New Garments

I am technically on holidays.  I'm actually still flat out, however I took a couple of days off and did some sewing.  First of all I finished off a purple shift I had.  I found this shift half finished at work and I was about to send it out as a rag when I thought that as it was my size I could finish it and wear it.  The previous owner had assembled the dress and put the zip in, really only the hem was left to do.  However, they hadn't under stitched the armhole facings and in finishing the outer edges of these facings had stretched them out of shape so that there was no way they were staying tucked into the garment.  I ended up topstitiching the facings to the dress.  It looks fine and there is no chance of them rolling out.  I also had to refinish the outer edge of the neckline facing as it had been hemmed by hand and was undoing.  I then hemmed it and I had a nice new shift dress.  I used the pretty silver Godfrey for this task.

The next project was a very pretty 1940's blouse with a peplum. It is a Simplicity reissue and extremely lovely!  I made it in a lightweight seersucker like fabric on my adorable 99K knee control machine.  This fabric has a line of damage running down its centre and is only approximately 90cm wide anyway, it makes cutting things out very difficult.  I got it (all 5 metres or so) free from work as it was only going to be thrown out and it was rather pretty.  I managed to find a piece that was fault free wide enough to cut the back out but it was difficult.  The buttonholes were made on a Singer 71-30 industrial buttonholer and came out very nicely, after about 20 trial buttonholes!  Although a size 8 I think it is still too big for me, the fact that it sits comfortably on the mannequin pictured below which is set to a size 12 probably backs me up.

In other news I have a gorgeous new machine, although unfortunately it is unusable at the moment.