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~

Comments

[Marthe]

thank you thank you for showing how you do your sleeves. I was so confused. But now I get it

[Rhoda]

Ahhh light bulb moment about wobbly ribbon trims on my 10 yr olds skirt ( see sleeve trim technique)