Return from exile

My Muse went on vacation for a couple of days, which I spent working through pattern drafting exercises.  I took them to Sharon on Sunday (along with the jacket muslin), and to my delight, I discovered that I had done the exercises correctly.  So now that I have dart manipulation down, I’ll be moving into style lines (princess and panel designs), and from there to adding fullness/ease.

Sharon also made a few adjustments to the jacket muslin – not many, as it fit pretty well “out of the box”.  The unadjusted pattern length (meant to be mid-thigh or above-knee) is actually mid-calf on me, but we  agreed that lengthening it to a coat would be just fine.  We may shorten it to below-knee once we see it in the actual fabric, but that should be pretty easy.

And I am almost done with my 1-week exile from weaving!  I am totally excited, though I will probably take a few more days to let the hip rest up before actually weaving.  So I will start threading the loom on Wednesday or Thursday so I can weave (gently, gently) over the weekend.

And now that my Muse is back to work, here are the fabrics for square #1 of the fabric manipulation sampler:

For some reason I can’t get the colors to come out right, either with flash or with the (yellow) lamp, but they are just beautiful “in person”.  When I finish, I’ll take a photo in natural light, and hopefully that will come out better.

This sampler square will be about gathers and ruffles.  The purple chiffon in the top left will be gathered into strips running around the borders of the square.  The gold duppioni will be gathered into a quarter-circle in top left, and tacked down (to create brain-like crenelations) in a quarter-circle at bottom.  The orange scrunch-dyed fabric will become a wavy ruffle going through the square.

This is all fairly ambitious considering I haven’t tried any of these techniques before, and I cheerfully expect to screw up at least one of the components.  That’s OK; it’s a sample, not a finished piece, and I expect to learn a lot from it.