Three Tier Skirt

 I realized that I have made a small stack of shirts, plus a few jumpers, and no skirts I can wear (the skirt I made with the Lekala pattern is too big--I do want to take it apart and re-sew it...eventually...)  So, I decided to take a beak from trying to get the shirt pattern how I want it to make a skirt.  I used to wear tiered skirts a lot, so that that's what I did.

This kind of skirt doesn't need a pattern--rip a narrow strip for the waistband, and rip a lot of wider strips to assemble into long strips to make the tiers, then start gathering.

Of course, I automated that--and the eventual 'whole lotta hem'--with sewing machine gadgets

And so a skirt was made

Halloween Shirt: Getting Closer

 Not getting closer to Halloween (although, I mean, yeah, it is) as much as getting closer to how I want this shirt pattern to be.

I started with Burda 7831 with New Look 6080 sleeves again, and this time called in McCall's 7575 for a proper collar with stand.  I even made the effort to trace things!

Including the body of 7831, because I have reached the stage where I am very very hesitant to cut a single size from multi-size patterns, and, yes, I know some people argue that you should always trace every pattern anyway.  I am now...considering that more than in the past.

Another thing about tracing the body is that I remembered how, in my old "I use this to make a whole stack of deep-front-dart shirts from novelty prints" pattern, it was set up so those deep front darts were cut out so that there was a seam allowance involved, meaning I only had to mark the tops of the darts, and anything that lets me mark fewer dart parts is fine with me.

This also meant I could manipulate the dart easier to make it a little less extreme, which I wanted to do because of how my abdomen is currently shaped, and, it turned out, I needed to do because of the single yard of fabric I was working with.

Fabric with a one-way print.

Pause for Order

 I have cut out the pieces for another shirt, with modifications

but

I have decided to pause that today to finally sort the buttons from the friend's relative's destash of 2019

I was surprised when I realized that I had not yet sorted these.

Chip has been helping.

Ghost Shirt

 I am getting closer to being able to feel comfortable wearing separates again,and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is a range of close-fitting button-up shirts in novelty prints.

The pattern I once used to make many close-fitting button-up shirts in novelty prints was cut in a size I will probably never be able to wear again, and is long out of print, so I need to find a replacement pattern.  A big help in that search was when Coriander sent me Burda 7831

shown here with New Look 6080, which was called in for its tiny sleeve option, because the fabric I wanted to use for my first try at this Burda pattern...I didn't have a lot of that fabric, but I was determined to make it work.  So: shorter sleeves and a bit of contrast fabric and here's the result

Doll Destash 2021

Thanks everybody for the enthusiastic responses!  You helped me get down to a very small amount of dolls left that I can deal with on my own.

I'm ready to get back to sewing now!

Jelly Roll Race with neither Jelly Rolls nor Racing, Again

 I dove into the "small yardage for doll clothes, maybe" dresser and chose a lot of larger pieces of roughly (very roughly) coordinating prints that were either a scale I don't always want to use for doll clothes (including pieces left over from human-size sewing projects), or that work fine for doll clothes, but I've had in the stash for years and my sewing styles have moved on.

I ripped the fabrics into 2½" strips, not caring at all about lengths, and assembled them with the jellyroll race method of sewing them all together end-to-end (choosing to make the seam angled, but that's personal preference) to create an unwieldy, long strip which is then folded in half, right sides together,and stitched long one edge.  Cut through the fold at the end, flatten, fold it all right-sides together, sew along one edge, cut the folded end open, and repeat until it's 50"+ long.

 This one ended up at 58" x 30" wide, which is not quite as long and not nearly as wide as it would have been if I had used either an actual jelly roll or had measured the strips to make sure I had an equivalent amount of fabric strips.

It's fine.

Halloween Swirl

 Looks like it's been about six years since I last sewed any bias swirl skirts (for humans--doll-size bias swirl skirts were three years ago.)  My introduction to the concept of a bias swirl skirt was from Simplicity 6261 (1973), which I adopted from Mom's pattern stash back in the 1990s

In the intervening years, I'd forgotten that the pattern piece I'd cobbled together had been altered from the 6261 pattern.  But it still worked