Skip to main content

An Impulse Purchase


Last week I was in the Garment District. Do I actually need fabric? I did need orange shantung and blue shantung for a tallit that I'm working on. I really didn't need this beautiful wool knit. It is a lovely soft wool blend with some fur content. I can't tell you exactly the fiber content because I bought it at a store where they have no idea what they are selling. The store is housed next door to Paron, in what used to be their half price store.
They had a few bolts of these art deco- ish autumnal prints. I fell in love and bought me a yard for $6.00. I thought I could make myself a cardigan. Do I really need a cardigan?
Something that is my current "trying to learn" plate is set in sleeves. My usual method of learning how to do something is to read a whole lot about it for a couple of years, look at diagrams and then attempt to tackle the task. Last summer I kept reading David Coffin's shirt-making book. I also have a blouse making book from the early 1980's. I keep reading the directions and not really understanding what I was reading. Eventually, I was ready to make a go of it. I was actually successful at my first attempt a few months back. My husband needed a new bath robe and I made him one using his old robe as a pattern.
But just because I am successful once, it really doesn't mean that I actually understand what I'm doing. I cut out the body of the sweater, using a cute sweater my sister had bought for me as a model. That much I'm really comfortable doing.

I then sewed the front to the back. I opened  the sewn together sweater body and copied the shape of the shoulder curve,and armhole opening,  armscye to all you sewing geeks. unfortunately, i didn't pay attention to the direction of the rib, so my sweater sleeves stretch north south rather than east-west around the girth of my arm--not too smart. I didn't have much extra in the fabric department. i also cut the sleeve a bit too narrow.

I sewed up the sides of the sweater with the serger and inserted the sleeves into the arm holes. The fit of the sleeve in the arm hole was perfect.

The neckline is edged with purple plush back elastic. It looks lovely and I also like how it gathers the neck. I decided to edge the hem with maroon velvet ribbon. Clearly I did some stretching as I serged the hem to prepare it for the ribbon. I could pretend that I had planned the wavy edge all along. But I didn't. I think that I actually like it though. I hated it last night when I finished it, today looking at it on the dress making dummy, I like it.
I also added more of the ribbon as a closure. I will probably add some buttons from my stash to hide the stitchin on the ribbon. For those of you with crick on your necks, my computer finally figured out  how to tilt the photo.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
1 comment
Read more

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...
8 comments
Read more

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...
2 comments
Read more