Week One: Minoru Sew-Along

Week one of the Minoru sew-along is behind us and we are starting our second week  today. I am almost caught up. I stopped at the hood section. I have not attached the main fabric and the lining together yet, but have sewn together both the main hood fabric and hood lining individually.

I need to get some black non-fusible interfacing for the collar. I think I found some locally, hopefully I am not too tired to pick it up this evening.

I want to share with you how I straighten the grain for my fabric. I did not use the clip and rip method. I do enjoy ripping the fabric but at the same time it makes me nervous and sometimes it seems like I make matters worse by tearing it. For my nylon fabric, I decided to clip and then pull a single thread to find the straight of grain.

What I did was snip through the selvage. You don’t have to snip too far in just about an 1/2 inch. Next, you want to find a single piece of thread.

Once you find the  thread, you will start pulling it. It will make your fabric gather. This is okay. I like to flatten out the fabric as I go. You want to keep pulling the thread until you reach the other selvage end. If the thread line trails off before you get to the selvage, you are going to have to clip it again and start over.

Finally, you will cut along the thread line that you created  and this should create a nice straight edge. Hopefully, if your fabric is not really out of wack, you will have  straighten the grain. If it is a little bit off, you can pull the opposite ends of the fabric to even it out. I hope this makes sense. The lovely Susan at Knitters Delight introduced me to this method while I was working on the Tikva Trench.  Sometimes you have to use this method, when the fabric won’t  rip, like the fabric I used for the Tikva.

Sadly, I found it a little tricky straighten the grain on mesh lining fabric. I ended up making the fabric as straight as I can. If anyone knows how to find the straight of grain on mesh fabric, please let me know.

This weekend I did some top-stitching. I am not the best at sewing straight, so I was a little nervous about doing the top-stitching. Not nervous enough to avoid doing it in a contrasting color. I like to be difficult. My actually sewing was not bad, however there were some loose stitches. I am not going to bother ripping the whole thing out and re-doing it. It is  to random and probably has to do with my machine and the needle I am using. I probably should be using a top-stitching needle. It looks fine to me. What do you think?

Tonight once I get home, I think I will  mark my lining on my Tikva Trench (yeah, it’s still around). I need to serger all my main fabric before I move forward on constructing the trench coat. I might not need to serger  my lining fabric, cross your fingers. I wish I could say I will have this coat finished in time for the last day of class. Let’s be serious… since I have all this serging to do, finishing is not going to happen by Wednesday. I do think I will be spending the last day of class serging. Even on my Minoru jacket. I completely forgot about the seam finish. I forgot to do a seam finish before I top-stitched and I do need to finish the seams since I am using a mesh lining. *sigh*

I have broke one of my sewing new years goals ALREADY. Last week, I purchased fabric (3.5 yrds for only $3.50) and two more patterns Simplicity 2508 and 2556. I did want to get Simplicity 2418, but it was not part of the $.99 sale that Joann’s had going on. This week I purchase 5 new patterns. I KNOW RIGHT. I bought Sewaholic Renfrew top.  I hope to get it in time for my Advanced Knits class. I bought  Burda 8186 for Tailoring class and for no real reason I purchase Burda 7738, Loretti 5934 and Loretti 5937

I know, so bad of me. But I’ll be so cute this year. lol