Eureka! :-)

I watched the three Great British Sewing Bee Celebrity Specials this weekend...so charming, as usual...and I was determined to sew something, even if it meant staying up till midnight last night.

And I got one in the 'done' column!

Well, actually two, but the first one was just a second chop job on a T shirt.  I don't have a photo...but we were given T shirts from the DIVE school I attended (That's Deep Innovative Vertical Expression, not something involving large bodies of water).  However, the stock was running low and there were only extremely small and extremely large sizes.  So, knowing I could whack it down, I cheerfully took a 2XL and cut it down, using Kwik Sew 2900  just as I did on the one I chopped earlier in the summer.  This T was a rayon blend, much thinner and drapier than the beefy cotton on the first T so I did a couple of things a little differently: 1) placed the sleeve  pattern  on the cut -and-flattened sleeves so that the top of the cap hit the top of the cut sleeve, letting the hem fall where it may, which made the sleeve much shorter and 2) I left all the length on the top that was there.  So all I had to do was put the new sleeves on the new armsceyes and sew up the new side seams...all the hems were original.

It works.  I'll try to get a picture soon.

But I do have pictures of the second top.  It's Sewing Workshop's Eureka top, made from a stylized silver and black printed rayon/lycra jersey.

That fabric was almost my undoing.  Things were going together fairly well until I got to the hem.

I could not get a decent looking stitch.  The fabric was so stretchy that it stretched going between the feed dogs and the presser foot (even with the even feed foot attached), and when it relaxed, the stitches were all loose and loopy.  I tried a single needle and a double needle, I tried adjusting the tension...finally I fused the hem up with some old Steam A Seam and, because my new sewing machine does not have the capability to adjust the pressure foot pressure (why???  Who thinks to look for something as basic as that???) I even pulled the old Janome out and ran it through that one.  That was a little better, but it's still pretty wonky if you look closely.

Next time I make something out of this fabric I'll sew through tissue or something.  It was crazy.

But it's a kinda crazy shirt anyway.