Day 2 - Confeccion de prendas de vestir

April 17, 2015.


In addition to the sewing machine (the SY machine, from Ikea - http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60208974/), my friend Eva also loaned me a book:  Confeccion de prendas de vestir.

Now that was a challenge!  Not only learning how to sew from-scratch, but doing so in Spanish!  LOL!  But... I do like a challenge!  So I pressed-on.

The book is actually quite good.  It walks through most of the basic techniques - stitching, basting, interfacing, various approaches to hemming, inserting zippers in a variety of ways - and explains the situations where you would chose one or the other approach.   The latter half of the book contains patterns (download to print-at-home) and the patterns refer back to the earlier instructions so that you can look-up the details of each technique required by each pattern.

I spent a couple of days reading the book, cross-referencing the instructive parts with some YouTube videos to be sure that I understood the Spanish :-)  then I picked a simple skirt pattern from the end of the book, put it on paper, and cut it out (only 4 or 5 pieces).  I then returned to the fabric store, picked some old curtain fabric out of their bin (less than 1 Euro!) and sat down with the Spanish instructions for the pattern.

Okay, I am faced with a zipper in my very first pattern!  So I watched a few YouTube videos, read the instructions again, and got started...

My first darts:

Assembled except for the back seam and zipper:

Finished!

I was actually quite proud of myself at this point!  It's not pretty, of course, because it's just rubbish curtain fabric... but it's a skirt! ...it even looks like one :-)  With my appetite whetted, I popped out to the fabric store (this time, a fabric store for clothing) and picked up a few pieces out of their "remnants" bin in order to repeat this success using "real" fabric.

At this point, I should talk a bit about my friend (and colleague) Eva.  One thing that you immediately notice after a few meetings with Eva is that she has a passion for colors!!  (She actually has a bit of a color ritual... but I wont give away too many of her secrets!).  When she initially loaned me her machine, the deal was that, as soon as I was capable, I should make something for her!  As such, when i went to the fabric store, I had colors and designs in my mind... the next "edition" of this skirt had to be colorful and interesting!

Long story short - on April 18th I created this:

In the next post - Eva models the skirt!  (yes, it fit!!  :-) )