fold hem in the front, two hem-widths longer at the bottom. 

Here it is hemmed and pressed back into pleats.  The lovely thing about cotton is, with enough steam, it'll generally do whatever you want it to. 

Now I've pinned the panel into place, right sides together with one side of the opening. 

What you see here is that I've left the front edge of the hem facing raw right there at the pleat-panel seam.  That's because I'm okay with using the seam we're about to sew to finish that off. 

I sewed from the hem to the upper edge, because if this seam shifts at all, I'd rather it shifted up into the top of the panel opening than down, which would make it uneven at the hem. 

Pin the top seam together, babying that corner into place.  Clipping into the corner helps.  Still, this is a really fiddly spot.  I bet I end up with at least a little pucker. 

And I did, but not too badly.  Since I'm going to be putting the tab over that, I'm leaving it be. 

And I did put the tab over it, and sewed it down all the way around, on top of the previous stitching, but inexplicably, did not take a picture of it. 

Finished it off with a couple of vertical buttonholes and mother-of-pearl shank buttons:

dolled up my model, and voila! (This may have something to do with why I forgot to take that last picture.)

At long last! Our baby!

I have to say, we did a fantastic job. You folks are outstanding. 

Now for the contest winner.  All your comments were so extremely helpful, but the one that I think helped define the style of our dress the most was this:

"I loved the idea of a vintage swingback coat for this fabric. A dress would be pretty with the deep ecru lace as an underskirt and trim.''  from Heather.  Her little comment helped spark the style idea that gave our dress its final look.  Send me your address, Heather, and 2 1/2 yards of green featherwale corduroy will be on its way to you!

Thank you all so much for all the wonderful participation.  We should do it again sometime.  In fact, I think I have some pretty pink fleece that needs to be designed into a coat...

~Erin~

design observed :: day 10

As promised, that picture of the finished hem facing:

An added benefit of a heavy facing like this is that it gives the hem enough body to stand out on its own.  Which seems to give the dress more shape.  More character, if I may. 

Now all that's left is the hem panel and tab!

Tab

To create the tab pattern, I measured the panel opening, drew a rectangle that length, and added points:

At first I went for a 3/4" wide tab, there on top, but decided wider might look better, and ended up with the bottom pattern there. 

Then I cut two tabs from green and two from brown.  I want the tab to have some thickness to it, and the woven (green) fabric will stabilize the stretch (brown) fabric.

Then I took both green tab pieces and basted them to the wrong side of one of the browns.  Now I essentially have two tab pieces, a very thick tab front and a one-layer tab lining. 

I sewed that all the way around, leaving one side open to turn:

And trimmed the seam allowances.  I trimmed straight across the corners so that the seam allowance wouldn't wad up and make my points non-pointy.  And I graded the bulky seams everywhere else.  Grading is just turning your scissors at an angle like this:

And cutting the seam allowance so that each layer of fabric ends up a different length, like this:

This way, the seam allowances don't all end in one thick block when you turn them to the inside. 

I did turn them to the inside, and pushed all the points out with the tip of a blunt pencil.  Then I turned the open edge in and pinned it:

And edgestitched all the way around.

Now I'll just handsew our little gold buttons on, one on each end, and we'll put this aside for just a minute while we work on the...

Front Pleated Panel

Now, if I knew what length I wanted this panel in advance, I'd go ahead and turn up a 1/2" double fold hem.  But since I don't, I'll have to wait until I've figured that out.

To make the pleats, I fold the panel in half lengthwise and mark it 1" from the center:

This will give us a 1" wide pleat, which actually takes up 2" of fabric.  See why it takes 3x the fabric?

Now I'll just baste from top to bottom on this panel, 1" from the folded edge:

And press the pleat open on the back.  This is a box pleat, so we press it so that the basting line runs down the center. 

See the little ridge the basting line makes down the center there?  If it were knife pleats, we'd press them to one side, but they're box pleats, so they get pressed like this.

Now we'll flip it over and measure 2" away from the center of the first pleat.  2", because it's 1/2" from the center of that pleat to its edge, our new pleat will take up 1/2" from its center to its edge, and we want to use 2" of fabric for this pleat.  Since we're marking the center, that adds 1" to our total.  So, 2" from the center of the first pleat.  

Was that clear at all?  Trust me for now.  I'll go into pleats more another day.

When we press that pleat open, it should just touch the edge of the first pleat:

I did that one more time, for a total of three pleats.  Then I basted across the top of the panel.  When the pleats were all pressed in nicely, I removed the basting threads that held them closed.  (But not the basting threads across the top of the panel.)

Now it's decision time!  We have our pleated panel and our tab.  If I pin the panel into the hole I cut in the pattern originally, I get the picture here on the left:

And if I move it three inches up, I get the one on the right.  So, for our last decision, I turn to you one more time.  Which one do we like?  Once we know that, we'll insert the panel, sew on the tab, and be completely finished.  Then it's pictures, cheers, and the announcement of the fabric winner!

(Whew!)

~Erin~

design observed :: day 9

Friday already? Or Friday at last?

We finished the collar yesterday, and now we're moving on.

Sleeve hem and trim

To finish the sleeve, I turned up a 1/2" double fold hem, and straight stitched close to the upper edge. 

Then I took a 1 1/4" wide strip of brown and pressed under 1/4" on each of the long sides.  I put the bottom of the strip right over the hem stitching and edgestitched that down both sides.

Now, if you're applying something like this contrast band and you sew down one side and up the other, and your band is cut on the straight grain, it'll ripple.  At which point you'll cry, and pull out your seam ripper, and get all mad at me.  I'm not saying I told you so.  I'm saying don't do this.  Sew from one side to the other, then go back to the side you started from and do it again. 

Sleeve/Armhole seam

To insert this sleeve here, which has no gathers in the sleeve cap, I'll put in two pins.  One here:

And another at the back side seam/sleeve underarm seam.  So you've got the two ends of the sleeve pinned and the whole middle hanging free.  I suppose you could pin pin pin it all the way up.  It seems to work better for me if I pin it at the beginning and end and shape the sleeve cap to the armhole as I go. 

And here's the sleeve seam:

Side Seam

Now we'll lay the whole side seam together, from the sleeve underarm seam to the hem and pin it:

And sew that, from the hem to the sleeve seam, and all the way down the underarm seam to the sleeve hem.  If you do it the other way, from the sleeve hem to the dress hem, you might distort the fabric on the side seam and get ripples.  I always think of sewing like petting a cat.  All your little threads on the raw edges are poking out a certain way, see, and you have to sew in the direction that would smooth them down, not make them stand up.  Our threads here are pointing toward the top of the dress.  So we sew from the hem to the sleeve seam. 

Once we've sewn that seam, and finished and pressed it, we get our first glimpse of what the whole thing's going to look like:

Shaping up nicely!

Hem Facing

I told you that we were going to cut off the bottom couple of inches of our front and back patterns for a hem facing, but I didn't show you exactly how we'd do that. I didn't cut them out with the rest of the dress, because I wanted to see if we had enough brown to do a contrast facing.  And we did.

Here it is. 

We'll just take a ruler and mark off 2" on the bottom of the pattern and cut it off.  Voila!  Be sure to label and mark them. 

When I went to cut out the back hem facing, I discovered I didn't have that long of a piece of moleskin left on my skirt.  So I just added a seam allowance at center back and cut out two smaller pieces. 

The process that I used to do this is almost exactly the same as in Liesl Gibson's tutorial. 

-I sewed the center back and side seams and pressed those open.

-I sewed a guideline 1/2" down from the entire upper edge and pressed the upper edge down on the guideline.  I did not make vertical cuts in the fabric to the guideline, because a) it's stretch moleskin b) our hem is not very curvy.  If I had a very curved hem, and/or I was using non-stretch fabric, I'd make little cuts in the fabric I just folded under to keep it from puckering up. 

Here it is turned under and pinned to the right side of the dress hem.

Here I've pressed the seam allowance toward the hem facing and edgestitched right along that fold on the facing:

And here it is turned up and ready to hem.  The facing is pulled just to the inside so that it doesn't show from the outside. 

Then I folded that back and blind-hemmed it to the dress.  At this point, there was less than enough light to take decent pictures, so I'll have to show you that picture tomorrow. 

This leaves us with just the front panel and the tab to go before we're all done.  I can hardly wait!

~Erin~

design observed :: day 8

Lesson learned:  Saying that you will do something "later today" is like inviting chaos to prevent you from doing it. 

Ahem.

Now that we've got everything designed, drafted, and cut out, we need to think for a minute about the order of sewing operations.  The fact that we don't have commercial sewing pattern instructions is a double-edged sword.  We don't have to play by their rules, but we don't get to lean on them, either. 

Still, it's not too difficult to figure out.  If we write down all the steps we need to do and fiddle with them for a few minutes, it'll become pretty clear what has to be done first, next, and so on.  Like a jigsaw puzzle, kinda.  Like our pattern layout puzzle.

Sparing you my rambling thought process, here's the ordered list I came up with:

1) Placket

2) Shoulder seams

3) Collar

4) Sleeve hem & trim

5) Sleeve/armhole seam

6) Hem facing

7) Front panel

8) Tab

Now that I have an outline, I just go down the list.

1) Placket

Instructions here.

Check.

Shoulder Seams

Sew from neckline to armhole.

Collar

Staystitch on the seamline all the way around the neckline.

See how the presser foot flattens the corduroy?  Since we'll be putting a collar over this stitching, I'm not going to worry about it, but on other seams in corduroy you can steam the fabric with your iron to remove those marks.  I've marked the center front with a pin.

Now, match each upper collar to each under collar.  My upper collars are brown, the unders are green.  Here I've pinked and pressed the seam, and marked the fronts with a pin.

Because a lot of this round seam here is bias, it's really prone to stretching around while you're sewing.  So that if you sew one collar from front to back and the other the other way, they'll end up different shapes.  Make sure you do them both the same way.  I sewed both from the back to the front.

Turn the collars right side out.

Here I've fooled around with the shape of the collar by pulling on the (green) under collar until I like the way the collar drapes.  This is where you have the chance to avoid that sticking-up collar look that all of us hate to see on our newly finished clothes.  I pinned it in place, and then basted it at the neckline.  Basting from front to back on both seems to work better.

Then we'll baste the collar in place on the neckline seamline.  Again, we'll have to sew from the back to the front, then go back and sew from back to front on the other side.  If we don't, we risk the collar twisting around the neckline and ending up off-center.  

By the way, do you see my mistake here?  (I can see it clear as day, now that I've seen the finished collar, but I missed it at this point.)

Now I'm binding the neckline with a bias strip in brown.  To do this, I cut a strip that was the length of the neckline plus an inch or so to fold under at the back, and five times the width of the seam (1/4").  Five, because I need two seam allowances, one width to wrap up the right side of the seam, one width to wrap down the wrong side, and an extra bit because the fabric's bulky. 

First I pressed under 1/4" on one long edge of the bias strip.

Leaving 1/2" hanging over at the edge of the placket (I'll show you in a second) I sewed the strip to the wrong side along the seamline. 

Then I trimmed the seamline a bit and folded the edge over to the front, covering the neckline seam there.

See where I left it hanging over at the placket?  When I turn it to the front, I trim that and fold the edge under like this:

Now I edgestitch right along that folded edge on the right side, all the way around, and end up with this:

Now we can all see my mistake!  I matched the collar center fronts at the seam allowance instead of at the seamline.  So that when I sewed the binding over them, they didn't meet in the center.  Not that it ruins the look or anything, but something to remember for next time. 

Next time we'll move on to the sleeves.

Anything unclear? Let me know. 

Thanks!

~Erin~