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Shazaam Cape, With Love to Detroit

April 20, 2013 Comments

Quick, before winter completely disappears.

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As I look back over my sewing over the last couple of years, I notice that I tend to huddle down in mid-winter and work on one big project, usually a jacket of some kind. This one was completely spontaneous. The night before our Christmas holiday, I had this big idea to sew a red cape. And not just any cape but a red cashmere, fully-lined-in-silk cape. With bound buttonholes. And here’s the kicker–I actually thought I’d be able to finish it in a day!

Turns out a cape was a complete bust for our particular winter, which never quite went much beyond t-shirt temperatures. But the trip to the colder weather of Michigan gave me the impetus to start. I started having these fantastic visions in which I would climb the Joe Louis fist with a red cape and my Flash Gordon shoes, and bravely overcome any blizzard that came our way. I love a good photo opportunity, and well, I feel like a superhero when I’m in Detroit. It’s more like Gotham than Gotham.

I grew up about 30 minutes from the city. My grandfather was a Ford assembly worker in the 40s-60s, the golden era of the motor industry. When I was a kid the actual downtown was sort of off-limits, but as an adult I treasured its steamy street holes and art deco vaudeville theaters. (Probably the only place I’ve seen bullet-proof glass around a gas station.) Detroit brims with a latent, atomic energy. Its people have a kind of directness, an urge to tell the truth, to build and to invent. I accept that strength in me.

So this is my Detroit cape. Paired with appropriately Flash Gordon shoes.

red-cape-and-pattern

Details:
Pattern: Simplicity 5252, circa 1978? I used a combination of view 1 and 2. I love these 70s patterns with one size and all their lovely markings.
Fabric: Wool/cashmere coating (very nappy, almost like a melton) from Elliot Berman Textiles, silk charmeuse lining from Mood.
Buttons: Italian metal dome buttons from Britex.

My superhero gifts don’t include speed, so I didn’t finish in a day and missed my Joe Louis photo shoot opportunity. But I got surprisingly close. Instead I spent part of January calmly putting on the finishing touches.

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This was a project I stewed on a for a few years. Over two years ago I spent some time sourcing all the right materials and notions, down to the buttonhole thread. I really wanted this to be a lifetime piece. It’s a total 180 from everything else I’ve been making, but I’m glad I had it waiting in the wings. Perfect for taking on the New Year and leaping over bronze fists! I don’t have a ton of detail shots, but those may come later. Lots of groovy details on this one–bound buttonholes, stay buttons, internal pockets for when you want to keep your hands safe and warm. I just love capes, cloaks and all their kin. For me, their whole point is having lots of fabric to whip around, even heavy fabric such as this. I don’t care what Edna Mode had to say.

For this shoot, Derek was all too happy to choreograph me jumping out of elevators into an abandoned parking garage.

cape-dance

It’s all about the movement! he said. Here’s a little peak at the world of my better half. He loves flight!

p.s. The dress underneath is Style Arc’s Kristin pattern, a simple shift dress that I’ve tweaked to bits and made multiple versions of over the winter. I had in my mind “Classic Shift Dress” with elbow length sleeves for multiple seasons and fabrics, and who knew Colette Patterns would run a massive contest on that very same idea a few months later? I highly recommend a shift for any body. And I’ll post more about this dress later when I don’t actually have a cape smothering it.

· Comments { 29 }

Finally, a Fur Coat!

March 8, 2012 Comments

My husband and I are pretty much exact opposites when it comes to photographs. I like still, very non-moving and exacting perspectives and can spend hours fiddling with the camera controls. He often just sets things to auto at all times of day and thinks mostly about composition. He’s kind enough to remember that I want photos that give at least some level perspective of the physical plane because hey, this is also a sewing blog and I want the zipper in focus and folks like details. And I need at least a few where I’m not vortexing into that graffiti.

But I’m definitely not complaining. Derek is enthusiastic about most of what I make and wear and likes making art out of it. It took us a few days to figure out which setting would be best and on top of that we’ve been traveling (which meant that I was totally sewing my coat until the 11th hour before getting on a plane).

We finally found a fun location earlier this week and the sun was kind enough to be lingering behind some light cloud cover. Still, black is hard to get. And the wind was nuts!

The beautiful hair knot I’d managed kept tumbling down left and right and so I just gave up on the hair. I am in desperate need of a haircut anyway. (If pictures could speak, you’d be hearing me saying “my bangs are driving me nuts!” over and over.)

No matter the weather difficulties or the hair anxieties, he encourages me to come out of my shell and show my face to the camera.

But yes! Le coat is done. And it feels good. And I adore it! I’ve already worn it four times because the weather got cold enough. It’s a great feeling to want to wear this and not to abandon it out of sheer boredom from familiarity. I’m still feeling a bit sad that my Lady Grey and white silk blazer, two other labored jacket projects from the last year or so, aren’t getting the wear they deserve. In defense, the Lady Grey was an experiment and I still haven’t figured out how to make its silhouette work with the rest of my clothes.

Speaking of which, although I feared the cocoon silhouette might be a bit much, it works amazingly with some of my basic every day clothes. I tried a few different outfits underneath and most of what worked were shapes that stuck toward the streamlined and narrow, especially from the hem down. If it was a top and jeans they had to be narrow and the top hitting somewhere near my hips. A dress with lots of pleats and drapes looked overdone, but another one with stripes and a columnar look was perfect.

View from the back:

If you’ve been following along my coat process, you might remember I planned to shorten the sleeves, which I did by about an inch and a half. On the muslin they were just a smidge above the wrist but I think it’s better at this “hip” length. I’d also originally intended to use leather strips down the each side of the front zipper. This proved to be more than I wanted to do. It took some careful sewing to enclose the zipper in the leather facings and I didn’t want to push my luck by adding one more leather seam. Anyway, I kinda like that the front closure is just a hint of gold teeth shining through. Simple.

The coat is fully lined in a stretch polyester lining that actually ended up giving it some needed weight and structure, so in the end it’s quite warm and not as drapey as I thought it’d be. I think I’m getting the hang of this lining thing. After learning to draft one for Sherry’s RTW Sew-along, I went back over my notes and adapted it for raglan sleeves.

This was such a fun project to throw myself into and I’m so glad y’all have followed along! (Here’s a link to all my previous entries about the coat, if you’re interested.) The leather adventures may not be over, either. I’ve got some ideas for all those leftover scraps but that is for another day!

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Just a Few Smashes Left

February 29, 2012 Comments

Oh my, is it March already? On my leap year day, I played a bit of hooky and spent a long day sewing, basting, hammering, sewing. The coat is so close and soon, I promise, I will be showing up in it in person!

What’s that, hammering? This might be a good time to introduce you to my friend, the mallet. I highly recommend whacking seams with a hard (preferably non-metal) object at some point in your sewing career–it’s therapeutic.

Whacking, smashing, the Jamie Oliver method of sewing. It’s also just about the only way to flatten intersecting leather seams.

In the end, the leather only occupied such a small fraction of the coat, but made for some very careful and slow sewing. I think I was stitching at snail speed on my machine. The most difficult part was inserting my leather trim neatly around the hip seam.

It’s basically one strip of leather that I pieced together and folded in half. Then I sandwiched it into the hip seam like one would sew piping. The result is a bit bulky especially around the inseam pocket. There was no way I was going to get that folded edge topstitched down neatly without first gluing or tacking it in some way to the fur. Yeah, I had to tape leather to fur. My other newfound friend: Wonder Tape.

For most of the leather seams, I used a teflon foot, which is the white foot you see below. My machine came with this and I’ve occasionally used it on other fabrics that seem to get pushed a lot by a regular foot. (A roller foot is an alternative.)

And there’s the jean-a-ma-jig tool in action. It’s sort of like a fork you stick under your foot. Understitching intersecting seams was much easier with this! (Another way of doing something like this is to slip a folded piece of cardboard under your foot about a half-inch away from the beginning of the bulky part, and sew “off” the cardboard.)

I understitched quite a bit, especially the seams that were going to be edges. On the leather seams that needed to be pressed open, I used double sided fuse tape to permanently hold them down. (Some like to use glue or edge-stitch the SAs down.) These seam allowances are fused-taped and then trimmed near the edges, where there will be an intersecting seam:

On the needle front, I used both leather and microtex needles in size 9, which I had from a previous project. (I found both of these in 20-packs on ebay awhile back.) Both are very sharp and seemed to work well on the lambskin and the fur. Little binder clips are also good to have around, to hold seams together in lieu of pins! I confess I abandoned these because they just kept getting in my way. There were places where I couldn’t baste or pin and I had to hold the layers tight and just pray the fabric didn’t move around too much.

Now back to whacking… just one more hammering session and I’ll be happy enough to sew the lining shut.

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Cocoon Coat: Sewing the Fur!

February 25, 2012 Comments

This was the week to get my coat done. I had lots of extra time for sewing and then a little-turned-big winter cold decided to take over. People, it was 90 degrees here yesterday. Having a fever in this kind of weather in February is so disorienting. But with a little seam here, a seam there the coat is slowly but surely coming together. The lining is done and the rest of the coat getting close.

Each new material brings a different challenge and learning how to “feel” it as it sews. Last year I worked so much with silk and similarly drape-like rayon that I abandoned pins altogether. I got used to the feel of it in my hands, under the machine, how it feeds, how to control ease and sew around curves. Gaining this kind of tactile knowledge, of both machine and material, is a real pleasure. I love letting fabric intuitively do what it wants to do.

I don’t have much experience quilting but it must be like this experience of this persian lamb fabric. It’s so lofty and cushy and the layers slide around on each other. Just sewing two layers about five inches long results in the top layer creeping a half inch longer. I pulled out my machine’s walking foot but there was still a lot of creepage. In the end I basted all the fur seams before sewing and still used the walking foot for control.

Back when I was sewing clothes in college I’d use like 50 pins just to put in a sleeve and elsewhere did a lot of basting–and still get mightily frustrated when things didn’t line up. Maybe sometimes the pattern was at fault (I wouldn’t have known anything about walking patterns or even thought that patterns could have problems). But I didn’t know much about material handling either, like how to use the feed dogs to ease bottom layers. It was more like trust the pins over trusting or getting to know the fabric.

One interesting tip I picked up from Fehr Trade was to sew fur seams down the nap. Which means sewing all seams from top to bottom. So when sewing the sleeves, rather than going around the entire circle in one pass, or going from the underarm up as some often do in setting sleeves, I sewed each side from the top down.

I wasn’t quite sure how to go about the bust darts. They seemed a little bulky after sewing them shut, so I tried clipping one of them open. This made a bit of a fur mess so I slipstitched the dart together and then tacked it down to the fabric. I left the other one unclipped since it didn’t seem to make much difference from the outside.

For some reinforcement, I used a bit of fusible tape around the armholes and areas where the pockets and zippers would be. I practiced on scrap to make sure it wouldn’t crush the pile.

For larger areas like the hem and front facing I basted in some woven interfacing.

i’ve got a few more pictures of the leather sewing but I’ll save that for later. Now back to my queue of b-list netflix movies and shlepping around in the bathrobe…

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