Whatever I may have intimated, I have not yet abandoned the purple muslin project.
I spent some time on Tuesday morning morphing patterns.
You see there usually is a method and a plan to my madness, although it seems that I am rarely privy to the full detail when I get started. I seem to just jump right in and then the plan evolves as I get going. This does require time to step away from the sewing room and allow the details to float around my brain a little bit, but at the moment that is no problem as time away from the sewing room seems readily available and it is time in the sewing room that is in short supply.
I have a vision of a lightweight, loose tee in my head, one with cut on sleeves. Yes it will be loose and boxy, but the fabric is light and airy for a knit. I plan to wear it as at-home-wear with a pair of coordinating knit pants.
The purple muslin was made from this pattern:
It dates from 1985 and a small was an 8-10. This was before I ever traced off patterns. I had made view B several times, the one with the wide neck and the cuffed sleeves. It was so big on me, and the neck so wide that I took 1/2 inch out at the center fold to make subsequent versions fit. The fact that the purple tee, which was made from View A (same back piece, diffferent front piece), fit me, albeit snugly, was no testiment to my slimness, but merely evidence of how oversized clothes could be in the mid 80s.
But anyway, I knew I would be able to get into the tee without altering the pattern, and I was mostly interested in the neckline and the sleeves, which I recall that I really liked at the time.
Monday night I looked through my pattern collection and really found nothing much that was like the tee I envisioned. Oh this original Vogue pattern was pretty close, and I had Christine Johnson’s Three Tees pattern.
The Christine Johnson Pattern is more appropriate size-wise, but I really did not like the way the sleeves lay when wearing the tee, and I was not thrilled with the neckline either.
What I really want is something in between these two patterns. Once I discovered what I wanted, the path was clear:
I traced the Christine Johnson pattern in a size large (red lines in the picture above), and then I aligned the old Vogue Pattern over it to get the neckline from the Vogue pattern, which was actually a little tricky and I hope I got it right. I actually took the back neckline from CJ and altered it to join up with the front neckline from the Vogue pattern. Looking at them and taking a few measurements they look good, but only the next muslin will tell.
I then also moved the Vogue pattern out and altered the shoulder and sleeve angle on my new pattern to correspond to the Vogue pattern (in a bigger size obviously). As you will note the Vogue shoulder sloped downward slightly more (1/4 inch) than CJ’s, and there was an entirely different shape under the arm in the way the sleeve came out from the body on the Vogue Pattern.
Will it work??
I actually have no idea. I may actually need something more in the middle ground between the two patterns.
I considered waiting to write this until I had whipped up another muslin, but I had hoped to do that yesterday, and then again today, but I see a long day of paperwork and filing ahead with little chance of a muslin appearing in the next 10 hours or so. I shall continue to hope for tomorrow, or the long weekend…. but I am actually going to have workmen here Saturday and Sunday, and house guests, so extensive sewing time is not likely.
But now I must go back to work. How did all the office files and accounts get so out of hand while I was out on family medical leave???? How do I ever begin to sort them out???
I’d much rather be sewing…..but the penalty would be far too high.