The 4T-ish TNG Jacket... halfway there!

Yesterday was full of delicious progress.

I still need to figure out the collar, waistband, liner, and invisible zipper situations, but the skeleton is all here.

For my little captain. 

I had been stuck on the first step. 

Yeah, the FIRST step.  The front chest piece sewn to the front waist piece... in all my practicing on muslin, I could not keep the darn point from puckering.  I guess they make it the first step because it's the most important clean line... if you mess it up, you are cutting new cloth and starting over!  Finally I went on a hunt to see what other people did for cosplay purposes, and I learned about stay-stitching.  I made my seam allowance 1/2", so you sew a line above the point on the red piece just under 1/2", then cut the cloth almost all the way up to that point.  Once that corner is separated into 2 flaps, it's far easier to deal with.

Uhhh... like this:

Stay-stitching experiment.

You can see here that I accidentally put it darn close to the seam!  I did the same for the back point (on the black though, of course), and kept the stay-stitch to about 3/8" which worked just as well but gave me more of a safety zone.  I feel like I should have run into this technique at some point in my last decade of sewing halloween and ren faire costumes. 

After I figured out that step, the rest progressed pretty fast, until it was time to assemble the sleeves to the body.


There has to be a better way.

Attaching the sleeves, sleeve inserts (the black triangles), and body together is just ridiculously hard to do on the sewing machine.  I really messed up the alignment of the left sleeve inserts, but considering that I can't re-do things with this knit material (it leaves "tears" in the knit if I pick out stitches), I'm just leaving it instead of starting from scratch.  I ended up hand-sewing most of the shoulder seams on the right sleeve, and that turned out far better... but still frustratingly far from perfect.  He's only going to wear it for a year or two anyway, and there's only 6 days left until we need the costumes, so I'm trying to let go of the perfectionism.

Speaking of which, my husband could theoretically wear his uniform forever, so I need to get all my mistakes out now!  I'm desperately hoping that my husband's jacket shoulders are easier to assemble due to being much larger... and also due to not having to improvise a pattern. Wish me luck, I start on his today!

Skanty Progress

The sewing machine is hobbling along, and will work with only the regular straight stitch and a slow speed, after I ran some waxed floss through where the upper thread goes on the machine.  Looks like I need to replace the tension disc, but I can't send it in for repair before costumes are needed. 



In any case, some progress has been made!

Halfway sewn.

The skant isn't finished by any means... it still needs a zipper, sleeves, collar, hemming.  Originally I ruined the top 3 pieces due to how stretchy the black cloth is, but I re-cut them and added interfacing to the black, and they were much easier to deal with.

Since my pattern is far more simple than the men's jacket, I'm using it to do the learning of new techniques, and to make sure the sewing machine is going to be reliable now that I've found a "fix" for it.  So much of this is new to me:  sewing with stretchy knits, invisible zippers, stay-stitching, stitch-in-the-ditch, collars, trims, linings. 



It's motivating to see some real progress finally. 

Only 8 days left to finish our costumes... and those are already going to be busy days.  Wish me luck.

If I end up finishing the sewing early, I'm totally doing head-to-toe Trill spots with a brown permanent marker.  Even though I will have to explain them to the doctor the day before Halloween, bwahahaha! 

The last step before sewing: Color decisions and interfacing.

No longer so blue.

Torin has decided that he wants to be red instead of blue.  Good thing I anticipated this last-minute change, and bought a bit of extra cloth for his dad's costume.  Since the muslin practice run went so well, I cut out all the fancy cloth... there is no going back!

The Stiffening.

The red cloth is pretty thick, while the black cloth is noticeably slippery and flimsy in comparison.  After a bit of experimenting, I decided to only put interfacing on the black cloth, so that the 2 colors have a similar stiffness and feel to them.

It really did not use up much interfacing at all!

Black interfacing on black cloth.

Now that the interfacing has been ironed on... WE ARE READY TO SEW!! 


One small snag, though.

My sewing machine decided to malfunction right as I started to test out sewing with the stretchy cloth.  I spent several hours yesterday cleaning and resetting everything, researching, and coming to the conclusion that I likely need to replace the tension wheel for the top thread.  The thread keeps getting stuck at that part (even at zero tension) and skipping stitches and then breaking.

Part of my old job was to deep-clean, re-align, and repair a variety of microscopes.  It's so frustrating to not be able to do the same for just a "simple" sewing machine.

The practice run: TNG Jacket

Things are moving along!

I finally finished the pattern, cut out all the bits (besides the collar and waistband) in some really cheap muslin, and pinned them together to see how it'd work.  Seems to fit the kid perfectly!

YESSSSSSS!

This fuzzy photo shows you the main parts of the outer shell (minus one sleeve).  I think the hardest part is going to be sewing that point in the center front, it's so tricky to pin it smooth!  Of course, that is literally the first step to sew in the directions.

It's getting real now.

Wish me luck!