One Stitch In Front Of Another

The irony of my current situation is not lost on me. I’ve spent the last 4 weeks sewing everybody else’s tunics and the only one I’ve got left to do now is my own overtunic. The Mother Of The Bride is currently half-naked! And I’m having trouble concentrating enough to even get it cut out. I didn’t sleep at all well last night. Between the sore throat, the coughing, the sniffling and the worry that I won’t get it all done in time, it was a pretty restless attempt at sleeping. An Advil and a couple of teaspoons of Benylin cough syrup helped some after I finally convinced myself to get up and get it. If I sound like I’m feeling sorry for myself — I am. But I’ll get over it. Eventually.

Meanwhile I’m hand-stitching T-Man’s overtunic hem while lounging in bed with the cats. The outfit is quite handsome, no?


The fabric is some kind of taffeta-ish decorator fabric in 100% unknown fibre (possibly rayon acetate or maybe polyester) and is slippery to work with. It also doesn’t press a nice flat hem. Does look nice and silk-like though which was kind of the effect he was looking for. That and the lovely dark green colour. The neckline isn’t perfect but at this point good enough is all I can really ask for or expect. Hey, I suddenly realized that I never blogged about his undertunic. You can just see it at the neck, plain dark madder red. It’s just a cotton/poly broadcloth with no trims. I will be using leftovers for his liripipe. You’ll see what that is in a later post.

For Rosemary who asked, all the hems up to now have been serged and then a line of straight machine stitching beside that. With the machine stitched thread I drew up the excess to fit the deep curve. Then I loosely slip-stitched by hand. It’s not the prettiest thing on the inside but it does the trick and so far everything has hung fairly ok when done. Machine stitching is not supposed to show on the outside for period garb. (Though I cheated on the trims because it was faster and mostly doesn’t show much, if at all.) A much nicer hem would have been to use a bias facing but I didn’t have enough of the fabrics and commercial wide bias tape sucks. Not to mention I’m too lazy to spend time cutting bias strips right now. I’m just going with what was easiest and fastest. And I didn’t use my machine’s blind hem stitch because it’s just too hard to control on a deeply curved hem and it shows too much on the outside for my taste. I only ever use it for fairly straight hems on firm fabrics and even then often opt for hand stitching instead.

Speaking of hems, I think my overtunic will have a reversed hem where it folds to the outside and is covered with trim. I didn’t have enough of any of the trims up to now to do that but I want mine to be a bit different and there’s lots of the madder orange/black trim. It’s flexible enough to bend nicely to the curve too. I also didn’t want any trim at my neckline and I wanted it on the upper arm instead of the cuff. After all the tunics I’ve made, I’m obviously getting bored of the basic style. Later I’m going to have to recompense The Bride for using up so much of her horde of precious trim!

This afternoon is devoted to making Nana’s hat. I’m hoping it goes without a hitch. I don’t have a lot of mental or physical resources to call upon right now. I was hoping I could pace things to avoid burning out but how was I to know I was going to get hit with the Third Coming of The Bug? Stuff happens, eh? Darn. All hints for preventing snot from dripping on my sewing gratefully accepted.