Coming Back

I can't believe I haven't posted for over two years; that's quite break! My dad and mom needed all the attention I could give.  My dad passed away and my mom had to rebuild her life without him.  It's only in the last few months that I've fired up the sewing machines and created some joy again.  Late last November, I received a call for help from the Chatham Fantasy Theater.  They were a month away from opening, and their costume designer abandoned them with no work done. It was a great excuse to throw myself into the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg and move on.

When I met the director, Eric Hofstadter, he told me that the lead roles of the play were five chickens and a goose.  I almost fell over as I came to understand that the actors were teenagers all just over 5' high.  Eric didn't want the costumes to look like one of those guys you see outside of Mr. Bojangles.  After drawing some sketches on blue line, we decided on making paper mache masks and fully articulated wings.  The actors themselves would become puppets and bring their characters to life.  Here are the results of those musings on paper:

The set of wings consisted of 26 feathers, which were simple white cotton sewn on a 14-guage electrical ground wire.  There were two types of feathers whose shapes were borrowed from studies I'd found of actual bird wings.  Real wings are actually much more sophisticated in number, shape and layering.. but hey, my chickens didn't need to fly.  The feathers were attached to a harness made of elastic.  The harness had a pivot joint at the elbow and straps over the shoulders to pull the wings up.  I'd have been dead if not for my trusty commercial Singer 20U33 with #16 needles.  You haven't lived until you hit a 14-guage wire at speed and bust a needle.  Many needles gave their lives in this production, and each one sounded like a gunshot followed by much cursing.  The longer feathers were 34" long.  Easy to sew until you reach the end of the feather and need to turn to go back the other way. To cover the harness, I cut a simple 36" radius circle with a 6" hole in the center for the head.  The pants were simple shorts with elastic bands and creative cutting.  

Not so easy to see in the picture above, but have you ever run out and tried to buy six pairs of ladies cotton knee high socks?  They were no place to be found!!  In a panic, I went to the Short Hills NJ Victoria Secret.  VS helped once before finding vintage garter belts (don't ask.) They didn't have the socks, but VS sent me to Lord & Taylor who did.  The wonders of Rit Dye cannot be over praised! White socks became five pairs of yellow and one of orange.  Add five pairs of rubber chicken feet and voila! I had to sew up goose feet myself.

The masks were another adventure entirely.  To approximate the size of a teenage head, I used a mini-basketball and aluminum foil.  The eyes of the mask are made from cardboard egg cartons.  To make the crop stand up, I bought a roll of plastic leaf gutter guard at the local Home Depot and hot glued it to the head, then hot glued felt to the gutter guard.  Gesso paint covered the newsprint no problem, and took the color acrylic paint well.

There were other costumes, but these were pulled from the theater's stock room and then modified for the play.  Except for a 1980s designer dress that was originally made by International Pleating.  I added a long underskirt, cooked up a head piece, and hoped the audience would buy the illusion.

We had five shows and many in the audience were children who'd never seen a live performance.  On a small scale, the play was a big success.  The costume budget was extremely low and the producer was able to give a glowing financial report to the theater trustees.  After the play, the producer of The Three Musketeers asked me if I could come back and help. We open in May.  But first, I have a shirt to make and some puppet head bags to finish.

Post Mortem - Ebenezer's Housecoat

Early in May I took on the assignment of making a replacement coat for the character Ebenezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol" to be produced by the Chatham Theater in December.  I did my best to copy the coat to tracing paper and then transferring the pattern to muslin pieces.

The original coat is over 30 years old.  It had been let out numerous times and there were generations of repairs.  There was a total breakdown in communications between me and the costume designer for the play.  I wasn't until just weeks before the opening of the play that I learned what the actor's size would be roughly a size 53.  I was further directed to provide a 1" seam allowance without grading so that the coat could be let out more if needed.  The coat was to be fully lined, which is unusual for stage.  The fabric was a velvet upholstery, and I hadn't made a coat like this before.  From reading books on tailoring, I learned that an important element of creating the body of a coat is the undercollar.  The undercollar provides the shaping for the outer collar and pulls together the front and back pieces.

I wish I had taken more pictures of the under collar construction.  I had a fairly stiff interfacing and did padstitching (about five close parallel stitch lines in a slight arc from the center back to the seamline) to shape the collar and then diagonal quilting lines from the outer padstitch line to the seam.  The collar had a full rounded look that I thought was pleasing.

I made a muslin for fitting the actor.  Unfortunately, we was wearing a heavy sweater and had little arm movement at the fitting so the designer directed me to roll the sleeves back in the armhole.  When I returned with a first cut of the coat in the final fabric, the actor was wearing only a T-shirt.  The designer directed me to cut the yoke of the coat back 1/2" on each side.  I knew then that reducing a yoke by 1" was going to be trouble.  On the second fitting, the actor didn't have arm movement again so the designer directed me to reduce the seam allowances to 1/2".  By this point, I'd had it, especially with the show opening 1 week away.

The coat's original design was a rumply affair to begin with, but with the many changes the coat took on a life of its own and got away from me.  The dress form I have is a size 40, so it was really a struggle for me to see how the coat would look at all.  In the end, I gave up and turned the coat over to the designer along with the leftover yardage.  After the play closed I learned that the designer never used the new coat, as it was too much of a departure from the old coat.  She really wanted a perfect knock off of the old coat.

A couple of weeks ago, I joined the Yahoo Group GBACGCostumers (Greater Bay Area Costumers Guild).  One of the members mentioned finding a pattern for a "Prince Albert" Skirted Frock Coat on the Birch Street Clothing site.  As the member said, I found a Laughing Moon pattern # 109 and the great treasure Mr. Lars Malmberg, proprietor.  I purchased the coat pattern to sanity check my own copied pattern, a Birch Street pattern for a reversible bolero jacket,  Birch Street pattern for a reversible Vest, and #106 Folkwear Turkish Coat.  The Turkish coat also provides Trapunto designs for all the borders, so I might be consulting with my mom on trapunto again.

There is an interesting twist to the story.  The actor was Alan Semok a/k/a The Dummy Doctor.  During the fittings, he liked the coat.  He wanted the sleeves kept long, the designer cut them back.  He wanted an inside pocket; I made sure he got his pocket.  Alan asked me if I would be interested in making clothes for ventriloquial dummies and puppets.  In a heartbeat, I said I would love to!  Very soon I hope to meet Alan in his workshop. 

In the next entries, I will tell you about my trip to the Merrow Machine Company , Fall River, MA where I met the present owners Mr. Owen Merrow and Mr. Charles Merrow, descendents of the original Mr. Merrow.  And just today in the NYC Garment District, I visited Elliott Berman Textiles, where Eugenia presented me with a double gauze cotton print from France that I bought for a future shirt, and visited the International Pleating Company where I met George Kalajian.  You've got to check out Geroge's blog and his store on Etsy, both linked from the company website.

Good night!

Sewing for Community Theater

My last post on October 7th was about the reviews of the 39 Steps, a fantastic comedy that I was fortunate to be the costume designer for. 

Costume Design is really not for people who love to sew.  It is about understanding the play, the characters, the set and the illusion the actors and the director want to bring to life.  Costume Design is just as much about collaboration, project and budget management as it is using space, line, shape, form light, and texture to manipulate scraps of fabric into costume.  I'd have been dead from the beginning had it not been for the kindness of Andrea Sickler, the stage manager, who handed me a costume plan she'd saved from a production of the show she had done two years ago.

 

From this simple listing of items of clothing each character would need, I crafted a detailed spreadsheet plan which cross referenced the characters, actors sizes, and desired characteristics of the costumes.  I could change the sort of the spreadsheet by character, or size, of type of garment. Here's an excerpt:

 

The Chatham Theater has a wonderful collection of costumes that is decades old.  Most costume designers prefer to rent the entire collection of costumes pre-packaged for the play they are working on.  'Cabaret?  Oh, call up the costume company and rent that package.'  It did briefly cross my mind to do that, but with a small warehouse filled with beautiful things I could not bear to incur the expense of renting.  So with the producer, the stage production manager, and another costume designer, we ventured into the vault and came out with some 150 items.  The 39 Steps is a play with four actors who portray over 40 characters in just two hours.  Let that sink in.  In many parts of the play, there are really only seconds between costume changes.  In fact, actors often traded costumes right on stage.  It's something of a trick for a milkman's jacket to not look too large on a small frame actor, and then not too small on a large frame actor, but that is what we were able to pull off.

To help organize the costumes, I created a category and numbering system.  Items were linked to characters, and to positions on rolling pipe racks.  As the play progressed, the dressers could pick off the rack the costume combination for the next character.

The elements of design came to the forefront in finding costume pieces that would signal the character to the audience.  The actors were a huge help to me.  "I want to be mysterious, sexy, and funny."  OK... black suit, jacket with a peplum, tilted hat with a long feather, a mink wrap (hey $5 from the Goodwill!).

  "I want to be the wife of a country farmer who dreams of life in the city."  OK... earthy tone clothing, modest, slightly contrast colored apron, light prints and solids.

 "I want to be a professional women.. a suffragette of sorts."  OK.. violet colored suit with black piping. 

There was a scene in which "Pamela" had to taken off her wet stockings to dry by the fire.  Sounds easy.  Do you know where to get vintage ladies stockings and garter belt?  Most ladies stockings today come with elastic sewn in at the top, and most garter belts sold are really not functional.  I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when we found an ancient box of vintage nylon stockings in the costume vault, but then I thought I slipped into Hell when I picked up a garter belt and it disintegrated in my hands.  It took weeks to find a garter belt.  On an early Sunday morning, I appeared at the Rockaway outlet of Victoria's Secret with my actresses measurements.  The young ladies weren't sure what to make of a 60-year old guy looking for a garter belt, but they directed me to a very emphathetic garter belt specialist.  At the bottom of a drawer, pushed to the back, was a real garter belt.. a damned fine sexy one too!  The belt played a key comic moment in the play.

  I might mention that just a few weeks later Victoria's Secret would come to the rescue again in Manhattan when they gave their massive fashion show generators to the National Guard during the weeks after Sandy.

The play's Director, Bell Wesel, was a live wire.  She had a creative vision that I was never able to fathom because I was down in the dirt of the details while she was trying to bring on the laughs.  At one point, she told me one of the characters needed a fez.  He needed to be smarmy, but funny too.  A fez is not something you can go down to Walmart an buy off the shelf. 

Through the magic of eBay, I found the perfect fez.  The problem was that it was in Turkey.  In fact, I needed two.  One for the actor and a second for a dummy dress like the actor which would be thrown down from a box above the stage after the appropriate gun shot.  I sweated big bullets waiting for the box to come from Turkey, but they came just days before we needed them.

If you're wondering, I did do some sewing.  Much of it alterations.  For the two clowns, I sewed two black shirts.  The collars had only a stand with a velcro strip to ring the actor's neck.  I made several dickies.. a tux shirt with bow tie sewn on.. a policeman's shirt with gold braid dark blue tie.. a loud salesman's shirt with ties to make you sick.  As it turns out, only the tux dickies made it into final production.  For most of the play, the clowns simply wore the base black shirt. [sigh]

Of the many people who helped me, Beverly Wand, gave me the encouragement to make it happen when I thought things were slipping out of control.  Beverly won the 2012 NJACT Perry Award for Outstanding Costume Design (The Grapes of Wrath.) She was right there to help pull a set of marching band hats out of the sky when the tartan golf caps I'd found didn't cut it for Belle.  After the play ended and it was time to put the costumes away, I came down with a nasty flu and she put everything away herself.  I still feel badly about letting her down.

One day I hope again to be the costume designer for a play.  After 39 Steps, I assisted Julia Sharp, who was doing the costume design for The Wizard of Oz, and Fran Harrison, costume design for A Christmas Carol.  For Wizard, I helped make 22 hats that are 3' wide poppies.  For Carol, I made a coat for Ebenezer Scrooge.

More on these tomorrow... g'night

39 Steps Opens and the Reviewers were kind!

Even as the folks were out front purchasing their tickets and taking their seats, I and Beverly Wand were in the back making last second repairs, moving clasps, sewing on bits of velcro.  It becomes surreal in a way to sew on small squares of black velcro on ivory blouses and thinking 'hey, this is pretty good.. they'll never see it from 20' away.'  The director brought in three costume pieces she'd sewed herself just hours before to replace finished pieces that we've been rehearsing with for weeks.  I looked for cuffs on the sleeves; there were none.  The fabric was simply folded up into the sleeve.  The actor looked at me white faced and wondering how was he going to keep the cuffs from rolling out to bare fabric on the stage.  I don't think I have ever hand basted cuffs up as fast as that ever.  It was really hard not to break out laughing right then.  We had such a great production team there was no panic, screaming, crying .. it was essential to keep our actors in the highest spirits.

The show did go on and we all had a lot of fun, despite the craziness of the last few weeks.  The reviews have all been very good for us.  The company took an enormous chance putting on this play.  So far, the audiences have been delighted.  It is a good feeling, but there are little repairs already to make and a couple of weeks of performances to go. 

My blog posts have been a little out of sorts.  I started with planning the play, and now I've posted the opening reviews.  Over the next couple of weeks, I will write more about what happened in between.  G'night!

Opening this Friday.. leave wits at home

Here it is October 1st and I haven't posted since the end of August.  A few days ago, Peter Lappin (Male Pattern Boldness) commented on MIA bloggers who dropped out six months ago.. where did they go?

Sewing for theater is unlike anything that one might consider normal for sewing.  It is sewing for fantasy .. for an instant when a garment makes illusion plausible.  It is a black worn-with-holes London Fog raincoat that helps the audience pretend the character is a policeman chasing our hero by climbing out the window of a moving train and hanging on the outside of the car for dear life in blowing wind and rain.

After opening night, I will write about the steps of making the costumes for the 39 Steps.  For now, I'll leave you with a tantalizing picture of the stage curtain I made.  The theater itself is a thrust arrangement.  This play calls for a proscenium arrangement, so the stage crew (of volunteers) built a faux proscenium complete with upper level side boxes .. the characters play the part of audience too.  The stage crew had bought 40 yards of fire retardant 118" wide curtain fabric, but the sewing of the curtain was estimated to be $500+.  This is BIG money in community theater.  So I volunteered to make the curtain.  I thought it would be a simple hemming job and done, but this would have looked like hanging a bed sheet.  The fabric guy told the stage crew that a 3" box pleat with 12" centers would look good.. try figuring out the math on how much fabric it takes to make two curtains 12' high and 20' wide (each) with 3" box pleats on 12" centers.  Answer 50% more than the width.  Do you know what it's like to cut 118" wide heavy fabric into 12'+ lengths, sew seams that long, and then sew box pleats from 30' of fabric down to 20'?  It took about 12 hours to lay out, measure, cut, and sew the fabric.  It would have taken less, but I had troubles with my sailrite sewing machine.. not the machine, me, the dumb sewer who got used to the way a Pfaff works.  And Peter wonders why bloggers vanish into the night? 

The curtain is ready to open.  The curtain itself plays a part in the play.  It completes the illusion of a real stage.

If you're wondering, most of what I've done is alterations to old clothes.  I've made a few pieces that could not be bought or rented at any price .. like a black & white striped ascot.  Actually, a pair .. one for the actor and a another for the dummy.  I don't want to spoil it, so I'll say no more.  Come to the theater to see the 39 Steps.. study your Hitchcock so you won't miss a thing.

Curtain Up, Act One

Forgive me for writing so little of late.  My pursuit of the stitching art has taken me in a new direction.  A couple of weeks ago, the producer of Chatham Theater's upcoming production of The 39 Steps asked me to take on the role of Costume Designer.  It was an opportunity that I didn't imagine would come to me, so I seized the moment and have been running with it since.

 

The play opens October 5th and will run through October 19th.  The 39 Steps was one of the longest running comedies on Broadway during the 1990s.  It's a zany take off on Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller of 1935 with four actors playing 34 characters in 33 scenes.  In our play, the part of Richard Hannay will be played by David Cantor, pictured here in costume for another play.

And the lovely, Ericka Knight, who is a regular with the New Jersey Shakespeare Theater, will be playing the parts of Annabelle, Pamela, and Margaret.

And as to be expected, we have two "clowns", Chip Prestera and Glenn Post who play the other 30 parts!  

Over the next few weeks, I'll write about my first experience as a costume designer (I can't believe I am writing that at all!) and hope I can give you an idea of the fun community theater can be and bring.

A play closes, another begins

Saturday was a tough day for me.  My little queen of the house, Xena Warrior Princess, aged 16 died.  She suffered a stroke on Friday night and quickly declined through the night.  I adopted her as a 'senior' schipperke rescue almost six years ago.  For all those years, she was my dearest friend and a fierce 17-pound watch dog who could easily make anyone believe she was five times larger.  On our daily walks, she took particular joy in facing down a neighborhood akita.  I've never seen so much courage in such a little package.  I will miss her feisty fidelity and must admit shed tears for her loss.

Later in the day, I finished the linen shirt I've been working on so I could wear it to see my Sally Bowles robe in Cabaret that night.  Katherine Le Fevre's portrayal of Sally Bowles rivaled that of Liza Minelli.  Of course, I am biased by Katherine's performance of the song Maybe This Time, while wearing the robe I'd made for the play.  The show closed Saturday night to a packed house.  Afterward, I joined the cast for a farewell 2012 season party on stage.  During the party, Fran Harrison, costume designer, enlisted me in her next project. The Chatham Players have produced  A Christmas Carol almost every year since 1988.  Let me tell you, Scrooge's current robe has seen better days! I will be sewing a new robe for Ebenezer Scrooge for the 2012-13 Season production.  Sally Bowles' robe was a cake walk compared to this costume.

A new queen, Roxie, now takes Xena's place.  Roxie is another senior rescue that I have had for about four years.  She has always had to compete for attention with the dominant Xena.  At age 14, Roxie's moment has arrived.

We shall see what we do with the opportunities given to us. Good night!

Cabaret Review

Cabaret received a great review and my Sally Bowles robe sort of made it in one of the photo shots of the play.

I think it looks better under the stage lights than my hallway light. :-)  Can't wait to go see the play!

Sample No. 2 done... next!

Today I finished the hem of sample robe no. 2 in about 30 minutes. It took much less time than I imagined because I'd cut the fabric more carefully than the fabric had been cut for me in the Sally Bowles final version. The fabric itself was much more forgiving than the slippery shiny impossible to see the grain.

It's time for me to shift my thinking on what to sew next. My pick dogwood is blooming again. It's a few weeks early and we've had almost drought like conditions since January. The blooms were so few last year that I hired a tree expert to trim it and treat it.

Maybe sometime I'll come across fabric that captures the beauty of this tree, or at least hints at it.

Thinking about my next project. I have three in mind: Burda 7291, Burda 7525, and Green Pepper 402. Now that the warm weather is returning, I've started cycling again. All my jerseys are either yellow or some combination of red-white-blue. I'd like to do something really different, but I won't know what it is until I see it.

I already have the patterns, but only the fabric for the Burda patterns. I may go fabric shopping tomorrow for the jersey. I like 7291, but I won't be able to wear it until the Fall. I have a linen that I'd like to use for view C of 7525. Decisions.. decisions. G'Night!

What two hours looks like

I decided to finish my sample robe #2. When I looked at the bottom hem this morning, I realized I hadn't turned in the edge, sewed it, and turned it inside out. This meant carefully ripping open the seam that enclosed the edge and then closing up the edge. Easier said than done. I did one side and then the other quickly. I closed it up and Voila! my two edges were different lengths. OYE!

I can't tell you how many iterations I went through of measuring, ironing, sewing, ripping, measuring ironing again... you get the idea. After sinking a couple of hours into it, I think it's as good as I'm going to make it. Next I need to close up the bottom hem. I think I should take bets on how long that will take.

How do we get into a sewing tailspin like this? Does it always end in a crash and burn ?

G'night!

Showtime for Sally Bowles' Robe

Do I bitch and moan about the fabric? Do I wonder if the tension was a little too tight on my Singer? Is my memory playing tricks with me as I thought I did a seam just fine, only to see it again a day later and wonder if it's crooked? One of my personal work rules is that I know I'm done when I think I've done about as much as I can to get it right and I'm sick of looking at it. I have crossed that boundary with this fully lined robe.

I finished the bottom hem. About three times I think. It depends on whether one counts basting and pinning as a valid attempt. I did stitch the hem once. Despite the baste stitches, when the machine stitch was done I somehow lost 1/2" somewhere along the 5' length of the hem. I ripped out the seam (actually I use a curved Olfa razor, which I highly recommend now but was skeptical about when I first got it as a present from my dearest), and did it over. The third attempt was better. The actress who will wear it is human. No doubt her body is not mannequin perfect. If one shoulder slumps even slightly, intentionally or not, and if I'm off 1/4", the audience should not notice from 25' away. I hope.

Learnings from this particular robe: rotary cutters are much more precise than hand scissors, fabric that frays like mad after its cut is a tip off that one will have big trouble at high stitch rates, and poly-nylon blends absolutely do not play well with steam irons.

Since I've started to sew, I've always used an Olfa cutter. I do have a pair of Kai scissors that are so sharp I have wounded myself on several occasions but I only use them where it's impossible to use the rotary. Fran cut the fabric for this robe, which was a wonderful time-saving gift to me. Unfortunately, I am so used to the non-ragged edges that I tend to average the seam allowance as I'm stitching. Evil things happen to the stitch line! I like having a precise continuous cut that I can guide along my tape line on the machine bed. Cranky old guy? Guilty as charged.

For my own sewing, I stick to natural fiber fabric, mostly cotton and a little wool. I know what it's going to do under the needle. Generally, my iron is a magic wand to working out imperfections. Polyester-Nylon .. forget about it! It has a mind of its own under the needle and argues with the iron even about taking simple creases. The edges frayed almost as fast as I could stitch up the seams. The fuzz would actually wrap itself around the presser foot and attempt to snag the fabric. I had to crank my machine down to its slowest speed to avoid havoc on the table.

I hope the lights aren't too hot for my actress. This robe doesn't breathe at all. Well, at least it's colorful and has a brilliant shine. The thing will absolutely dazzle under the high beams. I just want her to look good.

What do you think?

G'night.

Happy Easter - The Cabaret Robe comes together

It's a quiet Easter Sunday. My family are scattered around the globe and my parents prefer no visits on the holidays, so I worked on the final version of the robe for Cabaret. I've got it all together except for the bottom hem. The edging fabric was 4 inches short.

The edging is finished. I can either hem the robe to the bottom of the edging, so it will be even. On the other hand, I can hem it 2" below the edging which will give it a notched look; sort of an oriental touch. I've asked the costume designer what she wants. What do you think? Even or Notched?

There's a bit of distortion in the full length picture I took. The edging fabric is highly reflective and bounced the flash enough to disturb some pixels.
G'night

Test Robe No. 2

If I count the little doll robe I wrote about on 3/14, then this full sized version of the Sally Bowles robe would be Robe #2. When I made the robe's front band/collar into a belt, the show's costume designer must have had heart failure because the fabric was her last 10' long 4" strip. Not to worry, I carefully ripped the stiches out and pressed the fabric flat again. So it was important to me to see how the front band went on the robe because I'd made my doll robe without it. Wouldn't you know it, I screwed it up. After a little panic I fixed it .. well, made it better.

Forgive me, but I've never done a fully lined robe before. Following the instructions from a YouTube on making a fully lined little girl's pajama top, I decided to sew my seams on the shell and the lining one-for-one slowly closing up the garment one seam at a time. First the shoulder seams, then the sleeve seams on both shell and lining. THEN I slipped the lining inside the shell. The next seam was the front seam sewing both the shell and the lining together.

I knew I had to get the front band in that seam, but really got it wrong. I stitched each edge of the band to a matching edge on the shell and the lining. Somehow I imagined that I could press a crease in the band to solve the puzzle. The result was more of an expansion joint. Then I realized I should have sewed it like corded piping between two pieces of fabric (RS to RS), and then flipped it inside out. I lined up my two stitch lines as best I could and sewed through. I ended up stitching three times instead of once.

After the front band was done, I pulled through the sleeves and sewed the cuff seams, followed by the sleeve seams. After the sleeves were done, and I was satisfied that I hadn't twisted them (a lesson from the doll robe, then I sewed the side seams.. shell and then lining. I think there's a specific order to sewing the seams of a fully lined garment. I am told, no I could have sewed shell and lining completely first, slip one inside the other, and sew up the cuffs. I still can't get my mind wrapped around that approach. This worked, I'm not fooling with it.

I left the bottom hem open so I can get inside if needed after we fit the actress. For weird fabric, I think it came out pretty good for a test robe. Now I wait to hear if the show designer thinks so.

Good night!

Plodding Along on the Robe

I could swear I'm making this robe more complicated than it needs to be. I could not wrap my mind around making the robe lined with all seams to the inside. I made a small doll size sample to work out the order of sewing the seams.

By midnight last night I'd worked it out. Most sewers say "just make the outer shell and the lining completely, and then slip one inside the other wrong sides together, sew the seams, turn right sides out. Could it be so simple? I tried a basted version of my doll and it just twisted up into a ball. Notice that the lining of the sleeves peek out. Well, that seam needs to be sewn before turning to right side out, and remember the lining extends up the sleeve. I either had the lining with a 180 dg twist or I had the shoulders with a nasty twist too.

What worked: sew the should seams first on both lining and shell, then the sleeves to each. With right sides together, sew the outer edge up the front, across the collar, and down the other front edge. Then turn the garment so right sides are out. Between the shell and the lining, pull the sleeves wrong side out, and sew the cuff, and then the sleeve seam. Pull the sleeves through so right sides are out. Next sew the side seams, and then the bottom seam. I think.

I'll try again on a full size sample.

Today I bought a vintage commercial Bernina 850 from a lovely lady in Bayonne. It's part of my long term plan to turn this into a little business. She only had the head and its accessories for sale, so I need to track down a table and a DC servo motor for it.

G'night!