Sew Distracted

Lessons Learned

No sewing yesterday.

There was, however, lots of thinking about sewing, mostly thinking about sewing successes and failure and about the writing and posting about sewing successes and failures. Have I mentioned that I think FAR too much?

I finally took a pile of old clothes to the donation center yesterday, and in the process I got rid of the green coat. It has been much on my mind. Why, you might ask? Why fret and dither about a coat that doesn’t fit and is more of a sewing failure than a success? Why even post a picture and discussion of a coat that is not up to par, and in fact was not quite up to par at the time it was made? Why two posts about the same misbegotten project? Well precisely because it was misbegotten. Hopefully I have learned from my mistakes, but I also need reminders here and there, and my posts are as much about as what I need to remember as they are about what anyone might want to read.

I might prefer to remember only the success stories in my sewing journey. And a reader might prefer to read about fabulous stylish garments that they can dream of making (not likely here though.) But sewing is also about mistakes and lessons learned, or not learned, and sometimes the failures are as important as or more important than the successes.

Hence the green coat. Again.

The biggest problem with the green coat is a construction problem. It is glaring and I am sure that all you astute readers noticed it right off and are too polite to point it out to me.  This is not the shoulder problem, which really varies depending on what I wear under the coat. It is not the little wrinkle in the hang of the left sleeve, which is actually caused by the excess padding I stuffed into the left shoulder so that the coat did not collapse like a deflated balloon (and this accented the problem with the right shoulder as well).

The problem with the green coat is the front closure:

I have blown it up here to remind you. You can scroll down two posts for the full coat.

The front band pulls where I have attached the hooks. The coat obviously needs more structure here to support the weight of the hooks and the bulk of the bands I used to attach them. I obviously needed a different or more interfacing in the front of the coat. I did not fuse the front coat pieces to a fusible interfacing like Textured Weft and this would have helped considerably. This was obviously a lack of planning. I could have reinforced the area later by taking it apart and adding interfacing to add strength to that area.  I could have remade the tabs or the bands. I didn’t because I already saw other problems with the coat, and had decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

And yet I still wore the coat and even loved it despite my discomfort with it. Why? One reason is I loved the color of the fabric. The color makes me happy. Also it was warm and light. Thirdly it passed the DH test, who loves it, despite its errors which he noticed, but said “bah” As he pointed out, most of the droopy, saggy, cheaply made wool coats I see in my town all winter bag and sag and look pathetic within an hour or two of being worn the first time and this coat did none of those things. An attractive scarf draped over the front hid any imperfections, which probably only I noticed anyway.And lastly it is good to be reminded of our imperfections.

Even though I have finally given the coat away, there are things I want to remember and learn from this coat, aside from the obvious things like thinking out the construction and interfacing in advance, planning design details (like overlapping the front bands so that air didn’t come in the front of the coat, and accommodating figure variations.

Lessons from Green Coat:

1.    Don’t be afraid to use good fabric. This coat was good alpaca/wool coating. I don’t regret using it even if things didn’t turn out the way I wanted. Using good fabric saved the coat and made it wearable. Also, using fabric you have is better than buying more, especially buying something you don’t really like because you are afraid to make a mistake. Fabric that is not used is wasted. Fabric that is used is not, even if the garment fails. There is always something to be learned and I don’t mind learning even at the cost of good fabric. Strike it up to the cost of education. Failure is being afraid to try. If the coat had turned out perfectly but I had hated the fabric it would have been even more of a disappointment and would have still been a failure.

2.    Don’t take complicated detailed projects to sewing camp. This should perhaps be lesson #1 for me. It is not that a beautiful tailored garment can’t be made at sewing camp. I know plenty of women who have done it. But not I. When I am working on a project like this, I need to lay out my materials and dance around the project. I need to play with different interfacings, I need to hog the press and the ironing board, pressing and leaving things to cool and dry. I need time and space and a clear head. There are people who jump right into a sewing project and made decisions on the fly, turning out very successful garments as they do so. I am not one of those people. I think too much. At sewing camp I share cutting tables with 9 other women. We share ironing boards. I don’t bring my full interfacing collection, and mostly there are 9 or 10 other brains thinking and contributing and adding distractions. Those distractions are PRECISELY what I love about sewing camp. I come back inspired and I look at things in new ways. But when I have made tailored jackets, or this coat, the garment is nice, but it is not what I would have done at home in my own sewing room, and so there is always a little bit of disappointment there. When I have made simpler, less structured things, I have been much happier with my results. I need to learn from this coat and plan accordingly. There are lots of things I can sew at camp and I always come back from camp revitalized and ready to try new things. Sewing camp makes me more free-spirited. I need to plan my projects accordingly.

3.    I need to think more about the style of what I sew and what I really wear. The biggest disappointment with the green coat is that it is too classic. I find it boring. I thought I really wanted a classic coat; I thought that too many of my coats made statements, I though I needed a quiet, classic, timeless coat. I was wrong. The coat is most definitely not me and it would not be me even if I fixed the errors and altered it to fit; I suppose that is why I never bothered. The coat goes with everything and yet it doesn’t fit in. It reminds me of a time when I was dating my husband and he took me to meet a bunch of his old friends. He said I was always “too dressed up” and that everyone always wore Frye boots and LL Bean. So I tried to dress accordingly. I wore Frye boots (I actually did own a pair) and a very preppy button down shirt, Shetland sweater and cords. I looked like everyone else. And even though I was still painfully shy in those days and I would think that I would have been happier looking like everyone else and “fitting in”, I was miserable. I didn’t feel like myself. As a result I couldn’t act like myself and was even more reserved than usual.

I am 48 years old and I am still learning how to wear what I want, not what I think other people want me to be. I need to think about this when I sew something. I need to ask myself is this really what I want? Is it really what I need? Or is it what I think I am supposed to want and need?

Goodbye Old Coat

I have decided to add a new photo album of older garments that I made pre-blog.  In truth I  don't have a lot of them.  The garments from my 20's are long gone and I haven't done as much sewing in recent years, although I am trying to sew more.  Still I want to save pictures of a few things while I still have the opportunity.

This coat was made in February 2004 while I was in San Francisco at one of Sandra Betzina's sewing weeks.  At the time, I wondered if I was being silly sewing a coat in February when I could have been working on spring things.  As luck would have it a major snowstorm blanketed the east coast a few days before I was supposed to fly home and I was lucky to have the finished coat.  I wore it home and then I wore it for the next 3 months.  We had snow and freezing temperatures on Memorial Day weekend that year which is very unusual.    In fact it was still cold as late as July 4th that year, in the 40s, after which we it became brutally hot. 

Boy was I glad I made a new coat.

But the coat doesn't work anymore and so I am going to donate it.  I wore it for that first extended winter and all the next winter.  Last winter (2005/2006 I gained too much post-menopausal weight and it was too tight across the upper chest and upper arms.

This year it is no longer tight, but it doesn't fit.  Perhaps it never did, perhaps I have just shifted enough that the problems are more noticeable.

First of all it is considerably too big across the front chest.  That could be taken in.

But it is feels too tight through the upper back and I have trouble moving my arms.  I have checked this, it is no narrower than coats that fit comfortably so it must be something else. 

When you look at the photo you notice the wrinking and pulling at the right shoulder.  That is because my right shoulder rolls forward.  When we made the coat, we moved the shoulder seams forward, but I did not yet know how to redraft a shoulder shape and corresponding armscye to accommodate that kind of shoulder shape.  I don't have enough room to move my arms because the ease is in the wrong place.  This is not so easily fixed without redrafting the coat and I have no extra fabric.

The problem is not noticeable in a coat that is a little broad through the shoulders and I have the height to pull that off but in a more fitted coat, like this Fashion Sewing Group pattern, it is a definite problem.

This was also the first coat I had made in several years, and I used some new techniques and abandoned some old ones, I am not sure all that successfully.  I am happy I made it, it has garnered many compliments, but there are definitely things I learned and things I would do differently if I were making it again today.

(The only reason the left shoulder looks good is I stuffed an extra shoulder pad and some batting in there because it is now so loose over my chest the coat just collapses. Then I had to push and prod and pull to get the coat to even begin to hang naturally.  Believe me it did not originally look like this. And Matilda needs liposuction again, but has decided to wait until after the holidays, so the coat pulls on her in places it does not pull on me.)

Here is a detail of the front hooks: