It was cartoonist Alan Saunders who said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. This is definitely true! While we can make all the plans in the world, we don’t always know what life’s going to throw at us and how that will affect our plans.
Change of Plans
Speaking of best laid plans, I had a plan for my 2015 Sewtember Sew Along, where the goal was to sew Vogue pattern V1083. As you may have read in my last post, I was planning to use red fleece, white satin lining and no interlining. I was also planning to work on it all last week.
Well let’s just say none of that happened. First, I’m still in the process of moving so unpacking sewing supplies was high on my list. Though things have been busy, I did manage to get some unpacking done.
However, work has been very busy lately as I had to go to a couple of days of training, only to find out students did not behave for their substitute teacher. I mean come on, what’s up with that. Then if work wasn’t enough I’ve been suffering from allergies and Wednesday I gave myself a semi-concussion by running into a wall while doing laundry. “Curse you laundry”
As if all this wasn’t enough, when I finally sat down to actually cut out my pattern I discovered, I didn’t actually have enough red fleece to make my coat. Nooooooo….
Plan B
I decided to weigh my options, and as it turns out I also had some tan fleece which I had gotten from YourFleece.com a while back. I meant to make a tan coat with this fleece as well, but the first thought was to make the red first. Oh, well, switching to the tan wouldn’t be a big deal.
However, I’m not sure what to line the coat with. I was hoping for a satin / silky lining, but don’t seem to have enough of any one fabric in my stash. I’ll have to think about this in the coming week and decided what I want to do about lining.
Speaking of lining, this coat had an innerlining, which as you may recall I decided not to use. I also had read about fleece interfacing and decided to use that for the interfacing. After getting the fleece interfacing I determined it wouldn’t be quite the stuffiness I need for the interfaced pieces. However, it would make a lightweight innerlining. Thus, in the end I decided to use the fusible fleece interfacing as an innnerlining. We will see how that goes.
While I was short on time and ran into lots of issues this week, I did manage to actually cut out my main coat pieces. Normally I would trace out the pattern pieces before cutting into them, but this time I didn’t. The pieces were very large, and I didn’t have wide enough tracing paper, also I felt the urge to just get started on the project, and thus foregoed the tracing. Shameful I know.
The pieces were pretty easy to cut out, the only piece that I found tricky was piece 1. First off piece 1 is not whole. There is a 1A piece that must be attached, which is easy enough. Second there is a lot of weird angle cuts on one side, in which you have to follow the dashed line for your pattern size. The way the angles are cut it’s easy to make a mistake as you follow the line. Taking your time on this piece should make it easier.
Note about cutting fleece
Fleece is really easy to cut. I’ve heard that it’s best to use a sharp rotary cutter, especially for straight cuts. However, I found because I had such large pieces, and not a big enough cutting mat, that I had to use scissors the whole way around.
The scissors work fine, and the great thing about fleece is that it’s kind of a clingy material, so it doesn’t slide around and the pattern pieces seem to stay put with a minimum of pins or weights, depending on what you are using.
2015 Sewtember Continues
While it’s not the plan I started out with, I’m still quite excited about this coat. Hopefully I will make progress and keep you updated on my 2015 Sewtember Sew Along.
Remember it’s not too late to join the fun and sew along with me. At this point my tentative deadline is before my birthday on October 13, we’ll see how it goes.
So, stay tuned for next time when I discuss fusing the innerlining and main coat construction.
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