Underoos!

Isn't it wonderful the things you can do for yourself with a little knowledge? I've been studying pattern drafting since around 2007 under Don McCunn and have never been successful making something for myself from a custom pattern until now. It's not pants or a shirt, but of all things, underwear.

Until I started getting comfortable sewing knits, I thought underwear would be difficult to make and sort of scoffed at the idea of making it. But it turns out that it's one of the easiest things you can sew, and there are good reasons for making your own. We'll start with size:

You may have noticed in the top picture that these panties look big. Here they are with purchased size 5's laid over them. Look at the difference! Looking at this, you'd be inclined to think that I've been buying the wrong size, but 6 is too loose on me. Manufacturers purposefully make the underwear stretch like this in order to fit as many people as possible. Not only does this make comfortable pairs hard to find, it wears them out faster. When people make custom fitted underwear, they're surprised at how big they are and somewhat dismayed to find out that their proportions are not as small as they thought they were, including me.

The other big reason is comfort. Everything is where you need it to be instead of riding and bunching. No more digging! It's amazing how much more comfortable these are than purchased ones. I forget I have them on. When they're fitted properly, they don't leave those deep marks on skin after they're removed. You can get as much coverage as you need without looking like granny panties.

If you'd like to make panties, check out Don's blog and classes. But hurry, classes are being discontinued in 2013.

Update: turns out you do need all that negative ease. The pants kept getting pulled down all the time so I finally sewed big tucks into the waistbands to reduce them.

Finally, finishes for knits that don't look home made

Knits can be trouble. Because they stretch, they want to stretch as they go under your presser foot resulting in puckered, stretched, or lettuce-edged seams and edgings that look horrible at worst and home made at best. Here are some things I've found that help create professional looking finishes.

First of all, if you have a walking foot, use it. My primary machine is a Pfaff 1471 with a built in walking foot, but because this pulls from behind the foot rather that in front, I still had stretching when I sewed. A really good combination is Singer's rubber feed dogs (on older models) with the even feed foot. This has the capacity for extremely precise sewing, especially on difficult fabrics, as long as the machine will tolerate the fabric.

Secondly, make liberal use of laundry starch and let it dry before continuing. This seems to take forever and ironing doesn't speed up the process much. Sometimes spray starch is enough but other times it can be enormously helpful to make up a batch of Argo starch and dip your fabric in it before it is cut. The starch really helps control rolling edges and gives body to unruly lightweights that machines sometimes struggle with. However, my Singer combination described above just would not tolerate the lightweight T shirt knit shown below (this was before I learned about using boiled starch). Fortunately, my primary machine did, but if your machine is struggling there are a few things you can try. The only one I know off the top of my head is to sandwich the fabric between layers of tissue paper. Another thing that might help is to decrease presser foot pressure.

For edgestitching, adjust your needle position so you get as much fabric as possible under the foot. And obviously, you should be using ball point needles. Most knits require a seaming stitch with width, but if a straight stitch is used, it can be advantageous to use the straight stitch foot and throat plate.

Hemlines

I did some internet research for hemming knits and almost every site recommended stitching the hem with a twin needle and woolly nylon in the bobbin. Even Nancy Zieman says to do it this way. The combination of zigzaging and built in stretch of the woolly nylon is supposed to give the seam a lot of stretch. Maybe it's just me, but every time I try to do this, I end up with a tuck between rows of stitching. Even if I manage to stabilize the fabric enough to stay flat during the stitching, as soon as I flex the seam, the tuck appears and won't go away. After lots and lots of experimentation, I came up with a good, flat hem solution for casual garments.

Bottom row is wrong side

This is a feather stitch over the turned up, raw hem accomplished the same way you'd do a cover stitch. The raw edge doesn't need to be finished because knits don't ravel and finishing adds unnecessary bulk. Stabilize the entire hem with spray starch if you didn't dip the fabric before starting your project--from the hem allowance to the stitching line--and press it to the wrong side. Stitch from the right side, placing your line of stitches to catch and cover the raw edge. You can either stitch a fixed width from the edge and cut off any excess later or you can adjust your stitching according to the location of the cut edge if your cutting was precise. You can feel the cut edge under the top layer while you're topstitching so you know where to sew. I figure nobody's going to be looking closely enough at my hem to notice whether the stitching varies by an eight of an inch here and there and it saves me the trouble of doing any trimming later. I was surprised by how good this looks on the finished garment. It lies flat and mimics coverstitching very well.

Before I discovered this, I'd been finishing the edge with serging and zigzagging the hem seam:

You don't need to do this

This just doesn't look as good.

 Another good way to finish an edge when a narrow hem is desired is to do this:

I don't know if you can see this well, but this hem was turned up 5/8" and zigzagged 1/4" from the fold. Then I trimmed off the excess close to the stitching. I expect it to try to roll after it's been cut a while, so I'll come back later and trim again when it does. Again, flat seam that isn't bulky. Update: on this particular fabric, this hem isn't stable and the whole thing rolls.

Here's one I thought was clever at the time:

This is a 3 step ZZ on slippery Under Armour in green thread. I thought the green would look somehow bolder but I'm glad it didn't because the stitching is irregular due to the slipperyness of the fabric. If I'd used white thread it wouldn't have mattered. This whole shirt is kind of a disaster as you'll see below.

If you have a fabric that still won't behave, you can fuse a strip of knit interfacing to the hem allowance before stitching. Steam-a-seam was recommended to me so I went out and bought some. When I used this, the hem was stiff and heavy and had no stretch at all. It made it look like masking tape was stuck to the underside of the fabric. You definitely want to use knit interfacing if you do this.

Necklines

Necklines give me the most grief. Almost any kind of treatment (binding, facing, turning under) comes out stretched or otherwise botched. Ripping stitches out of a knit is a nightmare and I've had to rip out many a neck treatment. My first attempt at making a neckline without ribbing was the under armour shirt mentioned above:

I turned the edge under twice and stitched it, not knowing what was going to happen. I ripped this out and put on foldover elastic but cut it the length of the neck opening circumference. This was even worse. I ripped out again and cut the elastic shorter with no improvement. I ripped it out yet again and let it sit for 9 months. By this point, the neckhole had grown considerably from all the stress.

In the meantime, I learned how to make this from a back issue of Threads:

In the May 2003 issue, there is an article, "Neckline Finishes for Knits," that describes various finishes for knit necklines, including this one. The author also has videos on Threads' website that show you how to do it. I don't know what to call this; it isn't bound and it isn't ribbed, although the process is identical to applying ribbing. The secret is the difference between the binding length and the neckhole circumference. Your binding has to draw in the bodice fabric without gathering it so you have a nice, tight finish. The seam is stitched with a narrow 3 thread overlock so it stretches. This was a breakthrough.

Encouraged, I went back to the under armour with my new technique. Now I have success!

I didn't even bother to change the thread in the machines. I just used what was already there. The shirt was already such a mess, it isn't going to matter. What does matter is that I can do this! And since I learned about this, I've noticed how many of my ready to wear clothes have this finish. Some of them have the seam allowance topstitched, but when I tried to do this, I got another stretched out neckline. I just let them float. They're not going to stay where I want them anyway.

A few hints that are in the video but not the article:

1. Sew the binding to the neckhole with the garment lying flat across the machine bed like this:

so you can sew a curved seam and also see when you need to stretch. She's got the foot inside the neckhole with the shoulders on either side.
2. Stretch in the same areas as you did when determining the length of the binding, i.e. more for sharper curves and less for shallow ones.
3. Don't stretch the bodice while sewing if you can help it.
4. You may need to stretch the seam slightly while serging.
5. Use a wider seam allowance when serging in order to cover the basting stitches. This is where I go wrong a lot. Having an adjustable seam guide on your serger is invaluable.

You can sew a piece of ribbon over the seam allowance to stabilize the back of the neck if it wants to stretch too much.

Here's another method that looks promising. I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like it will work if you can control the stretching as the fabric passes under the foot.

Wilson Bickford's acrylic landscapes book

I know I talk about Wilson a lot, but his work and teaching are easy for me to follow. His landscapes book is no exception. It's called Wildlife Landscapes You Can Paint. He uses 5 colors and only a few brushes so you don't have to buy a lot of supplies. Until I got this book, I'd only used oils and had some difficulty adapting to acrylics. At first I didn't like them at all because they're hard to blend and they dry super fast but after doing 3 successful paintings in them I'm starting to like them better than oil.

The first one I did was on practice paper in case it sucked:

It turned out pretty well and I was encouraged to do more. His sky is painted wet on wet using diluted white gesso and regular paint in the same way you'd do a Bob Ross wet on wet sky. The trouble is that it starts to dry before you get it blended and then you're wiping paint off. If you haven't gotten it looking good by that point, you have to wait till it dries and start over. He even says to start the trees before the sky is dry, which is impossible if you didn't mix the color beforehand. I don't like having to speed through things and this was one of the things keeping me from liking acrylic painting. The other was the blending. I don't know if it shows up here, but the deer's highlights kind of look cell shaded from not being blended well. I'm also having trouble making clouds.

Next I tried some water:

 I thought this painting looked great and I've gotten a lot of compliments on it. Again, I didn't blend the shadows on the swans well and I made the ripples too dark. I don't like my cartoony trees. They're all powdery looking. Wilson's deciduous trees look fabulous and I can't duplicate them no matter how much I practice. I don't know what he's doing. I have a lot of trouble with randomness too. Everything I paint is too uniform and orderly.

Here is my third painting from the book:

I learned about scale when I painted this. He had the bears on the ridge with much larger pine trees but I painted my pines too small and had to move the bears forward. I learned more about shading and making corrections too. Even though acrylic is unforgiving while wet, you can completely repaint parts you don't like within a few minutes. I had trouble getting the fur highlights right and did a lot of overpainting till I was happy. I feel like this picture is too monotone. The green colors are all too close together. The background trees should have been paler. I've notice in all my paintings so far with a horizon line that the ground is too humpy. I need to work on this.

I'm very excited about these. I'm learning a lot and becoming comfortable with the medium. I like that I don't have to paint the whole thing all at once. With wet on wet oil, although you don't absolutely have to paint the whole thing in one sitting, if you don't, the part painted later will look distinctly different from the part painted earlier. Depending on the skill level and complexity, one painting could take 4 or 5 hours to complete. These acrylics take me much longer than that, but I don't have to devote hours at a time to them. In fact, it forces you to stop because you have to wait for stages to dry. This is contrary to something I said in an earlier post because I recently spent an entire afternoon doing a wet on wet painting that I hate. More on this later.

Now I know he did it in acrylics

This is my father's day gift.

I tried copying one I found on Wilson Bickford's gallery page. His paintings are pretty streamlined and easy to follow so I've been using his work a lot. I did this in oils wet on wet and it really doesn't look as good as his. Of course, he's a professional who's been doing this for twenty five years. But the beauty of wet on wet oil painting is that a person with no experience can produce reasonably good results. Having said that, I didn't have a lot of luck with this. The darks and lights didn't stay distinct and I lost a lot of definition in these small areas of the truck when the paints started to blend. Not knowing what I'm doing, I put liquid white over the whole painting including the sketch, which was a bad idea. I should have either put clear over the sketch or left it dry. Plus, the truck came out rather deformed. I didn't know whether I could sketch directly on the canvas or whether I needed to trace. I ended up tracing and heavily distorting my sketch, which actually was very good. Now I know.

Looking Good

WOO HOO! Look at this one! I think this is #6 or something.

This is another Wilson Bickford paint along. He's such a great guy. Even though he's written a book and is all famous (sort of) and stuff, he still took the time to answer my email.

Bob Ross lied

In episode 2607, Bob spends nearly the entire episode gushing about how easy the painting is and how even your grandma could do it. Perfect for beginners. Well he was lying. It's a fairly difficult painting requiring tree proficiency and snow building expertise. I'm from the south and I have to guess what snow looks like.

You start by painting tree shapes with gessos and then you come back with your oils and fill in the snow and shading. The first time I tried making the trees they were fat and straight and practically uniform. I sanded the gesso down and started over to get something I sort of liked before moving on to the oil stage.

I had a hard time getting the snow to look halfway decent. Bob put some in the background to look like the snow was fading away into darkness. When I tried to do that I nearly ruined the painting. Fortunately, oil is forgiving and mistakes can be improved upon, if not rectified. Instead of snow fading to darkness, my forest looks like it's in a heavy fog.

This painting is more labor intensive than regular wet on wet because it has to be done in stages with drying time and brush washing in between. I'd prefer to just paint the whole thing at once.

Who would have thought...

...to bondo a sewing machine? I didn't like the results I was getting with my paint layers. They were not going on smooth and many, many casting flaws were still obvious. While it's true that I have worked on a lot of cars, I never worked on the OUTSIDES. I don't know a thing about shiny smooth finishes. I finally asked for advice from a guy in Florida who does amazing finishes on Featherweights professionally. He helped me understand what I've been doing wrong.

To rectify the problem, I bought more oven cleaner and stripped the machine down again. This time proved to be significantly more difficult than the first. Then I primed and sanded it twice and then bondoed it:

That pink rash is all casting flaws. They were showing up as craters in the black paint. The black stuff is where the metal is showing through after sanding off the surplus bondo. The surface is very smooth and another coat of primer will reveal any flaws I missed. I probably don't have another coat of primer left in my spray can. This project is starting to get expensive.

Forgot about this one

I did this one several weeks ago from a Wilson Bickford video.

I think this is the first one I've done that I would consider good, even though some parts of it didn't come out to my liking, like the blue in the sky. In general, I'm pleased. I'm really starting to enjoy painting now that I'm beginning to understand how all the parts work.

The one real disappointment I have with this painting is that the sunglow isn't bright enough. In the example, the trees were lighter and the bright spot whiter, such that I instinctively squinted when I looked at it, as if I really was looking at the setting sun.

Mother's Day gift for Mum

I whipped this up after lunch to give as a Mother's Day present. It's a little 6x6 copy of an almost-painting Wilson Bickford did to illustrate his line of paint brushes.

Whatever hobby is currently captivating my interest when a gift giving occasion comes around is usually what people get from me, good or bad. It's not great, but she'll be impressed anyway.

People were giving me grief about not signing my paintings so I tried signing one. I think it was better without it. I actually meant to use black for the signature, but after watching hundreds of episodes of Joy of Painting, I instinctively went for Bright Red.

Kool aid dying

Whenever I read about something, I nearly always have to try it. I have no real interest in custom dying yarn, but this sounded like fun. Turns out, it is. The problem is what I decided to do with the dyed yarn. The project I settled on was a fair isle sweater manually patterned on the Bond. The process was slow and tedious and I haven't gotten farther than making one piece. Plus there's my tendency to work on a project till I find something else that catches my attention, and then the first project gets put on hold indefinitely. That's why updates here are far between. Here's what I've got so far:

Looks pretty good, but I don't know about that bright blue. Kool aid is limited in the blues available, so this is the best I could do. I really wanted to include the whole spectrum because it was so heavy on reds. The plan was to have warm stripes alternating with cool stripes with yellow being the unifier. I don't think the blue is quite as loud in person.

The pattern is one I dug up on the internet. Getting a pleasing color sequence turned out to be quite difficult. I tried many combinations before settling on this one. It was accomplished using the two carriage technique. I highly recommend this to anyone who does fair isle on the Bond. It is far preferable to hand knitting every contrast stitch.

The dying is quite easy and there's no science to it. The yarn will absorb all the dye from the bath, leaving the water clear. The quantity of kool aid in the bath determines the intensity. Due to the nature of the process, you can't really stop once you like the color, so you have to start with the right amount of powder rather than try to stop early. It's well documented on the web, so I'm not going to give the particulars. When it's cool, rinse it well, and most of the smell will come out in the rinse. I believe this only works with natural fibers, or it could be only wool. I'm not sure. I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes. The hot water will cause the wool to felt, so don't agitate it too quickly or it will ball into a prickly mess. Also, if you're trying to match dye lots, make careful notes about the quantity of powder used. Even then, the results are unpredictable. I haven't washed this yet, so I don't know how colorfast it is. I've read that it doesn't fade but don't know for sure.

Another painting

This is something I saw while riding on the interstate during winter many years ago. I'd been wanting to do a painting of it for years, but I didn't think I'd be able to do much with it. After doing a couple of Bob Ross paintings and learning a few techniques, I thought I might be able to pull it off. Not great, but it looks pretty cool. I can probably do a better one in future.

For some reason, this doesn't photograph well. In real life the colors are vibrant and distinct, unlike in this washed out photography. I tried all kinds of shots, and nothing was really satisfactory. Take my word for it, it looks better in person. I do wish, however, that I hadn't tried to put stars in the sky.

Ivy League Vest

I wanted to make a fair isle vest in reds and browns, so I settled on Eunny Jang's Ivy League vest.

It's all nice and tight on the model. Mine came out rather loose:

The colors look unnatural in flash photography, but in real life, they aren't this loud. The yarn is Palette by Knit Picks.

I know I said in an earlier post that I was done with hand knitting, but machine knitting this wasn't going well. I punched a card for it and started knitting, changing colors as needed. The color changes were pretty tedious, and every mistake required ripping out the row and resetting the row counter and punch card. The last straw was when I got yarn wrapped around one of the patterning drums. I was pretty irritated and ripped hard on the yarn, damaging the drum. That's when I resigned myself to hand knitting the project.

The gauges between the hand knit and machine knit products were vastly different:

I can see now that I was knitting much too tightly on the machine. You don't know how well or poorly you're doing until you actually take it off the machine. The swatch I made was nowhere near this tight. Owing to the complex shaping and neckline, I had planned to cut and sew this vest by making rectangles of fabric on the machine and seaming them on the sewing machine. Plus the machine knit sample just looks better because all the stitches are the same size. Mine are all over the place.

My hand knitted gauge wasn't right either and I had to omit rows to get the length right. The stitches per inch were the same as the given gauge, yet the vest is still too loose. It is unfinished in the photo above, but we had one cool day this spring and I knew I wouldn't have another chance to wear it for a long long time. I expect I'll have a go at shrinking it after I've dealt with the strings.

Steeks are pretty neat. This vest was knitted round with steeks placed at the armholes and neck as placeholders to be cut out later. You still shape the armhole and neck as normal, then knit across the steeks to the next section in order to continue knitting round all the way to the shoulder bind offs.

66 Update

Good news on the 66 front! There's going to be a decal source soon which has renewed my interest in the project. I ordered the electroless nickel plating kit from Caswell and now I have just about all I need to get the show on the road. The kit looks extremely complicated.

 

It came with a custom printed manual an inch thick, and two little stockpots. You have to make all these calculations about the area of the piece being plated and how much nickel in the bath is being consumed so you can replenish it as it is depleted. Looks like a job for a weekend.

Quite some time ago, I started painting the head black, but I used a brush because I wanted to build up a thick coat like the original Japanning and then spray on some thinner ones. Considering how much sanding is required to remove the brush strokes, I'll probably be back down to the primer when I'm done. Perhaps it wasn't the best decision.

The next steps are to finish sanding the head and prep the metal parts for plating. Shiny ones like the throat plate will need to have a mirror finish if they are to look anything like they used to. I could just buy new ones, but that conflicts with the original plan of only replacing parts that I can't restore sufficiently, like the etched chrome covers. I especially want to save the slide cover because it has patent dates stamped on it, all before 1910. The goal was to do this cheaply, but I don't know if that's going to be feasible. I figured the cost of the plating kit would be lower than buying all the parts piecemeal.

I showed the handwheel in an earlier post. It still looks the same. Since the plating process is finicky about absolute cleanliness of the metal, I may be able to only plate the outside diameter and leave the spoked part for painting. I don't really want to buy another one, as it has the potential to be very expensive for this budget.

Let's recap the spending so far: we were up to $82 and the plating kit was another 80. That makes $162 and hopefully there won't be much more to buy. I'm using a lot of supplies that I already had, like black paint. However, I did buy supplies to do a hand crank conversion since I used the treadle table on the 306: $45 for a handmade wooden base that will have to be stained, and $12 for a hand crank. I'm basing my budget on machines for sale on ebay, which are often in rough shape and sold with no base or table, yet still have high prices.

Bob Ross style painting

Bob Ross is the ultimate motivator. After years of watching Bob paint hundreds of 30 minute masterpieces, I finally decided to try it. I've never painted before as you can see, but it really is easy once you get a little practice.

I bought his master paint set which comes with instructions and a glossy print of the painting project. The example painting is quite beautiful. Mine wasn't.

Then I tried doing a black canvas and only using 3 colors. The result was almost good:

What am I gonna do with these things?