Sunday, June 24, 2018

Sewing: Vogue V1333 Skirt (along with McCalls M7093 top)

The main focus of this post is on the tucked skirt from Vogue Patterns V1333.I absolutely love this skirt. I love the feel and comfort of this cotton/linen fabric I bought at JOANN. I also love the print and how it changes angle with the pleated overlay. The pattern calls for cutting the overlay on the crosswise grainline, but I didn't have enough fabric to do that so I just cut it on the lengthwise grainline. I don't see any strange stretching issues with the overlay so I think it's fine. If you want to save a bit of fabric, I would do it that way, although cutting on the crosswise might be more interesting, depending upon how your fabric pattern looks.

I also shortened the pattern quite a bit. This is a relatively long skirt and I'm a relatively short person at 5'3" (and shrinking :)). I did all the length adjustments at the bottoms of the skirt and overlay pieces. I also removed the asymmetrical hem aspect. The pattern calls for the skirt to be shorter on the left side, but I found that the asymmetry wasn't obvious enough and it just looked like I made a cutting error. Plus, it was still too long on the right side. So, I removed the asymmetry and shortened everything a bit more, although I left it curving down a bit on the front and back centers. The pointy tip of the overlay hangs longer than the skirt body a bit, which I actually like. This skirt will see a lot of wear throughout this summer and into fall and even some milder days of winter.

The top is a second rendition of McCalls M7093, which I blogged about here. This one uses a slightly stretchy cotton for the body and a cotton eyelet fabric for the sleeve caps and side pieces. The neckline is a little bit wider than the pattern neckline and the length is shorter.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Modified Flaum

This sweater was finished some time ago, but I didn't get a chance to post about it. It's a bit too warm for summer, except perhaps in San Francisco, because summer in SF is cold! This is my modified version of Flaum. I knitted this sweater before, as seen here. I liked it so much that I wanted to try it again with some Rowen cashmere that was on sale at yarn.com because it's being discontinued. I also wanted to modify the body so that it knits faster than the fisherman rib so I used a simple broken rib pattern. The end result is a less puffy sweater because the broken rib pattern is not as thick. I'm just as happy with it as with the original.