Building a Work Wardrobe I'll Actually Wear Beyond the Office | Sewing Diaries

I got the dreaded return-to-office email. The day has finally come. Some people like going to the office, but I'm definitely a work-from-home girly. Much preferred. With that being said, there's nothing really I can do about it. I have a little bit of time before it's fully implemented at my job. In the meantime, I'm trying to ease myself back in, going a little bit more than normal. I just need to start building up my work-wear wardrobe. As you might know, as I've said before, it is small. So with that, we're at the fabric store and we're going to see how many pieces I can make this weekend. I'm getting a little bit of a later start than I was hoping because it is five o'clock Saturday. I went to the fabric store this morning and I was hoping to get a couple of cute clips, doing some fabric shopping. I had in mind what I was looking for, but I instantly got overwhelmed in there. The search was not going my way to begin with, so I just was dialed in, not focusing on filming at all. But we did come out with some good fabrics that I have high hopes for. So the first one is this silk print, and we're just going to make a simple elastic waistband slip skirt with it. And then I got linen fabric that we're going to make a button-down skirt for. And then third, we got this striped shirting fabric that we're going to do another button-down dress. Button-down dresses are my favorite for the office. They're the easiest things to throw on and they look cute. Probably should have done this first thing when I got home, but I need to throw the fabric in the wash, at least the fabric that I can. The silk fabric though is dry clean only. So we're actually going to start with this skirt and I'm going to go ahead and self-drop the pattern, take you along through that process. It is just an elastic waistband. So you really just need your hip measurement for the widest part so you can make sure that it slips on. Okay, so I had every intention of sharing the patterning, but I got cute with it and tried to taper it in slightly at the waist. While it turned out okay, I wasn't a thousand percent in love with the fit and I don't want to lead you astray, but all the sewing steps are going to be the same regardless of the pattern. To be completely honest, I have no idea what the best way is to go about cutting silky fabrics. I've seen people actually physically fold the fabric and then I've seen others just flip the pattern piece over and kind of trace around, cut it out that way. I've also seen people pin the pattern to the fabric to help keep it in place. Silky fabrics shift around a lot. I don't know if I can do that confidently without moving the fabric around too much. So I just put a whole bunch of pattern weights down and I'm hoping that'll do the trick. I also just realized I didn't add hem allowance. Good thing I aired the length on the long side and I plan on doing a narrow hem so it's not going to take up too much fabric. We've got both layers cut out and I don't have a serger to finish off the edges. I don't particularly want to do a zigzag stitch. So we're going to do a French seam and to do that, I'm going to place both pieces wrong sides together initially and sew along both side seams a quarter of an inch. Before jumping into sewing the skirt, I'm going to do a couple of test stitches on some scrap fabric just to make sure my machine settings aren't all wonky and work with the fabric. Got both side seams sewed and to be honest, I could probably have used a smaller needle. I was just impatient and didn't want to have to go get one before I could finish this project. It ended up fine. But like I said, I did my first pass through the side seams and we're doing a French seam so now I'm just going to trim off the excess seam allowance. Not going to lie. One of the main reasons why I did a French seam was so if I ever did take it to the dry cleaners, they wouldn't look at me crazy and it is nicer than a zigzag stitch. Now that we've finally got the body of the skirt sewn together, time to attach the elastic and I'm going to pin this to the waist on the right side of the fabric and then do a zigzag stitch across the top edge. I know I just was talking s*** about zigzag stitches but it's going to be hidden. And let the record show, I'm not opposed to zigzag stitches to finish off seams. I do it for pretty much everything else that I can wash on my own. This is my first piece that I can't throw in the washing machine. Elastic is all sewn and as I mentioned, this is the right side of the fabric so I'm just going to flip this over to the wrong side and give it a little press. This is what the inside is going to look like and that raw edge right here is going to be hidden. And I'm just going to tack the elastic down at the side seam and just stitch in the ditch on both sides. Alright, shall I share the good news or the bad news first? I feel like more often than not, people opt for the bad news first so they can end on a high note. So, I may or may not have messed up or broken my machine. Very unfortunate. It's still functioning. Whether or not I should be using it is another question. When I was finishing up the hem of the skirt, my fabric jammed and the needle nicked something under the machine so now when I'm sewing, there's a clicking noise. So unfortunate. I'm such a bad example but I plan on finishing up my day of sewing tomorrow. Which brings me to the good news is that I was able to finish up the hem of the skirt and now it is all done in all its glory. Here it is. I'll try it on tomorrow. It is very late. Took a lot longer than I was anticipating and I think a lot of it was the hem. It was uneven and so I had to put it on my dress form and hand measure the length from the floor to the bottom of the skirt all the way around and that just... I don't know if there's an easier way to do it than what I was doing but it took me forever. Hopefully the project tomorrow will go a little bit more smoothly because I will be using patterns. With that being said, I'm going to go ahead and take this win one project down. I'm going to call it a night. This sewing marathon has turned into a sewing walkathon real quick. I just got done cutting my pattern pieces for the next project which is going to be the linen skirt and it is pretty much 2 o'clock. I've just come to terms with the fact that not everything is going to get done this weekend and that's okay. I'm fine with that. As for the skirt pattern, I just used the skirt part of a dress pattern that I already had and then I'm just going to add a waistband on top. The dress pattern isn't meant to be fitted and so I just looked at the sizing chart and the final garment measurements to figure out what size I would need in order to be fitted on my waist, if that even makes sense. So I've got my outer layer fabric and lining fabric because it is pretty see-through and my darts are marked out so we're going to start with that. I've got 8 darts total to sew. I sewed the dart on the wrong side of one of the lining pieces so now I've got a seam rip and redo it. Sometimes sewing requires a little bit of mental gymnastics because with the skirt there's two things that I knew slash wanted. One is that the lining had to be incorporated in the button plackets some way somehow because that's the way that you're going to get it on and off. And then two, I wanted the hem of the outer layer and lining to be separate. So I kind of thought about it a little bit and realized the hem of the lining had to be a little bit shorter than the outer layer so that when I eventually hemmed the outer layer it would still be longer than the lining. And I did hem the lining before doing all this placket situation because once I sewed down the placket it would catch the hem of the lining and I wouldn't be able to then hem it if the raw edge was left here. So I hemmed it before and it's looking like that worked out. My whole plan of getting these three projects done in a weekend went out the window. I do still want to do the dress in this video so we're just going to work on that as I can throughout the week. I honestly, I didn't even finish this skirt. I still have to do the buttonholes and sew the buttons on. Made some decent progress, I just got sidetracked through the day. I don't think I'm going to push myself to finish up the buttons tonight. It'll be tomorrow's problem. An embarrassing amount of time has passed since I last worked on these projects. Oh my god. But we're getting back to it and we're going to wrap them up. The skirt is done. A couple of comments. For whatever reason, for the top buttons, I decided to sew the buttonholes horizontally and so while it fits, while the buttons are at its tightest position, when I put it on it slides out. Not a very good look. Having stepped away and come back, I could probably change the placement of the buttons so that when it is in its kind of widest position, the plackets are in line with each other. Maybe I'll give that a go. Secondly, I have come to realize the importance of interfacing and should not have excluded it from my plackets because as you can see, the buttonhole area is warped and I do believe that interfacing would have provided the stability needed to combat some of that warping. Lessons learned for next time. Alternatively, could have easily have done faux buttons and an invisible zipper, which I had contemplated after the fact as well. Anyway, moving on to the dress, I may or may not have done some sewing without you. So sorry. Not too much. At least not, well, kind of a decent amount. A couple of considerations though when it came to putting the dress together. In the pattern that I used, you sew the bodice and the skirt separately and then attach it at the waist. However, since my fabric is striped, I wanted to have one continuous pattern piece. And so for that, because there's darts, I had to work around that. The back bodice has two darts on the waist and the back skirt has two darts on the waist. That part was easy. I could align those and then cut one continuous piece out for the back panel. The front, however, has darts on the bust, none on the waist. The skirt has darts on the waist. Therefore, the bottom of the bodice was shorter than the top of the skirt. Initially, I had cut the bodice up the middle and spread it out, which was not the right way to go about things because I realized, luckily before I started sewing, it made the front bodice portion a lot wider than I would have wanted it to be. I then realized the more appropriate way to go about it is to reposition the dart. So I cut the dart out of the bust, added a slit in the waist, and then spread out the bodice piece to match it up with the skirt that way. Good to go. When it was time to start sewing, first of all, added interfacing to the button placket. Second of all, this was my first time sewing these dual-ended darts. I don't know if there's a technical term for that, but in order to sew those, I just pinned the dart as I would have normally and then did two seams, each starting from the widest section of the dart sewing down to one point and then a second seam sewing down to the opposite point. With the body of the dress sewn, at this point, we just have to attach the collar collar stand, sleeves, and then hem. We're sewing the collar first and I wanted to share this little trick that I learned to get super pointy corners. So when you get to the corner, stop with the needle down, lift the presser foot up and slide a piece of thread in between the layers of fabric so that it's right up against the needle. Lower the presser foot, move the needle one stitch, lift the presser foot up one more time and swing the end of the thread that's on the seam allowance side back in between the layers of fabric. So now both tails are on the same side and rotate to continue sewing. Now we've got the two tails of the thread sticking out of the fabric that you can pull to pop the corners out. Just be sure to pull both threads at the same time or else it will slip out. I don't use pattern fabric a whole lot, so I'm having to look up what a striped shirt dress looks like to get some ideas as to what direction the stripes are supposed to go for particular pattern pieces. For example, I've yet to cut out the sleeves, so I'm trying to figure out aesthetically what directions the stripes need to go, and this is a dress that we have found to go off of. If you can hear some grunting in the background, it is my dog as he's carrying a big stick in his mouth trying to find a place to hide it. I guess my fabric is as good a spot as any, huh? Alright, let's get these sleeves cut out and attach to the dress. Ooh, that sounds like I was cutting my ruler. Can we take a moment to appreciate the pattern matching on the shoulder seam?