The pits

An off-hand remark by a friend “Let’s make a jacket!” reminded me that I am making a jacket. Rather – a robe. Slowly, all handstitched. I hung it on the back of the closet door months ago and there it stayed. Why? Because I sewed on the sleeves in haste and messed up the armpit seams. They are quite finicky, especially when my seam allowances are not matched well. In this case, it seems to really matter.

I took the robe off the hanger and fixed one armpit yesterday. Not too bad. I had to take out the stitching, pin it in place and restitch. The seams are going to need to be finished somehow.

The second one is more challenging. I’m having to rip out a lot of the sleeve seaming to get it to fit. I’m going to do it though. The pins are pretty much in place.

I really like the “idea” of this robe, but I’m having trouble warming up to it in progress. I think I need to work on it some more. It was started in April 2020, when I was following Jude’s series on Large Cloth and she was talking about clothing. The base is an old sheet, lavender purple and worn very soft in some areas. The dark cloth with spotted diamonds is from an old pair of pants. The pants pockets are reused and stitched into the sides, and are quite nice. I was in the middle of “coating” it with silk from remnants and scarves, when I hung it up and moved on. The photo doesn’t really give an idea of what it’s like. Except, well, it is a lot of raggedy cloth sewn together, which is what it looks like here.

And just to close with something more organized, a nice pattern I made with some 1-1/2″ blocks. These cloth squares were too big for 1″ and too small for 2″ blocks. I didn’t know I could make the star pattern with my eight green triangular pieces. It would be obvious to a quilter, I think, but I feel like I discovered it by playing around! The lower right square is made from cloth that’s too thick. I will take this as a lesson and try to avoid doing that in the future.