A Knot Top and a Concrete Pour

I sewed the front of the knot top to the back yesterday and tried it on. It fits well, but for purposes of the blog, you get to see my dress form modeling it:

Overall, I am happy with it. The fit across the bust—where I always have issues—is good, so at least I have that part of the sizing dialed in. Reviews of this pattern, however, all mentioned that the fit across the midriff is too tight. I agree. I have a well-defined hourglass shape and I prefer tops that don’t fit like potato sacks, but I think this is overly fitted, especially in a rayon spandex fabric. I want the fabric to skim, not cling. This clings.

[I cannot get away from spandex, no matter how hard I try. It’s in my bra, so it’s not like I can avoid it completely. It bothers me most in jeans. I’ve learned to tolerate it elsewhere.]

For the next iteration—one that I will actually finish and wear—I am going to trace the same size off the dress pieces of the pattern and make a tunic length top. Other sewists who have made both the top and the dress from this pattern note that the dress is less fitted below the bust.

I wasn’t crazy about the back neckline finish on this top, either. The instructions have you cut a narrow length of fabric, fold it in half to make an even narrower binding strip, then attach it to the neckline edge. After grading the seams, that binding is folded to the inside and stitched in place. The instructions say to sew it with a twin needle on the sewing machine, but I have a coverstitch machine, so I did it on the coverstitch. It looks fine but it’s bulky. I think the neck edge would be better with some kind of facing, similar to what is on the front. I need to think about that a bit. One person coverstitched fold-over elastic on hers (the dress was black rayon jersey so it was easy to find matching FOE), which I thought was a nice finish.

The only other change I will make will be to match the looper thread in my serger to the fabric so it doesn’t show.

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The husband has been working in the neighborhood this week. A couple about our age has been buying small pieces of land, putting up nice starter houses, then selling them after a year and moving on. Their son does the same thing. (The father and son build the houses.) The husband does all their foundations. They had a wall pour yesterday, so I went over to take some pictures.

[I took a seminar on optimizing Google My Business a few weeks ago. The GMB listing is important for companies that work locally—not so much for something like Big Sky Knitting Designs—and I want to make sure the husband’s website pops up near the top of the search engine listings. One of the suggestions was to add pictures regularly to the listing. His website is getting more visits, so this seems to be working.]

The boom truck and the concrete truck work together on these pours, especially where access to the jobsite is tight:

Having the long boom makes the job a lot easier:

The husband controls the nozzle and directs the concrete into the forms:

It’s a messy job.

One of the employees wears a pack with a long vibrating wand attached to it. He runs the wand through the concrete to make sure there are no air bubbles. Another employee comes behind and smooths off the top of the wall.

At least the weather was nice. They can—and do—pour walls even when it’s raining, which is less than fun.

I think the husband plans to let the piglets out into the pasture some time this weekend. That should make for some good photo ops.