Hello and welcome to the post I promised would follow my last intro to my new B79! Two posts, so close together - what a novelty! Last time, I introduced you to my new machine - and I had so much to say that I decided to break out my first project into a separate post so that it could have the attention it deserved - as you do. So - without further ado, meet my new skirt!
I'm very into my skirts at the moment - I've never really been a huge fan of them, until I realised that the reason for that was simply because I was a bit too tall to wear RTW skirts comfortable - a problem I can certainly solve! I'd had this project in mind for a while, and I thought it would be a perfect one to showcase some of the features of the B79 that my Bernina 830 Record doesn't do. Plus - I sneakily got to add some decoration to the pockets with the embroidery function of the B79!
The skirt itself is a pretty simple design - I hesitate to really even call it "self drafted" - it's really just a bunch of rectangles. I used a 1.5m remnant of navy tencel twill I got from Drapers Fabrics, and based the total un-gathered size of the rectangle of fabric I had on what was left after determining the length I wanted for the skirt - as well as leaving an allowance for waistband and pocket pieces (more rectangles!). This is easier to explain with a picture, so I've drawn you a quick one:
The back half of the waistband has an elastic insertion so there's a bit of breathing room, and I wanted to have more of my gathers at the back than the front. The easiest way to achieve this was to distribute the gathers evenly along the entire waistband with the elastic stretched to its maximum: the skirt is gathered traditionally all the way around, and also gathered further by the elastic in the back. After that, all I needed to do was finish off the inside of the waistband with some bias binding.
The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice that the buttonholes on this skirt are not functional. I used my gorgeous set of bamboo laser-cut cat buttons from Arrow Mountain for this skirt, and I'd pulled them off a shirt that I never wore because the buttons were too snaggy to go through the buttonholes comfortably. To combat that, I decided to sew false buttonholes and stitch the buttons through both layers of the skirt's placket. For the top two, I added a sew-in snap behind the button to make the closure functional, and then finished it off with a regular, round button (and functional buttonhole) at the waistband. This way, I can enjoy my beautiful kitty buttons with minimal fuss!
The regular sewing for this project was as delightful as expected with my new B79 - the buttons to raise and lower the foot, needle, and to finish a seam and cut thread are really something to behold after you get used to them (plus the foot-free bobbin winding is magical!) and I really enjoyed the integrated walking foot - but the thing that really stood out to me for this project specifically was the buttonholes. The one-step buttonhole foot allows for adjustment to the height of the hole, and there are 18 different styles of buttonholes to choose from. For this project, I picked one with rounded edges that looks very similar to the buttonhole my Singer Buttonholer attachment makes, which suited the vintage vibes of the skirt! I chose a keyhole buttonhole for the waistband - I couldn't resist!
Now. I know you want to know things about the pockets. I had to do it, you know? Obviously the skirt was always going to have pockets big enough to hold all of my secrets, but with my newly realised capacity to do machine embroidery (again!) I couldn't resist the opportunity to add a little bit of decoration... not too much though, you know?
I also wanted to test out the ink/stitch embroidery digitizing extension for Inkscape - both of these are free programs, and ink/stitch allows for - by my estimate - some of the most powerful embroidery digitizing functions available in a free software. There are still a few things missing, and I think it would be pretty stressful to learn if you didn't have a background in vector graphics, but for my purposes at the moment it's really useful. I sketched up a little leafy vine design in my notebook, cleaned it up in Adobe Illustrator (Inkscape could have done the same, I'm just faster at Illustrator) - saved my file as an SVG and imported it into ink/stitch.
The website documentation for ink/stitch is really thorough - and I'm sure this won't be the last of my blog posts to talk about it as I learn more - but it still took about six iterations to get the design to "stitch" correctly in the computer-generated rendering as well as two iterations in machine-stitched form (the design was fine, but my scale was off and my pocket cuffs would have been way too small!) but we did get there eventually! The opportunities I have to mash my sewing practice together with design are pretty rare, so I relished this little project and had a lot of fun despite the high concentration of 'error' in my trial and error ratio. Eventually, I ended up with a perfectly stitched sample of the leafy vine design, ready for pockets even Gollum would envy!
The B79's largest hoop was big enough to stitch both pocket cuffs at once, and the in-machine setup tool allows you to flip and transform designs so my two pockets are mirror images of each other. I used a standard tear-away stabiliser for this design, and once the pocket was finished I backed the cuff portion with an extra piece of fabric to give it stability and hide the thread at the back of the design. Once that was done, the last step was pinning the pockets in place at the right height on the skirt and stitching them down!
Overall? Heckin' love it, obviously. I get to have fond first-project memories with this machine of something that really let me explore the new-to-me functions this machine has, and I've ended up with a skirt that I like so much, I've been trying to get away with wearing it as frequently as possible every week since I made it! So much of what's available on the internet if you google "Machine Embroidery Projects" is mostly targeted at grandmothers stitching things for grandkids (which is truly excellent, I love a good kiddo present, and one will in fact be gracing these very pages shortly!) but it's easy to feel left out if your style (like mine) is a little bit less "teddy bear". In addition to enjoying a new, powerful and thoughtfully designed sewing machine for my garment practice, I'm starting to really look forward to incorporating more embroidery into my wardrobe!
In the meantime... I may or may not have embroidered construction equipment on a hoodie I made for a two-year-old, so there's that. I know, it's a complete 180. I'll show ya next time ;)