I finished my joggers…

Well, sort of.  I finished them as far as the situation would allow.  I believe I mentioned that my fabric had absolutely no stretch and that I anticipated some problems with that.  If I didn’t mention it, that is how I was feeling last weekend.  I knew I had to fix the waistband gaping so I put them on and pinched out the excess at the center back seam.  I measured the width of the excess and then serged it off the center back seam.  I applied the measurement to the waistband and cut the back waistband in half and removed the excess minus the seam allowance.  This gave me a perfect match between the waistband and the pants.  So, everything went fine right?

Wrong.  This is when the train started to derail.  I must have made a mistake with my seam allowance when I attached the waistband to the pants.  My elastic was too wide to shove into the waist!  I decided to put that on hold and finish the stretchy cuffs at the bottom.  Oh wait, my cuffs aren’t stretchy because I thought I was gonna power through and force the pattern to bend to my will.  I was wrong, there was no way those cuffs were going on.  I would not have been able to get my foot in the pants if I had put them on, so I have a situation on my hands.  How much longer am I gonna screw around with these things before I give up and marinate in my own hubris?  Long enough to thread a ribbon through the waist band and call it a deconstructed set of pj pants.  Honestly my boyfriend took one look at them and said “What the hell is that?!”  He said they were the ugliest thing he has ever seen.  He wasn’t entirely wrong.  Sadly, I do not have a picture of the finished product, but there isn’t much to see anyway.  I will post some construction pics to show how I did the wedge, but that’s about all you’re getting out of me at this point.  I have officially moved on.

Back significantly shorter waistband, please ignore my foot.

Folded in half to find center back and the notches were the width of the wedge so I used them as a guide for how much to remove.

I decided to get down to business on my Vogue cape.  The pattern is Vogue 9288 and I will be making view B.

This will be my first time working with wool.  Also my first time working with coating fabric.  I found the beautiful red textures wool blend on Amazon.  It is being sold there by Fabric.com and the price was really nice for a first try coat.  I believe it was a little over ten dollars a yard and it looks nice so I am happy with it.  It is thick, which makes me nervous about bulky seams, any suggestions or guidance toward tutorials about how to deal with bulk would be appreciated. I will also be making some bias binding for my seam finish on the inside because the cape is unlined.

I decided to make a muslin of the cape because I wanted to make sure of the fit, but more importantly I wanted to get some experience with the construction to make sure I was confident in my ability to figure out the instructions and also to see where I may have trouble with bulky seams.  I am really glad I did because I did spot a few problem areas as far as fabric thickness goes, but more importantly the shoulder curve was a little to wide for my frame.  I drew a ridiculously terrible line onto the fabric while I was wearing it which was difficult, but seemed to work despite how sloppy my “line” was.  I will include a few pictures of the shoulder and the shitty line I drew and how I altered the pattern.

It turned out to be exactly 5/8″ which was cool because it took me down to the shoulder size of a small.  It made marking the pattern tissue a little easier.

I was going to include a pic of the muslin as a whole, but for some reason I only have video of it.  I cant seem to get the video to show up either, it keeps saying its corrupted.  I made the muslin out of some old denim scraps which were the thickest thing I had that I was willing to sacrifice.  I also should note that I did not make a muslin of the full length of the cape.  I was only worried about the shoulder, bust and neck fit because those are the only places that are close to the body.  I am satisfied with it and will be cutting out my wool as soon as I can get to it!