Made some more progress on the vest
over the last few days.
The first thing I needed to do was
permanently secure the interfacing to the insides of my pattern pieces. If you
recall from my previous post, I’d pinned them all together in preparation for
this step. The actual process is pretty simple: you lay the pieces out on an
ironing board with the interfacing side up, place a damp cloth over top of
them, and then press with an iron. This activates the adhesive on the
interfacing to secure it to the fabric. It’s recommended to leave the iron in
place for 10-15 seconds, then lift it off the cloth, move to a new section, and
then place it back down. This helps to prevent the interfacing from
accidentally shifting around, which could happen if you try gliding the iron
around, and gives the adhesive time to heat up enough to work.
That being done, there are several
features that need to be located on the vest front, such as: pockets, buttons, button
holes, and darts. The locations of all of these things are on the patterns, but
of course I needed some way to accurately transfer them to the fabric. What I
ended up doing was laying the patterns over the fabric pieces and poking holes
through the paper to mark the start and end points of each line with a pencil
(I chose a pencil because I didn’t want to take a chance on ink bleeding
through the front of the fabric and crayons wouldn’t be sharp enough to poke
through the paper without destroying it – I hope I made the right call!). Since
the interfacing is white, the pencil marks showed up well enough to be useable.
Then I used a ruler to draw the lines connecting the points (which will
represent stitch lines and cut lines for later).
Once that was done, the pattern
instructions said to start by sewing the darts. For those who don’t know, darts
are folds in the fabric that you stitch in to provide some shaping. In this
case, they take the form of the long, narrow wedges you see below.
Because these are so narrow that I
wasn’t confident of being able to do them on the machine, I decided to hand
stitch them. And let me tell you: that can be pretty tedious. The process took
me about three hours, though I wasn’t working very efficiently on account of watching
TV, eating dinner, and responding to a toddler’s repeated requests for food and
drink throughout the process. But I completed the darts, and then the next step
was to press them flat with an iron.
So that’s where I am as of today.
The next step is working on the pockets.
Cost of
supplies: $82
Time:
15hrs
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