First Attempt With New Pattern

A few days ago, my Kwik-Sew pattern arrived in the mail. This is my second successful transaction with the company that sells patterns online, so I guess I'm ready to commit to endorsing them!



The thing that really drew me to this pattern were the sleeves. There is a weird stripe that runs up the side of the suit that I am going to want to eliminate, and of course I don't want those pesky lower leg duo-tone thingies either. Oh, the seam up the front is a bit of a drag too. Other than that, it's dead on.

I pulled the pattern pieces out of the envelope, flattened them all out with an iron set on low heat with steam.



I then joined together the parts that I wanted to have as one peice. So the duo-tone calves got taped into place with the body panels. Good stuff.



I then needed to modify the pattern to take into account that stripe going down the side. I took the width of the stripe, then just added half of that onto each of the panels, front and back.



Then it just came down to that same old process that I followed on the previous pattern.

The one thing I did differently was the way I pinned the fabric together prior to sewing. I was sort of struggling with ways to get the fabric to stay in place while I serged. No matter how hard I tried, the fabric would always slip on one layer, so by the time I got to the tail end of my seam, there was a half inch of slippage. I tried tape, putting the pins in one way or another, and then it occurred to me that something like this might work.



And it did! I'm very happy with the results, and this is how I will be doing my pinning from now on.

Here's the results of my first time out with this pattern AND the new fabric I just got in. As is usual with these photos, the colors are not quite represented right.



My main problem here is that the shirt is WAY too big. This pattern is very different size-wise than my previous one. I am going to need to take it down a full size, maybe even two. Not a big deal. I'm getting much better at putting the shirts together, and have learned a lot of lessons along the way. I've gotten much better at making the four seams intersect in the arm pits, for example. The new trick I really picked up is trimming the fabric and seams before sewing it all together. It just makes it come together much more cleanly. I still have not figured out how to handle the collar, though I'm starting to think that the collar on the screen used suit was not sewn with a serger. It might also be rolled fabric. Stuffed. I'm not sure. I will take a look at my Bronze Armory body suit sometime and see how they did it.

That's it for now. Next stop is to re-attack the pattern and knock it down a size.