The Muse returns

I don’t know what got into me, but I spent the last few days frantically working on patterns and muslins.  First I drafted my jacket pattern, which involved taking my sloper, drafting a dress foundation, then tracing the dress foundation and manipulating it to create the jacket foundation.  Then from the jacket foundation I drafted a shawl collar foundation, from which I finally drafted the pattern for my jacket-to-be.  By this point I had been drafting for three solid hours, and was feeling bleary enough that I didn’t really want to tackle an asymmetric jacket front, so I settled for a very wide shawl collar, not quite wide enough to qualify as a sailor collar, but pretty close.  (The collar comes to just about the end of the shoulder.)

Feeling bold, I then tried to draft a two-piece sleeve, but something went drastically wrong in the process – either there was a problem with my sloper or I flipped something in the instructions, or – well, after another 45 minutes there was no sign of a normal sleeve, so I decided to make a sleeveless muslin and get Sharon to help me with drafting the sleeve.

Up until then I was a reasonably sane human being.  But then, for some reason, the Muse decided I wasn’t working hard enough, and arrived to personally supervise this obvious slacker.  As a result, I spent the next day and a half with my nose obsessively to the grindstone, somehow managing to cut not one, not two, but four muslins of the various patterns I’d chosen, and sew up three of them, before going to visit Sharon early this afternoon.  Sometimes having a personal relationship with the goddess of creativity can be a bit daunting.

At any rate, I went to visit Sharon, armed with my three completed muslins, and discovered:

• My laboriously drafted jacket pattern worked!  The back is just perfect; in the front, I somehow managed to make the bust dart about two inches too low, but once that’s corrected, it should fit really nicely.  Yahoo!
• The palazzo pants (very wide-legged pants) pattern almost fits; I need to make one small change to the pattern, and then it should be good to go.
• The Vogue blouse pattern (silver and black, from a few posts ago) I’d been eying doesn’t work on me.  Sharon and I spent some time fiddling with it, with not particularly satisfactory results, and we finally decided that it would probably be quicker and easier for me to draft my own version of the pattern.  (Yes!  Another chance to play with pattern drafting!)

Next on the agenda:

• Draft a sleeve pattern for the jacket.  This should be fairly easy since Sharon suggested that, for a striped fabric, a one-piece sleeve  would disrupt the pattern less than a two-piece sleeve.
• Change the jacket from two darts to a single dart in the front.
• Learn how to “shrink out” a dart, by shrinking the fabric in the dart area to take up the excess, and shrink out both the front dart and the sleeve dart (if possible) in the next muslin.
• Alter the palazzo pants muslin by adding 3/4″ in the center back, and take it back to Sharon next week for review.
• Draft the silver-and-black blouse pattern myself, and sew up a muslin.
• Finish weaving the Autumn Splendor sample, so I can warp up for the next project.
• Figure out yardage requirements for each piece, wind the warp, and start setting up the loom!

And, in other news, I have finally finished scanning my complete collection of Weaver’s.  In another few days I’ll have it all saved out to .pdf format, and uploaded into Evernote.  Then I’ll start in on my entire collection of Handwoven magazine, which goes all the way back to 1980, and which will no doubt take awhile.

Welcome back, Muse!