Hat!

 I wanted to try using two cameras to make a video--I have recorded everything, but I have come nowhere near editing, but I wanted to go ahead and make a record of the project I sewed for the video: a newsboy cap.

See, my ACNH player character wears the Dandy Hat so often that I was starting to notice its absence in my own wardrobe, so I decided to make one.  Some research showed that the hat in the game is technically a bakerboy cap instead of a newsboy cap (because it has a band), and also dark gray instead of black

I still made a black newsboy cap.

Distraction Projects

 About a month before Halloween, a friend shared a sewing project: a bomber jacket made from a patchwork of Halloween prints.  It turned out adorable (I'd add a link but I cannot find it on their blog), and I wanted to make one, too.

I did make a patchwork bomber jacket for a (different, but mutual) friend a few years ago, so I knew that the amount of fabric needed would be a lot less than expected.  I got out the gallon bag full of Halloween print scraps, figuring that would provide more than enough...and was faced with the reality that most of those scraps are better suited for doll-size projects than human-size.  So.  I'd have to cut out the patches.

I shuffled through my Halloween fabric, starting with the smaller pieces, and was drawn to a color scheme and...hmm...let's say...attitude? of some of the prints.  After I sorted out everything that fit the (vaguely-defined) theme, I figured I should look at the larger yardages, too, and ended up with one more Halloween print and three non-Halloween prints.

What size would the blocks be? I have a quilt block ruler that makes 4" squares, so I went with 4" squares.  How many?  I measured the front pattern piece and did some math and knew I'd need 15 blocks for that, so I extrapolated 15 blocks for the other side + 30 blocks for the back + let's say 30 for each sleeve = 120 blocks.  I ended up cutting 123 initially and three more later, but those last three were purely for design purposes; the sleeves ended up being 25 each + 3 halves across the very tops, so my math was sound, yay.

I cut out a lot of blocks and I sewed together a lot of blocks and I even ironed a lot of blocks.  Simple patchwork like that goes together easily enough, even if it's a bit tedious, and since I used New Look 6120 again you know the jacket cutting and assembly were easy.  I didn't rush things and managed to complete it in five days.

Which was good, considering I hadn't started cutting and assembling until, like, a week before Halloween.

Blips

Grudgingly made some more masks

did my civic duty

and finally tried out the Clover bias tape maker

which worked a lot better than I expected and now I should probably figure out more projects that call for half inch bias tape huh

Doll Sewing Interlude/Revelation in Thread

 I wanted to make a doll-size bomber jacket

which required getting into the Doll-Appropriate Knits drawer

which was so over-stuffed that the sides squeaked when I moved cloth in and out of it

which made me decide to grab a stack of smaller bits of knit fabric

from which I cut a lot of random doll clothes

and that got me to here

which took me seven days to completely sew and ended up being 50 items

I haven't yet taken pictures of dolls wearing them, mostly because I'm still working on dressing them.  And some are for 60cm dolls, of which I have only 3, so that means that I physically don't have enough dolls to wear everything I made in that size.  I also plan to send a stack of the clothes to a friend, plus there were a few pieces that I just didn't feel immediately inspired about, which is common with the "there is too much cloth so I will sew random things to fix that problem" doll clothes making projects, which is something I've done since 2004-ish, and has ended up creating some pieces I really like that I know I would not have made otherwise, despite how foolhardy it sounds.  But!  What I do use will end up on Instagram, and I'm also making long rambling background noise videos of the doll dressing process (which some doll people appreciate) for my YouTube channel (which is, so far, all rambling doll stuff.)

And I also had a revelation about the reason I had never really had an easy time of sewing thin knits for doll clothes over the years: because I was using low-quality thread.  I always assumed it was entirely because a thin knit with a tiny seam allowance was just never ever going to go well, which is why I grudgingly cut a doll dress from a foiled synthetic jersey for this project--just to use up  the bit of cloth--but expected to fight with it the entire time sewing. 

But it went together with almost no problems? 

I thought maybe it was because I had a better machine now, or maybe the cloth was higher quality than foiled synthetic jerseys I'd tried to sew in the past (this particular fabric was a 6" square swatch I had gotten from someone else's destash, so it's easily believable that it would be higher quality than cheapskate-me would buy.)

But, once the bobbin of that thread (my current thread love: Saba C tex 40) ran out, I decided to switch to a new color to match a lot of the things waiting to be sewn, and the best match was a thread I used to use all the time...because it was so cheap.  And the first thing I tried to sew with it--a sturdy cotton interlock that I had already sewn in different colors for this project--got mangled as badly as I had expected the foiled synthetic jersey to be mangled.

and I immediately realized: OH.  IT'S THE THREAD.

So I emptied that bobbin and refilled it with a not-as-good-color-match Saba C and things went back to sewing fairly well.

Of course I've always known the advice is to sew with good thread, and I long ago realized that good fabric sews more easily than cheaply-made fabric, but it wasn't until this unplanned demonstration that I realized how thread quality matters. (And of course, thanks go to Wawak for expanding my world to the ability to acquire good quality thread for relatively low cost--there are things in the modern age that I just didn't even have a clue about or access to in the way back when...)

So!  This project produced a big stack of doll clothes and some first-hand sewing knowledge.

Sewing in Denial: Fake Green

 In the early 2000s, there was an odd fabric outlet store that Mom took me to a few times.  It had a small front room with bolts of cottons, a smaller area with a selection of hot sauces, a medium back room with mill ends--mostly upholstery weight from the area office furniture factories--sold by the yard, and a large middle room with tables stacked chaotically with mill ends and offcuts of all sizes of the upholstery fabric, as well as odds and ends of other fabrics, all sold by the pound.  You can probably guess how much fun I had, digging through everything for ~treasure~

You can probably also guess--correctly--that I still have a lot of those fabrics in my stash.  I decided to finally use the big piece of weirdly supple short pile kelly green fake fur to make the coat I'd always wanted to make from it.

There was a slight problem, in that I had, a few years ago, decided that I was probably never going to make that coat, so I then used some of it to make two Minecraft Creeper pillows (one for the kiddo and one for some friends.)  That meant that my yardage was short for the view I wanted to make of McCall's 9634 from 1998

(does the shape look familiar?  This is the pattern that the doll coat pattern I shared last year was based on--I'd been making doll coats based on this pattern since the pattern was new, but it was only for this project that I finally cut the tissue...)

I wanted to make view B, but there was only enough for--with some finagling--view D.  It worked out OK, though, because I am not proportioned like a fashion illustration, so it ended up longer than the illustration makes it seem

Green!

Sewing in Denial: Dancing Circa 1990

In the early 1990s, I had so many scarves made out of this kind of polyester chiffon with lamé brocade sections, so I couldn't resist buying this fabric when I found it in a thrift store

But what would I make from it?  ...uhhh...

You can possibly guess that the fact that I'm posting about it now means I decided to use New Look 6120 for another bomber.

 Honestly, I probably would have considered myself somehow above wearing something like this when I was a teen in 1990--it would have seemed way too casual.  'course, in the world we're enduring right now, it's probably way too formal, so that works out.

Sewing in Denial: Parties I Never Went To Anyway

 Another iteration of New Look 6120, this time with a fabric I knew might cause messy regret

That's the length of iridescent-to-holographic flip sequin ($29.99/yard in JoAnn) I thrifted in 2018, in the form of a "blanket," roughly 30" by 2 yards, with polyester fleece on one side and this on the other, for about $3.  I had no idea what I'd do with it, but, for that price (even minus the labor cost of cutting the stitches holding it to the fleece), I couldn't resist.  I eventually thought...maybe a jacket?  

And now: yes, a jacket.