Kitchen Towels

I have been far too busy to do anything remotely interesting recently, although I do have some lovely new machines to post pictures of.

However, I had to make some simple kitchen towels for a birthday present and, probably because I was in a hurry, they took four times as long as usual and every machine I touched threw a tantrum.  Needless to say, frustration is not the word.  I thought I would post pictures of the completed towels though.

Decorative stitching on the bottom edge

The tops, complete with buttons

Novelty 'dress' towel, I do like making these.

The buttonholer was by far the best behaved machine, it took me about 10 minutes to set it all up and do all three buttonholes.  I do love that machine.

Butterick B5920.....

....my new favourite dress!  For the past few years I have made myself a dress in late November to wear to an end of year function.  My previous favourite was the rose pinafore that I made a couple of years ago.  However, I think it could have just been eclipsed by my latest creation.  I was short on time and even shorter on motivation when I started making it but it went together like a dream and fitted wonderfully.  I didn't take any construction images (too much of a hurry) but have some completed images.

 Instead of fussing about with a sheer and probably difficult material (and then having to make a slip as well) I went for a sensible cotton printed quilting material.  It happened to be on clearance when we bought it, fortunately given the price!  I made the belt from a scrap of red poplin I had over and used pretty bright red shank buttons, although you can't see them in the picture.

From the front

From the side. I'm in love with those shoes btw!

Collar detail before buttons added

I used my Singer 66 (not yet posted about here) for the general construction, set into the 206's table so I could use the clutch motor.  However, my 66 is one of the earlier ones and has the earlier presser bar which requires special feet.  As a consequence I did the buttonholes on my industrial buttonholer, the 71-30.

Finally, today is Loretta Young's birthday and I cannot resist a few lovely photographs....

Those sleeves.....

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.