sew and so: mending

I made a sad discovery last Saturday morning. (I meant to post this last week, but it kind of got away from me.) As you can see from my last post, I wore a brown shirt that day. My original plan was to wear my Engagement shirt, since it was supposed to still get pretty warm that afternoon, but then I found this when I was about to put it on:

Holes! Four of them, right in the lower back! I'm not sure if this snagged on something in the wash or what. But this made me very sad, because I'd only worn this about twice so far!

I had other sewing plans for that morning, but I decided to try and fix this first, lest it end up sitting under my bed with holes in it for months and I forget all about it until next summer. (Now that I think about it, immediate mending is probably a better strategy for me in general.)

I've mended jersey knits before. The problem is, you still see it. And one of those holes is particularly large for this type--pretty close to a full 1/8" in diameter. So I decided to try a little experiment to minimize that as much as possible.

I ironed a little bit of double-sided fusible onto a scrap leftover from the shirt--fortunately for me, I hadn't emptied the trash by my sewing machine since I made it! (Incidentally, I think the problem might be with the fabric itself, because the scrap had holes too. Yikes.)

Invisible patch!! Then I just cut around that piece and fused it to the wrong side of the fabric over the holes.

It's not perfect. I was afraid that just ironing the fabric on would make it fall off again the first time I watched it. So I did secure it with some hand-stitching as well. The biggest hole (all the way to the right) is still kind of obvious. But the smaller holes ended up pretty well-hidden, I think. Hopefully it will stay.

I have been doing some sewing lately, but it's a gift project, so I can't share it yet. I'm hoping I can finish that up in the next day or so, because I'm getting very antsy that I haven't started The Dress yet! I also got as far as I could on said gift project on Friday night-- I was having a Once Upon A Time/craft marathon with my best friend so she could get caught up before the season premiere next weekend. So I also did a little scrapbook work (trimming page protectors to allow access to pockets and the mini-albums I like to make on pages that I have a lot of photos for). And I even attempted to start knitting that afghan that I want to make, with a modification that I liked even better. The bad news is, I discovered that the needles I'd bought, which is what it called for in the pattern, are too big to make a good afghan--they're just way too big for the yarn I ended up with. The good news is, turns out I was doing the background for the trees wrong anyway, so unraveling it wasn't a huge loss. I guess knowing that I need to buy smaller circular needles is still progress, right?

Which leads me to the question...I'm trying to figure out what on earth I should work on when tv-watching with the fiance over the next several months, because it sure isn't going to be The Dress. So I've been debating whether I should knit some simpler/smaller stuff like hats and handwarmers, or work on catching up on some scrapbook type stuff. They both have their pros and cons--knitting doesn't need a whole lot of stuff out, but following the patterns would mean that both the shows and Doug would get less attention. Scrapbooking takes way more stuff, but writing aside, it would be more of a brainless thing, I think. (And I'm probably way more behind on that, so catching up some would be a pro....but then, I have to take the time to match a bunch of papers to my printed photos, so that's a con.) Hmm.

So apparently I'm going back to work next week, which is a week earlier than I was told. I guess that's a good thing....I'd be more enthusiastic if I didn't spend hours at a time scrounging for things to do every time I'm there. So that's going to leave me with a lot less time to do the things I'd planned to do, like mending. But I did get several more things done over the last couple of days, which I'll get back to in a bit.

The main derailment of the plan, though, comes courtesy of one of my friends-- I was helping her reconstruct a dress for a holiday party yesterday (pics may come later if she allows it, once she finishes it), and while she was at it, she invited me to the birthday party she's going to be throwing for her boyfriend in a few weeks. It's a Mad Men-themed party, so the dress is basically early 60s cocktail. I don't know about you, but since I don't really spend a lot of time with vintage fashion like a lot of other sewing blogs I read, I don't really have anything suitable just lying around, you know? (Besides, when I go 60s, it's usually more the boho-hippie end of things!) I'd never actually watched an episode of Mad Men until last night, since she and I put it on Netflix while we worked, but I'm always up for a costume party! I want something I can wear again, though...

So, since I'm on limited time, I'm going to go with a pattern I already have on hand: the Licorice dress from the new Colette book.


(Picture from the Coletterie)

I figured it has sort of the look, and it has sleeves, which is definitely a bonus for December. I just hope it turns out ok, because my fabric's not ideal according to the recommendations. I have about 3 yards of that Casa satin stuff that anyone who's ever browsed the fancy fabric section of Joann's should be familiar with, in a forest green. It's leftovers from the dress I sewed for my masters' degree recital, because apparently I severely overestimated how much fabric I'd need for the very full skirt. I also have about a yard of this pretty green brocade that I made the top out of. I can't seem to find a picture of me actually wearing it on my computer--I guess this was when I was transitioning from my old film camera to my digital--so I just threw the dress on Donna:

Man, I hope I still have those recital pics around somewhere. Anyway.

What I'm thinking is to use the satin for the bulk of the dress, and then the brocade for the neckline bit and tie/belt/whatever. (I'm strongly tempted to get one of those belt kits from A Fashionable Stitch for this one! Even though I haven't used the first one I got from her yet, because I haven't gotten to the raincoat.) But I am concerned that the satin is a little heavier-weight than it sounds like it should be. So I ran out to Joann's this morning to see what I could find. Basically what it came down to is that all of the prints I liked were too late 60s or modern, all of the ones that looked like it might fit the look of the floral-print dresses I saw in the show were kind of ugly, and the one print I did like that would fit the look was basically a black polka dot on ivory. But it was a taffeta-type fabric, which is even stiffer than this satin. And if I was going to have to go for a solid color, I figured I might as well bust the stash I have. So instead of buying new fabric, I sprang for the nice Bemberg rayon lining and got a little extra, thinking that the dress itself appears to be structured enough that the satin will probably work, and if I underline the sleeves with the Bemberg too, it might soften them up a bit. Here's hoping it works.

Also, I do have a couple of mending updates that are actually worth showing, since they're more along the lines of refashionings:

I have this jacket that I picked up from the thrift store earlier this year, because it fits me almost perfectly and I love the color and pleat details. One of the buttons on the sleeve was actually broken though--basically, there was about a quarter of it left. I hid it by leaving it unbuttoned for several months, but finally went ahead and just replaced the buttons. There wasn't a spare, so I had to replace them all, and since Joann's didn't have a large enough quantity of any button remotely close to the right size, I had to make my own.

So here it is with its new fabric-covered buttons....

....which are more fun than those brown ones anyway.

I also had this long, never-been-worn, tags-still-on-it denim skirt that a friend passed along to me because it ended up not fitting her.

(Check out the detailing in the back!)

This is the after-- I didn't get a pic of it before, but it ended up being too big on me. So basically, I just took in the sides a nice chunk and re-did the topstitching.