more sewing

 On a Zoom call with Laura OLPH and a number of the Hill Slugs last night, I told 'em I was wearing the worst t-shirt ever. Herewith:

It's the first shirt I've sewn up. I learned a lot on it: sleeves are hard, but less so for knits than woven fabrics; collar circumference should be shorter than neck-hole circumference (the fabrics are stretchy; they'll work it out); the division of effort and attention for a successful sewing project is 40% choosing the right pattern, 50% measuring accurately, 40% cutting accurately, and only about 30% sewing machine skills (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it).

As bad as that shirt is, it went well enough that I'm putting together a dummy for my bike jersey project:

The cheapest of cheap fabric is muslin, and for woven clothes, it became so common for tailors to make their dummy, how-does-it-fit practice garments out of it that the practice garments themselves are called muslins, even when muslin isn't used. My jersey is a knit, so it can't be made of muslin, but that flowery stuff is the cheapest stretch knit I could find. The white stuff is left over from the tee.

The pattern I'm using has a center front and back body, side pieces, a collar, and sleeves. It's plain from the pattern that the designer thought that the bodice and sleeves should be one fabric and the side pieces another, but what do they know? I'm making it with the body and one side and sleeve the main color, and the other side and sleeve the other color. I may also widen the collar a bit so I don't have to use a zipper; I never open 'em, even on the hottest days... sometimes comfort has to yield to fashion and vanity.

Earlier, I'd made this overconstructed apron:

At top, you can see it on a hanger. The straps cross in the back, so it doesn't need ties, and the pockets at the sides are big enough to hide illegal aliens from the Trump administration. It's all French seams and heavy work; all those panels in the second pic go into it. At bottom are the straps, all sewn up.

It's boxy. The Excellent Wife (TEW) doesn't like the way it hangs on her, but when I get some more heavy, canvas-ish stuff, ommina make one for myself as a shop apron. I may add some.smaller pockets in front.

I laid in a supply of non-woven interfacing (a fabric used between layers to add body to a garment; there's some in hat bills, for example) which has a couple of other advantages: it's more substantial than tracing paper but still transparent enough for tracing patterns, and it makes an effective middle layer for a face mask. I made up this one that promised to keep my glasses from fogging.

It's not effective, and it hurt my ears. This one below is both more comfortable and less vision-obscuring:

With two layers of tight weave and one of non-woven facing, it should be pretty effective.

So that's what I've been doing under lockdown.