End of February round up: sewing for others and pattern matching fail

What am I doing now?

Mending. Fixing. Mending.

This is the sort of stuff that occupies most of my sewing time.

Fixed straps on bike helmets. Seattle Fabrics has an entire wall of drawers of this kind of hardware. Bless you SF!

There is a whole school of sewing that involved adding funky bits on top of nonfunky things. I am not really one of those people, though I do admire and love their thinking. This is my tribute to them. My husband begged me not to wear these pants out of the house. I did, but I did keep my coat fastened, so only he could see me wearing them around the house. Lucky guy.

Added removable alterations so I can wear the wool pants right now (vs when I lose ten pounds or alter it properly). This is what I do to make winter stop around here.

That and the grey coat.

You're welcome, Seattle.

Button over a buttonhole!

Added 'circuitry' patches behind 'preripped' jean holes. Also added three inches of pocket depth to them (to MENS JEANS. Men's jeans with shallow useless pockets. Wha?)

Altered photo to amuse Julie of Jet Set Sewing. And my sister. Hi Sandi! 

Bought magnetic bra clasps for future burlesque costume. You can store them on the fridge door until you need them. Or until your family objects.

Made those overalls for the boy. He's kept them in heavy rotation.

That whole tack button debacle. That really fries me: make a nice hole, pound a crap button into it, ruin the item as you remove the crap button. Do that a couple of times and it will affect your outlook on life for awhile.

Everything in the handsewing mend pile is black. Makes needle threading easier. Also harder to see tiny stitches. Family will not see badly sewn mends in the lousy lighting in our house. They won't wear these outside, will they?

 Sewed the long promised shirt for my sister.

 Traced it off and harvested the buttons ages ago.

I even took a photo of the original shirt and printed it out for a pattern page. I had good intentions. I even made a handkerchief for my sister from what wasn't all worn out on this shirt.

I did not lose the buttons!

I did not add seam allowances when I traced this!

My intention was to match up the pattern across the front, and ate up a huge amount of yardage in the attempt.

I can see here where I went wrong; I should have folded over more, basted it up, cut out the entire front piece as one entire piece, and then got back into the center to work out the underlapped placket and facing. I am so close to being right it kinda hurts to see this. I had scads of photos of my faulty process; it's a slow motion car wreck of pattern layout fail.

 And just missed by 1/2" in the end.

Spatial reasoning is HARD apparently
It's still a pretty fabric, and the shirt looks fine. My buttonholes are better than normal.

Sandi, your shirt is done. We'll lunch this week.

I have ten more choir dresses to alter, and four more belts out of that velvet ribbon.

I should clean house.

So that's the business until the 28th, when a whole new project starts up, just in time to be that last minute project for Emerald City ComicCon.

Because what is life without an impossible deadline?