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Adventures in sewing knits

August 29, 2015 Marie 2 Comments

mesa-muslin1 sleeves1 dangerboy

Today I’m working on learning to sew knit fabric. It’s something I’ve always wanted to try but have been too intimidated, but with all this sewing I’ve been doing I figured I might as well try it now. I picked up the Mesa dress pattern as it looked easy enough and like something that might be flattering on my shape. Today’s attempt is a muslin, so I’m just stitching it all together to see how it fits as well as getting a feel for how sewing knits on my machine works. Since knit fabrics tend to differ in weight, drape, etc I can’t totally account for all of those with this muslin alone, but it’s a good place to start.

So far, things seems to be going quite well. My stitching is going nicely along the fabric, and things are lining up as they should (I was worried the fabric would stretch out for some reason). But the sleeves…. I don’t know what I’m doing. I thought I eased them in right but trying the thing on it appears that there’s some puckering/waving along that stitch line. I’m not totally sure what I did wrong, though, because it seemed like it eased in just fine and I wasn’t left with fabric leftover to try to do something with. Oh well, that’s why it’s a muslin, right? I have some lovely charcoal double knit in the dryer so that’s going to be my next run through with this pattern – hopefully it turns into something wearable!

The “one hour to sew” liner on that pattern seems… ambitious. I’m absolutely positive that if you’re not new to sewing, and sewing knits, then yes – one hour to sew it all up is probably reasonable. But it probably took me an hour to trace and cut my pattern last night, and more than an hour to start pinning and sewing it all together. Though, granted, I do that have little boy you see there and he makes getting anything done 10x harder… so maybe I should just ignore times for the next 5 years and just be happy I get anything done at all, yes?

Featured, Posts handmade wardrobe, sewing

Comments

  1. DKnits says

    August 30, 2015 at 2:35 pm

    For me : “One hour to sew” equals one week to think about it and another one week to complete the project.
    I’d like to give a try to knit fabric too. Sounds fun!
    Can’t wait to see your finished project, it’s a lovely pink you have chosen here. :)

    Reply
    • Marie says

      August 30, 2015 at 5:28 pm

      Yes! That one hour to sew thing is sometimes more like a week! That pink fabric was given to me by a fellow sewist who didn’t care for the color. It’s really thin, though – if that material were made into a t-shirt I’d have to wear a camisole underneath it otherwise you’d see my bra and everything. Not good! I’m glad to use it for a muslin, though – it’s given me a perfect fabric to test run on and figure out how my machine handles knits.

      Reply

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