Saturday, March 10, 2012

Failure Galore


I'm going on a sewing retreat soon. In preparation for that, I've been cleaning up the cutting area and sewing room. Putting away projects and getting ready to prep several projects for the retreat.

I've had some unsuccessful projects recently, but I didn't realize how many until I did some cleaning.

I've had five, yes FIVE failed projects since New Years. I know that other sewists appreciate hearing about failures, as well as successes, so here's a listing. No pictures are forthcoming. Pattern names are not listed to protect the innocent - it really wasn't the patterns' fault in any of these cases. :)

  1. A beautiful coat using an expensive, gorgeous wool. Argh, this was a bitter disappointment. In this case, when I did the FBA on the pattern, I hadn't realized how another area would be affected by my large bust and it just did not work. I could not figure out how to salvage this one. C'est tragique.
  2. A jacket using an expensive wool knit from Mood. This was one of my "brilliant" ideas for converting a top pattern to a jacket, but I did not muslin it. Fail.
  3. A pair of pants using a taslan fabric. Wow, was the fabric wrong for the pattern. On so many levels, it was wrong. Let me give you just one example: you know that awful sound of pantyhose crunching between ample thighs? Yeah.
  4. There was a RTW jacket I wanted to replicate so I used a pattern to create a "muslin" using a very ugly piece of linen. It was a giant blech.
  5. Another RTW top I wanted to replicate. I used a cheap, but usable, crinkle knit fabric. I did lots of hand sewing on this one. The end result is so "meh" I will use it only as a sleep shirt.

What did I do with all of these failures? I pouted a bit. I whinged, especially to Margy. I tried other, easy, projects with better success.

And all of this is now purged and cleared. Time to start new projects. Hopefully, these will be more successful. :)