The fabric for this project is some admittedly terrible 100% cotton from Wal-mart. It's unbleached, so it has a nice tan color on the whole, although there are some random red, orange, and black threads in places. It was the cheapest I could find that was about the right weight to practice for a 100% linen project. The thread I'm using is regular Coats & Clark all-purpose, color "natural". The color blends in so well that some of my pictures don't really show the stitching very well!
Pattern is from the Practical Worksheet for Tunic Construction. I used the Javascript form to find out how big to make all the pieces (more on how good of an approximation this turned out to be later).
Step one was cutting it all out. Actually step zero was making a sort of pattern out of newspapers, which I had to duct tape together because the Daily Evergreen is not standard size newspaper. I took my pattern measurements from the worksheet and cut out pieces of the paper that were the correct size. Part of the reason for doing this was that I was doing this by myself, so I couldn't reach as far as I would have needed to. If you have another person to help, I'm sure the cutting-out process would go faster and be more accurate.
The tan fabric is only 44 inches wide, so the pattern layout on the fabric was different than what I'll be doing for the green linen. I'll probably want to repeat the paper-pattern process.
The very next thing I did was the neckline. I chose a round neck with a slit down the center. I chose to do a facing but bias tape would have been all right too. To make the facing, I pinned on a rectangle of fabric more than wide enough to cover the neck hole. I then pinned it closer to the actual shape I wanted, and cut off the excess corners. Next I machine stitched the two layers together. The bottom of the slit was a bit problematic but I mostly fixed it in the next step, which was to turn the facing back to the inside and hand-stitch everything down. This took a long time but the stitching looks pretty nice.
Next was attaching the underarm gussets to the sleeves. I chose a straight sleeve and a square gusset. This step was pretty easy. Things got a bit more complicated when it came time to actually attach the sleeves to the main body. I opted for free arm sewing on my machine for this. You have to be careful to remember what side is the inside and the outside for this part; it would be no good to end up with an inside-out arm or a neck facing on the outside when it should be in!
Pins all the way around makes it a bit difficult to try on before stitching too so just make a guess and hope for the best!
The triangular pieces for all but the front gore had to be sewn together. When doing this I made sure to sew the grain edges together so that in the final steps there would be a bias edge sewn to a grain edge. At least for this project, two bias edges sewn together is a no-no. I marked off where I wanted the points to end, and pinned all along both edges for one gore at a time. I left the very tops of each one to hand-sew last since some weird stuff happens and it would be easy to get something folded over the wrong way on the machine.
I'm really happy with the way the side gores turned out! Pointy corner is pointy.
The front and back were a little trickier but I think they are all right too.
Next post will be on overall impressions, lessons learned, and what I'll do differently next time.
