A cousin is having a baby shower soon. I asked what the nursery colors were--green, gray, white, with a forest or mountain theme. Ooh--I had fabric for that!
I don't think that cousin follows this blog, but, just in case, I'm going to put the finished item under the cut
I made the Tiny Stripe Jumper specifically to wear over the Unnecessary Pillowcase Shirt, and of course the Tiny Stripe Hat to wear with the jumper, and here they are all together
And this reinforces how much I want to make more jumpers in general and more iterations of this shirt in better fabrics specifically and embrace the eventual return of cooler weather unequivocally.
So, somewhat recently, Rachel Maksy posted a video on YouTube wondering if pillow cases could provide enough fabric to make clothing, and the answer is, yes, surprisingly.
Now.
I absolutely do not need to look at yardage alternatives--like sheets or curtains or tablecloths or pillowcases--to bulk up my fabric stash.
But.
The idea of the challenge of using limited, discontinuous yardage, like pillowcases, was intriguing.
And.
Thanks to the massive destash of the relative's fabrics Nata brought a few years ago (thanks again!), I had two vintage pillowcases on hand.
However.
These were the kind of vintage sheet sets with way more polyester than I generally want to use (a 50/50 poly cotton blend), and that meant I didn't want to put a lot of time into the project.
So.
I grabbed McCall's 5675 from 1977 (which I have made several more times than have been recorded on this blog) and threw this together
(of course I modified it as I went...)
We went to McKay's Nashville a few days ago (McKay's is a small chain of enormous used media stores--books, music, movies, video games, instruments, toys) and I grabbed a few $1.50 sewing books
Fit For Real People by Pati Palmer and Marta Alto, 1998
I know the Palmer/Pletsch patterns have instructions on how to fit pattern
tissue, and this information is probably also all over the internet, but
I still like physical books for things I would be doing away
from the computer. Eventually, maybe I'll finally start altering patterns to fit instead of settling for close enough or winging it as I cut.
Kerstin Martensson's Kwik•Sew Method for Sewing Men's Wear, 1979
I admit, I bought this as a possible replacement for a book on making doll shoes that I used to have and has since become very expensive to replace. But, the enthusiasm with which this book is written...who knows, maybe I might try making my own simple but refined shoes, someday...
So, the lot of vintage patterns I shared in the previous post ended with Simplicity 6405 from 1974
and the note that I had found it completely lacking in charm and potential, unlike most of the other patterns in that lot.
But.
While waiting for the patterns to arrive, I prewashed some random pieces of cotton, including two I really wanted to mix together. The yardage amount seemed to make the most sense to use for a button-up shirt with a contrast yoke. The patterns I had on hand all had back yokes with no forward shoulder seams, so they would not be visible at all from the front. I felt like even making the collar and front band from the contrast wouldn't be enough, both in terms of distributing the print mix, and in terms of there even being enough of the main fabric to make the entire front.
What I needed, I realized, was a vintage Western-style shaped yoke shirt pattern. I could probably have hacked one from a yoke-less shirt pattern, but...wait...
This unappealingly earnest MISSES' PANTSUIT . . . DESIGNER FASHION...has a shaped front yoke...with just a few changes, could I make the kind of shirt I was thinking of?
Yes.
So, when I gained weight a few years ago, I got rid of a lot of smaller size vintage patterns--even some I liked a lot and had used several times. I'm not back to the shape I was five years ago, but I'm closer, and have been thinking about re-acquiring some of the patterns I let go. (One of the patterns I let go--made distinct by the original owner's name written on the pattern envelope--is on Etsy. There aren't a lot of that pattern around, and fewer in that size, but I am...ambivalent about buying it back--I should be able to hack another pattern to recreate it, and in a more suitable size, but...the fact that I found it again at all... Anyway.)
I was looking around eBay at some of the patterns I used to have, and the search for Simplicity 5903 found one in a lot of 11 early 1970s Simplicity patterns for $20 shipped. I wasn't thrilled by the idea of paying $20 for that one pattern, but I had a look at the other patterns, and...some of them were really cute? So I put the listing on my watch list, and an hour or so later the seller offered $2 off and I was convinced to buy. That was 3 days ago and they arrived today!
I was a little concerned that the seller didn't seem to have experience selling patterns, so there was a chance I would receive a pile of empty or incomplete patterns, but I could see what looked like factory folds peeking out from under a flap in one photo and decided to risk it. A quick investigation says that most of them are indeed still in factory folds, and those that have been used give the impression of being complete.
And here they are! (...under the cut)
So, when the kiddo came in a bit after 7am and asked that his mask be washed so it would be shiny clean when we left for a thing at 9am, my panicked reaction was
1: It can be washed, but it may not be dry by then
and
2: So it will be faster to make another mask
(he only has one he likes--with elastic going behind the head instead of around the ears--because he did virtual school last year, and will again this year, so has left the house very very few times since March 2020, when the school year ended early due to a combination of pandemic uncertainty and a tornado destroying two schools in town)
So I looked at my smaller yardages stash for probably longer than I needed to--again, not a morning person--and picked out a relatively neutral cotton print, the bit of high thread count sheet left over from the back of the bedspread I made at the end of 2019, and a piece of the thrifted heavy embroidery stabilizer that I have used for almost anything but stabilizing embroidery.
Ended up here
And then realized that I probably could have just reconfigured the elastic in the reusable fabric mask he got in the "goodie" bag with his second vaccination.
Not a morning person.
There was more than enough fabric left from the previous project to make another of the Timber Lane Press Kaleidoscope Caps
Not as kaleidoscopic, if course
So, I'm currently somewhat obsessed with the idea of jumpers (in the American sense of the garment: a dress-like item worn over other clothes), and it appears that those are so incredibly unfashionable right now that search engines still want to show me knit sweaters (British sense of jumper) even when I search with terms like "jumper dress" (and I have leaned that the British term for what I'm looking for consists of variations of the phrase "pinafore dress")
But of course I'm looking for jumpers I can make, without doing...whatever it was I did with the vest pattern a few posts ago. I was surprised to see that there really aren't many jumper patterns in print right now. Simplicity has 4789, which...I've actually had for a few years already, and it's a super simple jumper pattern so should go together easily, but...you know me and super simple patterns. (I try not to be a snob about them, I really do, but it's something I have to actively try to do.)
In the 1990s, I had a jumper pattern that I used several times, and really liked everything I made. That was one of the patterns I eliminated when I got rid of patterns that were too small. Yeah. But! I was able to figure out what it was--McCall's 7812--and find it on eBay for a decent price.
When it was still in the mail, I went to a Walmart and spent time poking through the mill end pre-cut bins, and, when I happened to turn around, I spotted a jumper pattern on the cheap "It's Sew Simple" McCall's racks. I looked through all the other patterns on those racks and found a second pattern with a jumper view. I also recognized one of the other cheap McCall's patterns as a very distinctive color blocked Kwik Sew pattern, and, with that knowledge, I was able to identify the two "McCall's" jumper patterns as also originally being issued as Kwik Sew patterns...one of which is still in print as a Kwik Sew? The other had the decency to be an out of print Kwik Sew, at least.
(As an aside, I also recently noticed some patterns that I own as McCall's are now being printed as Butterick. It's obvious that McCall's, Butterick, Kwik Sew, and Vogue are all owned by the same parent company, now known as Something Delightful, and going up a level finds that the company that currently owns that--called Design Group--owns Simplicity/New Look, too, although they don't make that as obvious as the other four being under the same umbrella. So. While I am somewhat surprised to see patterns being reprinted under other patterns company names, the reaction is more "what are they up to?" than "how could this happen?")
It's Sew Simple McCall's 9578 is a reprint of the out of print Kwik Sew 3955
and that's where I started
