Re: Art, Craft and Needlework, October 2017
Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 7:45 pm
This little vest was a puzzle, but our Toy Story Woody is happy. This photo is over the only gold colored kid's shirt at my house, but you get the idea. The gold shirt he'll wear is long sleeve with button-down collar and tucks in to jeans.
No time to order black-and-white stripe binding (it is available, but from Europe!) so I made my own with sharpie marker on white binding. It was like a series of geometry problems, though! A right angle for the stripes wasn't enough - it has to be a sharper angle than that or on bias it will still look too straight. Then, when I first started, I had to learn that if marker got on the part of the binding that would tuck under, the fold turned it in another diagonal direction and it showed through.
The cording turned out to make very little difference in how the vest looked, so I didn't bother. The stripe of the binding (supposed to look like leather strips sewn diagonally, I think) is like an optical illusion that keeps you from appreciating that it's rounded.
Final problem was that in the photos of Woody, the trim stripes point in opposite directions on the opposite sides of his vest front. I thought that was because the same pattern travels up one side and down the other - noooooo, not that simple. After making a U-turn at the neck, the stripes won't point opposite ways, but the SAME way and look wrong. Armhole trim is tricky, too. So I drew half the binding with stripes going one way and half the other, "reversing" at back of neck and an underarm seam. If a tailor or seamstress goes up to him from the back and thinks "oh, how neatly this was seamed at neck", it will mean a double-take to see that it's really marker!
French seams at shoulders and sides of vest were a great timesaver again - no need to line it. I absolutely love that.
No time to order black-and-white stripe binding (it is available, but from Europe!) so I made my own with sharpie marker on white binding. It was like a series of geometry problems, though! A right angle for the stripes wasn't enough - it has to be a sharper angle than that or on bias it will still look too straight. Then, when I first started, I had to learn that if marker got on the part of the binding that would tuck under, the fold turned it in another diagonal direction and it showed through.
The cording turned out to make very little difference in how the vest looked, so I didn't bother. The stripe of the binding (supposed to look like leather strips sewn diagonally, I think) is like an optical illusion that keeps you from appreciating that it's rounded.
Final problem was that in the photos of Woody, the trim stripes point in opposite directions on the opposite sides of his vest front. I thought that was because the same pattern travels up one side and down the other - noooooo, not that simple. After making a U-turn at the neck, the stripes won't point opposite ways, but the SAME way and look wrong. Armhole trim is tricky, too. So I drew half the binding with stripes going one way and half the other, "reversing" at back of neck and an underarm seam. If a tailor or seamstress goes up to him from the back and thinks "oh, how neatly this was seamed at neck", it will mean a double-take to see that it's really marker!
French seams at shoulders and sides of vest were a great timesaver again - no need to line it. I absolutely love that.
