Purl and Seam

Or, “why we make a muslin!” (with apologies for a tomato smeared face and a paint smeared pinafore.  These pictures were taken just before bath time).

This is pretty dreadful.

And at first I was blaming myself and my shoddy drafting skills for the new sleeve, which is too narrow and too pointy at the top of the sleeve head.

But closer inspection finds problems in areas that I haven’t touched.  The shoulder seam sits very far back, the whole thing is too small across the shoulders and the back neck is very low indeed. As I haven’t removed the seam allowance there, it’s a pretty crazy neckline.

The pinafore pattern fits so nicely right out of the envelope so I’m quite surprised this is so small on her.

Anyhoo, I now have two choices.

1. I can fiddle with this to make it just right.  This will involve adding some width to the shoulders, raising the neckline, moving the shoulder seam forwards and redrafting the sleeve.
2. I can go back to the drawing board and either start with a new pattern or draft something myself.

As I’m pretty tired and have a warm bath and a glass of wine with my name on them, I’m holding off on decisions for tonight.

Any suggestions very much appreciated.

Quite some time ago Himmelbjerget gave me this fabulous child’s jacket to be refashioned into something for Button.

It’s a beautiful boiled wool with a knitted trim from Geiger Collections of Austria.  It’s for a child 140cm tall and as Button is under 90cms (she’s teeny tiny) something had to be done.

Ma has the patience of a saint and removed the trim for me last year.  The jacket has languished along with the rest of the stash since then.

So, with my February goals firmly in mind, over the past couple of nights I’ve been fiddling and faffing and working out how to cut it down to make a pretty little spring jacket for a pretty little girl.

I’ve decided to hack up the coat pattern from Simplicity 4712, as I can’t ever see myself making the coat:

So far I’ve made the following alterations:

• Removed 6″ from the coat hem
• Removed 1 cm from the front edge
• Marked 2cm in from the side seam at the hem and straightened the A-line to the underarm (nothing was removed at the underarm)
• Converted the round neck to a v neck (I’m binding the neckline and not adding a collar)
• Removed the 1 1/4″ hem allowance from the sleeve.  The hems will be bound.

The front and backs now fit  the coat front and backs and mean I can use the existing buttonholes and pockets. Woot!

The sleeves were a different ball game.

You can’t really see from the picture but they are very puffed and not at all what I was looking for.  I measured the armhole on the front and back bodices and it came to 29.5cm.  The sleeve head was 33cm.  That’s an awful lot of ease – particularly in boiled wool.

After much pondering, and enough head scratching to embed splinters in my fingertips, I referred to Helen Joseph Armstrong and redrafted the sleeve head. You can just see the new cutting lines here:

This removed 10cms of ease which makes it much more manageable.  It also takes 2″ off the total width of the sleeve.

BTW I know it’s crazy that I’ve got measurements in inches and cms but I only used one or the other for each alteration and it depended on which ruler or set of instructions I was using as to whether imperial or metric came up trumps.

So now it’s time to muslin this and see if it works.  If it fits her nicely the actual construction should be really straightforward as the original jacket is sewn on an overlocker with all the edges bound with that lovely trim.  If it’s good enough for the original production team it’s good enough for me!