Several of the Fyber Cafe group got together for a play day at Pat W.'s house. We had admired a sweatshirt our member Sara had worn to meetings and wanted to try to make one. It was made with random patches sewn onto a sweatshirt, then washed so the edges would get raggedy. We had cut the side seams and sleeve seams off, so the sweatshirt laid flat. I had pre-cut some strips and squares and rectangles, so I began by arranging them on the sleeve, pinning them in place. Pat had a beautiful variegated purple thread that I borrowed, and I stitched it in 1" wide straight rows.
I sewed straight rows, vertically and horizontally, trying to catch the edge of the patches. Then I went back and did it again in narrower rows trying to sew every thing in place.
I got the sleeves done at Pat's and worked on the front and back at home, on Saturday and Sunday. It took quiet a lot of sewing, and used 10 bobbins of thread.
A close up pic of the patches, I had dark, medium and light value prints, also some large geometrics and stripes for variety. I am not happy with all the stitching showing on the lavender sweatshirt, the others matched their threads to the sweatshirt color and it did not show.
The last thing I did was measure side to side, and cut up the center, and I rounded the top corners by the collar. I had enough of the beautiful dark purple with the frosted purple splotches to make a bias binding. We had been told to buy a size larger so you can wear it as an overcoat, and that it would shrink a bit when stitching. Well... mine shrunk too much, too much stitching, too small a patch. I hate making clothes, they never fit right :( It was way too small for me, all that work ...
...and now it is only good for a cat bed, but Poppy sure likes it.
Next time bigger patches and less stitching, some times over achieving does not work out. The other ladies at the workshop were doing less work. To see their sweatshirts check the Fyber Cafe blog
click here In a few days, I'll get the post up of from the workshop.
I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday"
click here to check to see what other talented textile artists are doing this week.
It's very pretty, too bad about the fit. I have done this sort of thing before and what I did was do all the patch work and stitching first, then cut out the patterns pieces way too big, then washed it to shrink and ravel and lastly cut out the pattern pieces to the proper size. That way it will fit.
ReplyDeleteThat is a very cool project!
ReplyDeleteWe started with a pre-made sweatshirt, so there was no pattern pieces to cut out.
ReplyDelete