Ancestors

Written by Sini Tuulia on 2025-01-19 at 16:25

For my sanity I absolutely need to stop working on this sleeve and arm's eye, now. 😆 It no longer deeply offends my sensibilities, doesn't horribly go wrong when I move, and the sleeve head sits alright enough that I can baste it down (it's just on with safety pins here). Then heat-form a bone and slap it on all along the side back seam for good measure. And see about the other sleeve, small gods of sewing preserve me. 😶 (Fitting gifs.)

[#]CinnamonLinenJacket #Sewing

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Written by Sini Tuulia on 2025-01-19 at 16:26

It's all sewn down with machine basting stitches now, so it's not perfect nor can be, but you can see the fit well enough to unpick where necessary etc.

Also I've been using a different colour thread for the gathering stitches, the basting, the stay-stitches and the actual stitching. So I can see what the bloody hell line of sewing I'm actually looking at!

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Written by Alistair K on 2025-01-19 at 21:04

@sinituulia I have not made a jacket for years for precisely this reason. Easing sleeve caps into armscyes that must be smaller than the cap going in always took me at least four tries.

I never figured out a good way to think about it. The closest I got is that the excess has to be distributed evenly around the scye but I have a strong hunch that this is not a sufficient understanding.

I also started wondering whether gigantic puffs were invented to turn the problem into its own solution.

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Written by Sini Tuulia on 2025-01-19 at 21:18

@libroraptor Four isn't all that many! If you have a decent pattern it's not the worst. Though working with 100% wool does also help, and you don't really find that so often these days.

The distribution depends on the shape of both sleeve and scye, but if they somewhat match, and the rotation is correct you can fully just squeeze and ease it in there. 😆

I've got two different arms and scyes so the same thing doesn't work, in theory very gathered sleeves are easier to fit because the mass of the puff hides a lot of sins... As long as the arm's eye is correct!

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Written by Alistair K on 2025-01-19 at 21:27

@sinituulia The last time for me might have been as long as a decade ago, making a little blazer for my son to attend a wedding. Made the necktie, too. The motivation was the stuff in shops – it was a horrible blend of trashy and cutesy, treating children as display objects rather than as people. All he wanted was a simple blazer and tie like his father wears. His whole early childhood was like that. We're losing the good fabric shops but there was one left in my city at the time.

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Written by Alistair K on 2025-01-19 at 21:31

@sinituulia Anyway, cloth is so expensive now that I've given up sewing clothes from scratch. All I do now is buy second-hand clothes and add darts and things to convert them into winter coats for our dog.

Though we got a girls' blazer for my son's school uniform (because the boys' ones are cut like a potato sack) and I shifted the buttons yesterday. Will be putting darts into his shirts over the coming week so he doesn't look like a Spanish galleon heading to the Americas.

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Written by Sini Tuulia on 2025-01-20 at 10:37

@libroraptor The blazer and tie on the child is extremely cute. 💕

The quality of fabric available has also really gone down. Fairly recently I've gotten used to buying expensive linen (16-22€/m) and having it be nice quality, and it's getting harder and harder to find cotton that's just cotton. Good thing there's the much more expensive organic cotton fabric here and there, but gosh heck it's difficult to find anything patterned that isn't either quilting cotton or polyester. I'm fine with quilting cotton, it's just not the best for everything ever!

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Written by Alistair K on 2025-01-20 at 23:29

@sinituulia Yes. Good basics are rapidly becoming a luxury item, and we normal-income people are pushed into a mixture of advertising, trashiness, fancy-schmancy display. I don't think it's merely coincidental that the look-at-my-prints-and-logos aesthetic is coupled with cuts that don't fit. My gut feeling is that the manufacturers use gratuitous decoration to distract us from both practicality and from good sewing.

The baking world is doing the same. Butter's so expensive where I live now.

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Toot

Written by Sini Tuulia on 2025-01-21 at 14:51

@libroraptor It's cheaper to use flashy prints that distract from the cut and machine embroidery that costs pennies per stack of clothes!

Meanwhile pretty much any sewing task is still made by human hands and that costs money, even when you're barely paying them a wage.

Don't get me wrong, I love a flashy print as a concept (though it's not for me) but usually it's a shortcut.

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Descendants

Written by Alistair K on 2025-01-21 at 23:06

@sinituulia yes, it is indeed a shortcut. The biggest thing that troubles me about fast fashion is how it makes the skill and labour invisible so that most consumers struggle to imagine what it is that's either missing or being gained by exploitation. I'm glad that handcrafts are coming back into fashion, even if a person does only for a bit of mending or focuses on cosplay art. I see a lot of broad humane good emerging from this.

Maybe one day we'll get good linen, cotton, silk supplies again!

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