Frankenpatterning
I don’t sew clothes for fashion reasons. (The chickens do not care what I am wearing as long as I have a can of scratch grains in my hand.) I sew clothes because I am sick and tired of the poor-quality, ill-fitting pieces that are offered in stores these days. Almost everything is too short. Or is full of spandex that stretches out of shape. Or falls apart after one wash.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
I’ve stubbornly held on to a couple of pieces of clothing that fit me well, intending to recreate them at some point. Several of them are Liz Claiborne tops; of all the ready-to-wear labels, I have the best chance of finding clothes I like that fit well in that line, although the quality has deteriorated significantly in the past decade (thank you, JC Penney).
One of my favorite Liz tops is a black-and-white striped tunic with a plain round neckline. It widens slightly below the bust. I wear it a lot because it’s so comfortable and fits so well. The fabric is a rayon/spandex of a good weight—not too light, not too heavy. It’s been at the top of the list to duplicate. I wore it the other day and found myself wishing for a similar top, but with a turtleneck. It’s winter here in Montana, you know. The neckline on the Liz top is too low for a turtleneck. It might be okay for a cowl neck, but I knew that if I traced the top to make a pattern from it, the neckline was going to require some adjustment to accommodate a turtleneck.
I went in search of a turtleneck pattern. The Hepburn Turtleneck from Itch to Stitch seemed a likely candidate, so I bought the pattern and took the file with me on a thumb drive to town on Thursday. The blueprint place where the husband gets construction plans done printed it for me on their large-format printer for a whopping $4.00.
Step 1 was tracing the Hepburn Turtleneck pattern in my size. The actual turtleneck pattern piece is just a rectangle, but I needed to see and understand the front and back neck shaping.
Step 2 was tracing the Liz top. That was a bit trickier because it’s an actual piece of clothing, but I was able to get a good outline of the pieces.
Step 3 was to lay the two front pattern pieces out on top of each other and see where I needed to make adjustments. The Hepburn turtleneck is much more fitted and has a tighter armhole opening. I kept the armhole shaping for the Liz top, but moved the pieces around and drew in lines where I thought they should go. I ended up raising and closing the front neck opening by about 2”.
[I wish I had thought to take pictures of this whole process, but I was concentrating on what I was doing. I probably will use this same method on some other tops, though, and I’ll try to remember to document what I do.]
The sleeve was the trickiest part. The sleeve cap and sleeve on the Itch to Stitch pattern is shaped, which is something I’ve only seen on patterns for wovens.
The armscye on the front is correspondingly shaped differently than the back, to accommodate the difference in cap shaping. Knit fabric has enough give that most designers—knitting and sewing, both—draft a sleeve in which one half is a mirror image of the other half. I could have taken the easy route and simplified the sleeve shaping, but I was curious to see how it fit, so I approximated it as best I could for the lower and shallower armscye on the Liz top, giving bountiful thanks for years of knitwear design where I had to calculate sleeve cap shaping. This was new, but not wholly unfamiliar, territory.
Once I had a pattern I thought I would work, I cut the fabric—a rayon/spandex from Joanns—and started sewing. I’ve got my knits serger dialed in with settings that work nicely for this kind of fabric. (I have a knits serger and a wovens serger so I don’t have to keep changing needles and thread.) The pieces went together perfectly. I even serged clear elastic into the shoulder seams to stabilize them. Boo-yah.
The moment of truth?—I put the top on and didn’t want to take it off, which says to me that it was a success. I got a better picture on my dress form:
This is exactly what I was envisioning. (I am especially happy that I was able to avoid having flowers end up in awkward places on my chest.)
And now for the post-mortem:
The fabric was lovely to work with. When I bought it, even the lady at the cutting table at Joanns remarked on how nice it felt. This seems to be an improvement over some of the knits they’ve offered in past seasons. It feels almost like peachskin.
When sergers behave, they are a joy. Two shoulder seams (with elastic!), two side/sleeve seams, a turtleneck and boom!—the top is put together.
I am getting better at coverstitching hems. If my serged seams got an A on this project, the hems got a B-. Coverstitch machines are fairly new to home sewing. I’ve got one of the earlier Janome 1000CPX machines, a generation which seems to have suffered from severe quality control issues. I followed the tips from a Facebook coverstitch group and opened the machine, raised the feed dogs, and oiled it thoroughly. Ever since then, it’s worked much better. I just need more practice with it.
I think that turtleneck pattern piece needs some shaping, or needs to be shorter. It ends up pushing the neckline down in the front when I am wearing it. The cowl tops I’ve made all have shaped cowl pieces. I will have to research that a bit more. The turtleneck feels nice and cozy, though.
The shaped sleeve caps/armscyes do make a difference. It’s subtle, but when I put the top on, it settles onto my body and doesn’t slide around like other tops tend to do. The front also has a slightly longer and curved hem compared to the back, which helps it avoid looking shorter than the back.
I’m going to retrace this pattern, incorporating some refinements, and then add it to my stack of “tried and true” patterns. The 5 Out of 4 Nancy Raglan is another tried and true pattern—I can cut that one out and make it and know that it’s going to fit well. I’ve discovered, though, that I prefer the Nancy Raglan in French terry or sweatshirt knits. I don’t like it as well in slinkier knits.
This truly was an accomplishment for someone with my lousy spatial perception skills. I actually managed to draft my own pattern. What’s more, it fits. I’ve got a stack of knit fabric and now I have confidence that I can turn that fabric into some great additions to my wardrobe. I spent most of yesterday on this project, but more than half of that was on drafting. This top could be put together, start to finish, in just a couple of hours.
I told the husband that I’m seriously considering jeans next. Joanna Lundstrom, who wrote a great coverstitch machine guide, just published a book on making jeans. I’d be thrilled to have four or five pairs of high-waisted, 100% cotton, boot cut jeans. We’ll see.