Up the Cut

What’s she on about now?

Preparing to cut out took longer than expected!  On the cutting table, two more Style Arc Lani tunics.  Now, the first one turned out nicely, but I dodged the FBA bullet by making the fronts out of jersey…and there’s still a little evidence that an FBA would have helped [I don’t care though, it still gets worn a lot!]

So, I braved an FBA- well 2 actually, as one side has a princess seam, and the other a little dart, which is too high.  I shifted them both to a lower side dart, as ham-fistedly as any of my ventures into ‘proper’ pattern alteration or drafting.  The FBAs of course resulted in having to slightly widen the lower front panels too, but extra room for my ever-increasing girth is no bad thing.  I’m going to try to put a pocket in on both sides this time.

Then I cut out one in this lovely Alexander Henry animal print [which, oddly for a quilting cotton, has slight stretch], blocked with a plain grey stretch poplin which I bought years ago from Tia Knight.  Deciding which bits to block which way took a little thought, with the main deliberation being about the sleeves.  You’ll have to wait and see what I chose!

The one on the right, last of the menagerie á trois to be made up

The second  is in that lovely mathematical fabric, teamed with various other black fabrics…I’m toying with putting some flat piping in red into this one, we shall see how that works out.

Next, a quick cutting-out, the trousers from V9114 in red crinkle linen/cotton

Then, after LOTS of pattern faffing and another messy FBA plus fiddle-faddle to lengthen pieces to suit [and grading the thing up to a basic size 16] I managed to get  V8434 out of the sari fabric.  It’s very greedy though so not as much left as I would have hoped!

I managed to get the gold metallic border all round the hems too…

Then , feeling very smug, I went to put it all into The Box for Sewing…and found two more pattern pieces for the V8434 smirking at me from the ironing board.  Poop!  Even LESS sari fabric left, ah well.

Four garments isn’t as much as I would normally cut in one go, but the holiday is soon going to be over, I still have two pairs of trousers to finish, and all that pattern alteration was a real bind!