Not Miyake Vogue 1859 for $96AUS

 the price keeps catching my eye and I would love to see this pattern, but something seems weird

and then I read the listing

That's a whole lotta money for a copy

and it's pretty easy to determine how to make one just by looking at the illustration.
Hard pass

Big Tops, Knit tops for winter

At least I had a coupon for this splurge

I don't want to screw it up. I went to look for Miyake sweater examples and really didn't find much to tempt me

So I'm trying out things  The Style Arc Brooklyn uses some of that acrylic backed faux sweater knit, which is really heavy (heavier and stiffer than scuba to some extent) The Freya and the Winnie I have made before. The Iris (similar but larger collar than Freya) and the Jasper are in there to poke my brain.

Heaps of ideas all scrambled together

Remember the Bristol? So glad i tagged that post with the chicken tag

https://erniekdesigns.blogspot.com/2015/02/what-i-bought-at-sewexpo-today.html

I made one at one point and it was a dud, so dud it went straight to the recycle bin. I was so full of myself in 2015. I think everyone learns more from the duds, frankly.

And there was this with the Freya and the Winnie Style Arcs

https://erniekdesigns.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-couple-of-style-arc-knit-tops-that.html

In the meantime, I finally decided what to do with the sweatshirt dress

original Etsy image, more color accurate. 

It was a hot mess as sewn. The pockets were on the side seams; if I had stabilized them, they would have looked terrible. So I sat on this for a year. To avoid working on the stuff I needed to be working on, I sliced and reattached this.

I am liking it, better photo later.

And the horizontal seam made me think

The width at the midwaist does not work: I have altered that

I've done purposely ridged seams before, even it does feel sloppy.

It's a recycled knit pullover with a huge pieced cowl collar (photo shows serger seaming)

I have no problem cutting up sweatshirts to frankensew into new things. I'm just more cautious with new fabric (just realizing as I write this that there's another pullover I made this week that is so awful I didn't bother to take photos)

So I tried the Winnie in a sweatshirt terry 

not the real color

Not a twin needle but went around twice, as once just looked sad.

tacking down the collar on the side seams per the minimal instructions

It's okay. But now I know what I want to do with the Miyake knit. Three, four shirts later.

Miyake Suit

 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/fashion/issey-miyake-dead.html

I have so many thoughts about his work, I have been building a blog just about his Vogue patterns, and no, I'm not ready to drop it today.

but I did haul this suit out to take photographs.

I bought this suit on EBay about 24 years ago, I almost fit it then, except for the waist, but I didn't feel I ought to alter it to fit me. So it's been hanging in a suit bag all this time.

The fabric is probably a poly/rayon blend gabardine, slight twill. It has only the Issey Miyake label in the back, no content, import, size labels of any kind, and no marks or indications that labels were cut out. It's always possible this label was put into this jacket to improve its sale chances.

Miyake or not, it has some clever ideas working in it, which remind me of some of the 80s 

It's got a high back/low front western jacket vibe to it, with a welted seam that works like a set of fitting darts that runs all the way around it (and the same seam across the lower back and the outside of the two piece seam)

this is probably the best representation of the color. yes, the lighting in my house is terrible

that welted seam goes all the way around from the front to the back

even into the lapel

It's deep

the pens mark the five seams in that back waist piece

the little belt feels extraneous, but it is sewn into the seams

And the pants?

Welted back pockets (4" deep, typical women's suit pockets at the time) and 2" cuffs.

the fly has a button fly guard

the front lining goes past the knees towards the hem (abt 6" short)

The pleat (there are two) under the pocket welt is 3cm deep. These are very baggy trousers.

Someone who knows more about these things will inform me, and I will keep this in my closet for as long as I have a closet.

And I will get the blog up and running someday.

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Things I did not know About Pleats Please

"Their prototype was conceived in 1991, when Mr. Miyake collaborated with the choreographer William Forsythe to design pleated costumes for a Frankfurt Ballet production of Mr. Forsythe’s “The Loss of Small Detail.” The male dancers wore the pants, then switched to dresses, the women vice versa. Whatever they wore, they were free to leap, pirouette and soar."

More from NYT today

Kazunaru Miyake was born on April 22, 1938. (The character for Kazunaru in Japanese writing also reads as Issey, which means one life.) He walked with a “pronounced limp,” Sheryl Garratt wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2010, a result of his surviving the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, his hometown, on Aug. 6, 1945. When he was 10, he developed a bone-marrow disease, Ms. Garratt wrote, and his mother died of radiation poisoning.

He graduated in 1963 from Tama Art University in Tokyo, where he majored in design because fashion was not offered there as a course of study.

In 1965 he moved to Paris, where he worked as an assistant to Guy La Roche and Givenchy. While there he witnessed the May 1968 student protests, which inspired him to make clothes for everyone, not just the elite.

“I seem to be present at occasions of great social change,” he was quoted as saying in the 2017 book “Where Did Issey Come From?” by Kazuko Koike. “Paris in May ’68, Beijing at Tiananmen, New York on 9/11. Like a witness to history.”

v2922 Miyake Top

 Scale model sewing to see how something goes together

Vogue Patterns 2922 oop, their image my copy cleaned up

So, how did I get here?

Scanning and cleaning up in Paint and copying. Getting the top to fit the model is always hit and miss, and I do it by eyeballing it (it's too big for this one, too small for another).

As this is copyrighted material, and I purchased this pattern and it's limited use, I will just show you how I got there

My photos of not my designs:

not my designs

Still not my designs

Actually only a couple of construction questions, once I wrapped my brain around the center front. 

Hint: it's just a big draped thing that hangs in front and you iron it to maintain that folded central shape.

I could sew this with the machine, but then I would have to get up out of this chair

Sewing set-in sleeves, something I do not do at 100% scale

So here we are.

And the life size version is

This fabric was purchased a few years ago for a different item altogether, and I almost tossed it several times (too flimsy and loosely woven for the dress I had envisioned).

But PERFECT for this top. I finished it and wore it the next day to work, thus this bathroom selfie.

On Madame, it's pretty handsome and more in focus

In a soft drapey fabric, it's a winner.

v2127 Miyake instructions and results so far

 I am working on a separate blog about Issey Miyake's Vogue patterns. I have been at it for a couple of years, so don't get all excited.

I know that there have been several designers from Miyake's 'house' on the job for these patterns over the years, I don't know all of them yet. There is much more information out there than I have included (which is why these are still in progress), but for my sanity's sake, I am starting to put these posts on my main blog. Because this is what I am sewing now, and this proves that this is STILL a blog about sewing.

I have shown bits and pieces of the construction of this top, but it's been put in the naughty pile while other things got done.

Let's see what happened.

I learned on Miyake Vogue 1309 to mark all the tailors marks, no matter what they might be.

I made this into a dress

https://erniekdesigns.blogspot.com/2013/04/miyake-dress-1309.html

For v2127, there were only three different ones on the ten pattern pieces, so I just went with light blue for dots, pink for squares, and hot pink for triangles.

Or was it pink for triangles....it worked. They were pretty straightforward.

These are triangles, I know that

Ah, the squares are hot pink.

There are sets of long skinny darts on the front and back pieces

Skinny as in one cm skinny. More a design line than a shaping dart.

I left them off the back. They do nothing, and I can easily add them in later if they look like they should be there.

At it's basic design, this 'top' is a cut on, sleeve/yoke piece with panels hanging from it that are to be loosely attached/buttoned together at the sides, with a regular shirt placket at the front. A T shape.

This shape makes a lot of appearances in Miyake's Vogues.

Still meaning to sew this one. It's handsome, but it has the 'is this practical' sleeve problem (the one where you can't wear a coat over this)

I will probably just make a tiny model of this one. I have questions.

This one the sleeves are a separate piece attached at the armscye in a very traditional shirtmaker process, but the collar is a loop of fabric only attached at the back neck.

2314 is another variation on a Vionnet design. The pants are on my to-do list.

This video actually makes me want to sell off my patterns. What on earth are you going to do with them, Smaug?

https://youtu.be/d1P3ZYdKHuU

https://sewing.patternreview.com/review/pattern/31697

https://patriciatorvalds.com/2020/10/22/issey-miyake-2486/

https://sewing.patternreview.com/review/pattern/151422

finding a bunch of them from work address I'd never seen before

https://sewing.patternreview.com/review/pattern/151422

Back to the naughty top.

For all of the marks, joining the panels to the yoke/sleeve unit was less than precise.

The previous stitching does not line up with what the seam line should be.

And for a pattern with a jillion enclosed seams, leaving that top edge raw feels wrong

This is what I think it looks like on the inside: the seam of the top of the front panel (the pink part) lining up mostly with the folded up part of the grey yoke/sleeve.

It Mostly Lines Up

This tack doesn't really have a partner.

 I serged the top edge of the panel and brought the loose end through the serger stitching tunnel to tidy it up and secure it.

It's roughly the same issue with the one panel on the back, and I did roughly the same thing.

So the panels are attached.

And....?

They are supposed to be stay stitched and buttoned (and yes, I see that my alignment is not the same as the illustration).
So you have two layers of panel AND buttons under your arm. And this is not a jacket, this is a top. that's just a lot of bulk and visual interest somewhere it's not going to matter. What do I so, raise my arm to flash everyone the snappy details? At least there's not an ungainly armscye preventing me from raising my arm.

To compensate for this project stalling out almost at the end, I am spending time trying to rework some recent fails so I can celebrate some sewing successes here. Or at least document where they went south. Sometimes sewing is more about creating writing opportunities for me to remind myself I like writing (and I do).  It's all slow going.