A different type of craft...

There has been less sewing around these parts lately, as I've been experimenting with alternative creative persuits, namely drawing.

Over Christmas I found a few free drawing classes on Craftsy, so enrolled in them both and then Darren and I completed them together. The first class was "Figure Drawing: An Essential Guide" and was a really great class. In the class Patricia takes you through the process of drawing a person using pencil.

Most times I've drawn anything in the last decade or so I have been frustrated that I couldn't get my hand to draw what my mind was imagining. My pictures would end up with weird proportions and not look like what I was aiming for at all. Therefore, I was surprised at the drawing I ended up with, finding her envelope technique really great for actually ending up with a picture that looked like what it should.

My picture from following along with "Figure Drawing: An Essential Guide"

We then went on to watch the second available class called "Draw Better Portraits". We didn't follow along with this class as we didn't have the required materials (charcoal and a more glossy paper). It was an interesting watch, but nowhere near as beneficial as the first class.

A couple more pencil drawings using the principles from the figure drawing class

After a couple more practices of what we learnt from the Figure Drawing class (above), we decided to investigate what other classes were available. After reading the descriptions and the trailer videos (which I wish more had clips of the instructor actually speaking to let you get an idea of their style) we ended up with quite a few in the wishlist, and one in my cart; "Radiant Portraits in Coloured Pencil".

My drawing from the "Radiant Portraits in Coloured Pencil" class

I have spent the last week working through the class, with a visit back to the art store in the middle to get more coloured pencils, and have reached a point with my drawing where I've decided to stop. I'm sure I could keep on going with the picture, but I have to decide to stop at some point.

I selected this photo by Sergey Stoylovsky to use as my reference photo:

Source: Sergey Stoylovsky

One thing, not suggested in the class, that I found helpful when drawing the framework was to overlay a grid on the top of the photo. I didn't draw a grid onto my paper or anything, but it helped provide a base for the proportions and alignment of the different aspects of the image, which was a great assistance when I was drawing it onto the paper.

The below photos show the progression of my drawing. In the class Kerry has you start by drawing the framework of the image in a pale pencil, then you start building up the values in fairly neutral colours, then you start refining the colours and values.

  

  

  

I found the process incredibly relaxing, and enjoyed the challenge of working out how to build the colours I needed (particularly when I didn't quite have the colours I think I would have liked to use). It is so surprising how a colour behaves when you're using it on top of another colour, as opposed to straight onto the paper.

  

The paper we bought wasn't as dark as the one she recommends, so I had some challenges using the techniques that Kerry introduces in the class, but I worked it out in the end. We have since bought darker paper so I'm looking forward to using that for my next drawing.

My goal going into the coloured pencil class was to draw something that I'd be happy to frame and put on my wall. I expected this goal to take multiple drawings and much practice to achieve, but given that I keep being drawn back to the table to look at my drawing I may well frame and put up this first drawing! I shall have to try another picture to see if I have infact discovered a before unknown talent or if this was simply a fluke!

I'm not saying that my picture is perfect, it's far from it. There are many things I would change if that were possible, and I will bear those in mind for my future pictures. While her head isn't quite at the right angle, her hair is miles from accurate, her lips leave quite a bit to be desired, and some of the shadows aren't quite right, the fact that it is a very recognisable likeness of the reference picture has got me absolutely thrilled.

What about you, have you done any portrait or figure drawing? Please share pictures with me if you have.

Have you done any of the Craftsy classes? If so, which ones and would you recommend them?

Note: The links to Craftsy in this post are affiliate links. If you click on them and sign up to craftsy and/or buy any courses within the specified time limits I will get a small commission, and I will be very grateful. However, I paid for the Craftsy class I'm talking about in this post, and would have written exactly the same post even without the affiliate links (actually I did, I added the links after writing the post).

Faux-Sureau

Have you seen the Sureau pattern by Deer and Doe? It's a lovely dress pattern with gathers either side of a little placket down the centre front. This dress is heavily inspired by the sureau pattern, except I altered my bodice block to make the pattern rather than using the actual sureau pattern, hence faux-sureau.

  

I have a confession however; I actually made 90% of this dress almost a year ago, but I didn't finish it off before the summer weather disappeared, so there didn't seem much point finishing it off then, when I wasn't going to be able to wear it for another 9-10 months. So I finished this off in my Christmas sewing binge, and what a satisfactory project it was, as all that was left was the zip and hem! I was finished before I knew it!

The pattern alteration was pretty simple. I rotated the bust dart to the centre front and converted it to gathers, subtracted the desired placket width, and changed the neckline to a v-neck. I may have been a little over-eager with this last alteration, and it's a little lower cut than I would normally make. If I were to make it again I would also move the gathers down a little so they're centered over my bust rather than being over the top half.

Rather than completely mimicking the sureau and adding a gathered skirt, I added the good old standby belladone skirt as I preferred an a-line skirt over a gathered one.

 

To correspond with the lightweight seersucker fabric and keep this a lightweight summer dress, I left the skirt unlined, and lined the bodice with a very light weight voile (principally to finish the edges rather than to 'line it'). I also found that some tiny prick stitches down the placket made the bodice front sit much nicer. Lastly I hand picked a dress zip into the back of the dress.



I'm fairly happy with the fit. I did some stupid alterations to take the waist in, which in hindsight I would have done differently (or ideally made the waist the right size to start with!). These alterations make the skirt sit a little funny, but not so much that it's a big issue. The bigger issue is that while the fit of the dress is pretty good when I'm stood up straight with my shoulders back (y'know, good posture we all like to think we have but don't really), as soon as relax and hunch over the neckline tends to gape a little.

Pattern: Self-drafted bodice, Skirt from Belladone by Deer and Doe
Fabric: Pear Print Seersucker from Spotlight
Notions: Thread, matching dress zip, voile for lining.

See also: Bimble and Pimble, Tybalt King of Cats, The Nerdy Seamstress

Strawberry Thief Belladone

Did you know that you can get Vans sneakers made from liberty fabric??! Back in mid-2013 there were 6 liberty prints available as Vans, however I only ever managed to find two of them in Australia, despite having decided that I must have the "Strawberry Thief" style. I also couldn't get them shipped to Australia easily, as supposedly they're imported here by a distributor.

Enormous thanks must go to the ever generous Poppykettle, who very kindly saved me a little bit of her precious luggage space from her trip to the US, to bring back these shoes for me (after I ordered them to be sent to her hotel).

Ever since achieving owning the shoes, I have also been plotting to make a coordinated outfit. Not a whole dress from the fabric, as that might be a bit too matchy-matchy, and also pretty pricey, but something using the liberty as a trim.

Just before Christmas, I bought this coordinating stretch sateen from Spotlight (although unimpressed with spotlight, 3 of the 5 pieces of fabric I bought that day had flaws in them, including this one. very unimpressed).

The liberty has so many colours in it that I had lots of different options for coordinating, but a lot of the possibles that I found didn't seem all that wearable. Bright pink? Too 'girly'. Pale Green? Too bright. Navy? No fun for summer. Then I spotted this steel-y blue. Yup, yup yup!

I chose to use the belladone pattern because it's perfectly suited to using bias binding as a feature. In addition to using bias on the back, and around the neckline and armholes, I also added a strip along each edge of the waistband, and along the opening of the pockets. I kept the bias binding as a thin line, making the visible width about 1/4".



I forgot to stitch down the top few inches of the pleats in the skirt, and may still go back and stitch them down by hand, as it really does make a big difference to the look of the skirt.

I was on a real hand sewing kick while making this dress. The first seam of the bias binding was done by machine, but the second side stitched down by hand. I also hand picked the zip up the back and did a hand stiched blind hem.

This dress has been a little while coming, but I'm thrilled with the end result. I'm expecting it to be great all year round, as I hope it'll be suitable to wear in colder weather with a long sleeved t-shirt and tights underneath.

Also, it turns out that it's pretty tricky to take photos that highlight that the dress and the shoes are coordinated, as the liberty on the dress is so far away from my feet!

 

Pattern: Belladone by Dear and Doe
Fabric: Stretch Sateen from Spotlight, "Strawberry Thief" Liberty Lawn from L'ucello
Notions: Thread, interfacing (for waistband), matching dress zip

 

See also: BusyLizzie, Millydodo, Tabatha Tweedie

So, dress coordinating with my shoes; Awesome or a little bit tacky?

Ziggi - A day's worth of muslins...

So I spent today making muslins for my planned Ziggi jacket. Yes, muslins plural, and I'm not done yet. I kinda think I would have been better off just drafting myself my own jacket, I wouldn't have been much worse off given what you actually get when you buy the Ziggi pattern, it's not like the instructions are anything worth paying for.

First up, let's recap... I have some gorgeous aubergine wool suiting that I want to make into a biker style jacket, and from limited selection of options, I settled on the Style Arc Ziggi pattern.

Now, the style arc patterns are single sized, so you can print only one size at a time.

My bust and waist come in between the 10 and 12, and hips between 12 and 14. For this reason I chose the size 12. Interestingly, my "upper arm girth" places me in the size 8, but my "shoulder breadth" just above a size 14. When you buy the pdf pattern you get three sizes, so I bought the size 10-12-14 bundle of patterns.

Above is the muslin of the size 12, straight out of the envelope.

Starting with the good; I really like how the collar is sitting. And despite the size chart suggesting that the sleeves would be too big I like the width of the sleeves.

And onto the bad issues...

The pooling at the back is somewhat expected based on my body shape, and I didn't worry about that straight away, working on the principle of starting at the top and working down with fitting... the most obvious issue was the armholes. The armholes came very far down, impeding my arm movement an awful lot.

It bunched up as shown above when I moved my arms around at all. My first thought was raising the armscye, but I noted that the bust felt a little more comfortable when the jacket was bunched up around my shoulders like that, so I tried removing some vertical length from between my armpits and shoulders...

Pinning out the excess did seem to help, and achieved the goal of having free use of my arms (a somewhat important thing don't you think?)

I did some partial unpicking and slashed and overlapped all the pieces and stitched them down to check out this alteration a bit more (see above pics), and thought it was promising enough to transfer to my pattern pieces. As this alteration had reduced the overall length of the jacket, I added the length back in at the waist to make the jacket the length I wanted it.

And so my second muslin...



While the principle of my alterations were good, there are obviously still quite a few problems...

Two changes I could easily make to this muslin were that I had added the length too high in the back, and now the seamline of the back peplum piece is sitting too low, so I shortened the upper back pieces and lengthened the peplum to move this seamline up. I also added half an inch of width to the bottom of the peplum while I was redrafting it, to give the jacket a little more ease over my behind....

(Yes, that's my "I've spent a whole day on this muslin and it still looks terrible" face).

So, at the end of a day of muslining I still have a heap of problems, for which I'm thinking the following changes for muslin number three:

- Add a little more length back in where I removed it between the armpits and shoulders to hopefully alleviate some of the pull lines from the armpits
- Take the width of the shoulders in by about 1.5 at the top, tapering to nothing by the lower sleeve piece (note my comment earlier about being worried about making a size too small for my "shoulder breadth" - what a load of tosh that measurement is! It's too big in the shoulders, not too small!)
- Do a sway back adjustment to remove some of the pooling at the small of my back
- Do a small FBA through the middle of my "middle front piece", to add some more ease and shaping through the bust
- Possibly add a little waist shaping through the side seams.

What do you think? Would you make those changes based on the above photos? If not, what changes would you make?

...and if I do eventually manage to get a good fit, I then need to work out how to make equivalent changes to the lining pieces.

Which reminds me of another frustration with this pattern; the pattern notes that the lining is optional, however you have to print all the pieces, there's no option for printing just the shell and/or lining pieces. This is frustrating me right now in particular as I'd quite like to reprint just my outer pieces, but to do so I'll have to reprint the whole thing. The lining and shell pieces are completely mixed together on the pattern sheets, so it's not even like I could just print some of the sheets to print the shell pieces again. I'm very disappointed by this.

Maxi Dress

Last January I made my first maxi-dress by extending my t-shirt pattern into a dress. That dress has had a reasonable amount of wear through the hot weather so I'd been keeping an eye out for some suitable fabric to make another one.

I found this rayon jersey in Spotlight recently and knew I'd found my fabric. The last version I was always tugging up the bodice as the arm holes were too low, so I added about 1.5" to the bottom of the armholes this time around to solve this problem.

I spent quite some time cutting out the pieces, and think I've done quite a good job of matching the stripes down the side seams:

I added some 1" strips of red jersey to finish the neckline and armholes; pressing them in half, stitching down the inside first with a zigzag and then folding it over and zigzagging along the edge of the outside.



I'm still not completely convinced about how flattering this dress is, but it's comfyness redeems most misgivings.

Pattern: Self drafted maxi dress (inspired by Mission Maxi)
Fabric: Rayon Jersey from Spotlight, some scraps of red jersey
Notions: Just thread!

See also: Creative Pursuits, Lazy Stitching,  Ada Spragg, Notes from a mad housewife

Also, as the selvege of the fabric professed to be a leopard print (I know, it confused me too), I guess this could be a sneaky entry for Jungle January.

Sewciedone Dress

This is the last piece of this gorgeous spotted cotton sateen that I bought back in April of 2011. I feel I have done it justice.

The rest of the 11m stack that I bought with this fabric became a Crescent Skirt, Portrait Dress and a brightly coloured quilt. Adding in this dress, each of the four are very different. It's interesting to see what varied potential just one type of fabric can have.

  

This dress is a mash up of the bodice from the sewcietea dress (without the contrast band), and the skirt from the Dear and Doe Belladone. This version of the belladone skirt incorporates the alteration I mentioned intending to do at the end of my post about my Roisin Dress, which I am calling a "Full Bum Adjustment", and I intend to talk about properly another time.

To add some interest to the dress, I decided to add piping. I also think that the miss-match of the spots with the waistband would have looked strange without anything defining the seam. I initially thought of flat piping, but decided to woman up and go for the real thing. This is the first time I've done "proper" piping, and as straight forward as the process was, I wouldn't want to do it on anything where I'm not sure of the fit.

As I wasn't sure about how to handle the piping and an invisible zip, I elected to hand-pick a dress zip into the centre back seam of the dress.

The dress is lined throughout with (I think) some white voile (I get the light weight cotton fabrics a bit confused), and has some interfacing (probably slightly heavier than ideal) in the waistband.

I couldn't be more happy with the construction, fit and overall look of this dress.

Pattern: Self-drafted 'sewcietea' bodice, Belladone by Dear and Doe skirt

Fabric: Cotton Sateen from Spotlight

Notions: Thread, interfacing (for waistband), matching dress zip, white voile for lining and piping fabric, smallest piping cord I could find.