Altering my way back to start

A cotton jersey top.  It's a comfortable fit scoop neck tee with bell sleeves.

Now this could have been an easy and quick project but, no, I had to go about it in a most time consuming way.  The story starts with KwikSew 3295 (now apparently out of print).  Last year I tried the top in a woven making the bust area smaller and experimenting with a center back seam for shaping.  After a few muslins I decided a woven top was not for me, at least not in the cotton lawn I was considering, so the project got put aside in spite of the several days I had invested in the process.

Then one day months later I thought of the sleeves and how I liked the bell shape.  I wondered how those would work in a knit.  I pulled out the KwikSew pattern I had already altered to fit and decided to make it work for a knit.  I removed the darts and took out a bit of width in the center front and center back.  There were a few fiddly alterations at the shoulder and front armscye that I don't remember the details of but they took more time.

I traced a fresh pattern of what I had created through my alterations and stepped back to look.  Omigosh, it looked so familiar, what was it?  I thought for a while and then remembered one of my favorite patterns ever that I have made nearly a dozen times, Onion 5025 (also appears to be no longer available).

Placing my overly altered KwikSew pattern on top of the Onion pattern I saw they were nearly identical!  All that time I has spent altering and muslining the KwikSew, more days in the sewing room that I care to admit, and I just end up right where I should have started, sigh.  Moral of the story:  productive time in the sewing room does not include reinventing the wheel over and over.

The top got sewn in spite of my foolish activities with the pattern and I like the result.  I wanted to have a somewhat less than plain binding at the neckline and sleeve hem so I placed a folded strip of the fabric on the inside under the raw edge and sewed with the cover stitch machine from the front.  This was completed back in the fall and the funny thing is after all that I went through to create the top I have yet to wear it.

The fabric, unlike the patterns, is still available.   Hart's Fabrics  Plum Jersey  Soft and light but far from sheer, a lovely tee shirt fabric.

Pantone declares spring colors

It's not even 2013 yet, winter is still settling in, even the shortest day of the year (here in the northern hemisphere, that is) has not arrived yet and some bossy thing called Pantone has declared what colors we are to wear and live in this coming spring.  There is even a "color of the year", like a Miss America chosen and crowned, that reigns over the season's palette. 

The very wonderful thing about a group of colors chosen by good colorists is the inspiration it can provide.  The limitations are the freedom.  Parameters can spur creativity where an endless abyss of options can be paralyzing.  Ten colors, only ten, but how much fun those can be.  Here they are.

Emerald, the tiara wearing winner of color of the year.  Dusk blue, grayed jade, tender shoots, lemon zest, african violet, linen, monaco blue, poppy red, and nectarine.  Not very exciting as a line of colored dots on paper but quite amazing as the palette for a pleasant room, or perhaps a wardrobe.  And just what do these colors look like in practice?  In a room, like this, from House Beautiful's December/January 2013 issue.  If you look closely you will see all of the ten colors.

Grayed jade in the barrel type side table and the lamp in the distance gives the monaco blue and poppy red.  Nice proportions of the amounts of color.

The neutral of linen calms everything and sets it off at the same time.

Emerald, the color of the year, in modest spots that make the room lovely and interesting instead of a place consumed by trend.  How pretty these are together!

In my wardrobe:

Unwittingly I followed Pantone's rulings when I recently bought the "Shimmer Me" jacket by Columbia for my winter wardrobe.  In emerald, it was the color that was to my eyes the least of the evils and was offered at the best of the discounts, things that rule my shopping much more than current fashion.  I know the Pantone police will not be patrolling the wilderness where I will be wearing this jacket but the ideas that are forming in my head about colors to wear with this emerald are invigorating.  A dusky blue top, a bit of poppy red somewhere, just a tiny bit like the painting above, perhaps with african violet grounding it all.  Yes, winter might be more than just keeping warm this way!     

Wishing you creative thoughts and happy sewing!

The look for less

I like Sawyer Brook very much.  Superb fabrics and top notch customer service.  Yes, I believe in paying for those things in the fabric world but when something lovely shows up for so much less at a different site I have to stop and wonder.  Or marvel.  At the apparent vagaries of pricing.  Today, this.

Viscose/Elastane jersey print Botanical Haze at SB.

$22.00 now on sale for $14.99

and

Viscose/Elastane jersey print Trendy Knit Print at Low Cost Fabrics.

$5.00

The colors look different in the photos but when I read the descriptions which both mention brown and chartreuse I am almost convinced they are the exact same fabric.  If I really wanted to buy this fabric how much would I want to pay to support a favored business?  Probably not 10 plus dollars per yard, unfortunately.