Skip to main content

Collared

Many years ago my husband introduced me to a friend who could barely read Hebrew and yet he studied Talmud pretty seriously with his rabbi. My experiences in the world of sewing are pretty comparable. I have some skills that most people would think of as being on the advanced side -- I draft clothing, I know lots of high level embellishment skills.

On the other hand. there are lots of skills that any one who took an old fashioned sewing class in high school would have learned  that I have never attempted (and completely terrify me).

The lopsided nature of my sewing skills is what is putting this kittle together so difficult for me.  I make all nearly all of my clothing, but I have never made a shirt collar. I have never made a button stand. I have never made a buttonhole.

The collar has been a big worry.  I have assigned puzzling it out to a corner of my brain and the problem has been simmering away. Today I attacked it.

The collar does not have a separate stand or band. It is a one piece collar. It is made out of three layers of fabric for stability.

I trimmed the collar with text covered ribbon. My commercial kittle had lace edging and the underside of the collar was junky with untrimmed fabric (feh!). I cut the collar at the stitching line and then bound the edge with gros-grain ribbon. I then added the lace to the underside of the collar.

The collar points look pretty even. The collar has enough internal structure to have body and feel rich.


Most commercial kittles are trimmed with lace.  I find it fascinating that a garment that is so typically male is lace trimmed. This lace is Belgian. I like how modern and manly it looks.

My next big worry is the button stand. Many men's shirts have a facing, creating two ( or more) layers of fabric to support  the buttons. The button holes are also made on a strip of fabric that is a few layers thick. The additional fabric keeps the buttons and the buttonholes from buckling under the weight  of the buttons and looks wavy or droopy.

I had found a bag of these great crystal embellished silver colored buttons at Paron. the nice folks at Paron just tossed them in for free.  I think they are perfect. This button has been buttoned through a hand worked button hole. It was my second.  It is not perfect, but not bad.

I think I now understand how to work a buttonhole and how big to cut the button hole.  I have been making eyelets for  tallitot  for years, a buttonhole is the same as an eyelet, only rectangular.

There is still lots of work to do, but I no longer feel like I am drowning.
Labels:

Comments

  1. MAMSeptember 22, 2016 at 11:02 AM

    The collar is outstanding!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 22, 2016 at 12:50 PM

    You are doing well! You are accomplished with trims, used to corners, and loads of other things. So, like the eyelets/buttonhole thing. It is just applying what you know in a different way.
    I think probably what is giving you the concern is that you have one example to look at. You seem to do better at going for it when you have a range of images in your head and then you can do your 'vaguely this' method, like your cooking, and come up with something that is from you and is special. and with the various trims, your lettering on them, and your unplanned for buttons, I think it is becoming you. Just believe it! ;-)
    Hugs, Sandy

    ReplyDelete
  3. helenekSeptember 23, 2016 at 12:20 PM

    The collar came out great! it's all starting to come together now. I can see you begin to relax.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sarah JacobsSeptember 23, 2016 at 12:50 PM

    Sandy, thanks for your wise advice. I think am outsourcing the buttonholes...it will just make my life easier.Luckily the garment district is still in the garment making business.

    ReplyDelete

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

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more