A FESA update, a refashion and the pants that almost didn´t come to be.

First of all, thank you all so much for the lovely comments on my last post, it prompted me to make another refashion of a shirt! This time a less radical change, I just wanted one of my darlings old crisp white shirts to fit me instead of him.

The shirt tucked into the wool version of my beloved Vogue 8604.

Just so you know, my camera didn´t want to co-operate with me today, so all recent photos are heavily edited…

I wanted to keep the dressy look of this shirt, so I kept the collar, I never wear it closed so I don´t mind that it is a bit big. I love the look of a clean white shirt, and it can be worn in so many different ways! Here are the changes I did:

• I took in the sleeve and side seams with about 8 cm on each side.
• I added 12 cm long contour darts on each shirt front
• I added a 7×4 cm elastic band in the center back
• I added tucks on the shoulder to rise the shoulder seam. 

That´s pretty much how I changed this shirt, I wanted to keep the length, as I would like to wear it untucked at times as well. I adjusted the sleeve length just by rolling up the sleeves one time the entire width of the cuff, and then closed the buttons.

Elastics in the back, and a view of the sleeves. 

FESA

There have been some change of plans. I have been working in a steady pace with the garments for the Fall Essentials Sew Along. But I have changed the plan a bit. First, here´s a recap of the original plan:

Now, as some of you may know, I´m not much of a muslin sewer, but for this sew along I actually thought I´d stitch up some muslins for some of the items.  The first one I did was the pants. I made them up in a navy blue stretchy cotton sateen. For those of you who followed the Self- Stitched September may know them as the unblogged pants:

I am very happy that I actually made a muslin (although a wearable one) for these pants, as the fit was WAY off. For the most part I have used Burda patterns for snug fitting pants, and they fit me without any other alteration than the usual 8 cm or so in the length of the leg. This pattern, on the other hand, is from Patrones, and was sooo hard to fit! Everything was off, the rise is extremely low, the waistband was, in my opinion too narrow,  and the legs were too wide. All in all, not the pattern for me. Eventually I got a decent fit, but I will replace the waistband with a wider one both to get the look I am after, and to compensate for the low rise. I don´t know the average height of the Patrone´s models, but I am guessing it is shorter and more petite than Burda´s as the pattern really wasn´t for me. So I decided not to use that pattern for my planned FESA pants. And to use Burda 10-2010-110 instead.

The next thing I did, just to be on the safe side, was to make a shorts version to check the fit of the Burda pattern I chose. The shorts went together smoothly, except that I forgot to add some markings for the pocket placing, and so they are a tiny bit off grain on one of the fronts, but I don´t think it matters much.

 The FESA shorts

I am very satisfied with these shorts, but there really are limited opportunities for wearing winter shorts in my life, I don´t need two pairs, so these took the place of the planned Simplicity 3850.

The problem with this change of plan was that I really love the fabric I had planned for the FESA shorts! Enter the pants that almost didn´t come to be.

So here´s the story: Last year, when I was struggling to make Vouge 8604 seen above, the one failed version I made was from a yummy mustard wool that looks a lot like this one, and the smart people over at Gorgeous Fabrics call it a nubby wool tweed, so lets call it that… There was enough fabric in this failed pair of trousers to fit another, more slim pair onto it. And so I did. Enthusiastically, I stitched up the new pair, but when I was to try them on, I didn´t understand, they were too small! I went back and checked the pattern instructions, and there it was, in black and white “only suitable for fabric with some stretch…” Oh the frustration! I threw them into the back of my UFO pile and didn´t want to see them again. Until this autumn.

 Can you guess the photo inspiration?

I pulled these out again in September, made a new seam as far out in the seam allowance as possible, ripped the old one, attached the waistband, and voilá! They fit! 🙂 Although I must admit that they are a bit tight, not to be worn for the holiday feasts…

The pants that almost didn´t come to be makes the perfect team together with my FESA silk blouse refahsion as well. I won´t bore you with the details of this refashion, it is more or less the same procedure as on the other recent refashions. But I will mention that I didn´t use the planned pattern for it, as it wasn´t enough fabric…;-)

So as you can see, there has been some change of plans, but I am happy with them. I will announce more changes, but I´ll save that for another day!

Until next time, happy stitching!