Final Project of 2015

Sooooo, it's not quite finished because my machine has gone on strike and is refusing to do buttonholes.  Don't know why.  Maybe just a tension problem.  I can try to do them by hand if I don't want to wait 'til my friend comes back from vacation to use her machine.

Evidence of crazy buttonhole:

The two I did just before were more or less okay, given the fact that my machine does crappy buttonholes, generally speaking:

Anyhow, this is my third time using pattern New Look 6104.  Here I combined it with sleeves from Simplicity 2365.  Speaking of, I took me at least three tries per sleeve to do the insertions of the sleeve heads.  I guess this is what happens when one takes a long sewing break.  Makes me want to flat-insert them next time.  We'll see.

This was started in February and then put on the backburner when I realized I had incorrect pattern placement for the button placket.  I'm on vacation for the winter holidays and I decided to try to finish this up in 2015!  Now the buttons are stopping me, or more properly, the buttonholes. 

After lots of eating and drinking this evening, we'll see how movitated I am in the few remaining days of 2015...it would be nice to put this project to bed.

Here are the buttons I chose, from stash:

I had additional complications because of my rounded upper back, or Lady Turtle, as Rochelle calls it.  This was not a problem on my previous two incarnations; I think this fabric must be stiffer.

 I tried putting in darts along the back neckline, but that just made it worse.  This was not even wearable under a cardigan though (believe me, had it been, I would've left it as is, no problem), so I decided to try scooping out the back neckline, since it laid flat lower down the back.

I drew a curve with my handy special ruler:

 And, pre-bias tape neckline treatment, it looked like a big improvement.

 And it passed the under-the-cardigan test after I applied the bias tape...

 It still has a slight up-tick when worn solo, but it's much better and I doubt I'll wear it solo very often.  So I'll call that a fix.


 There is another problem, which I did not fix.  Due to one of my shoulders slumping more than the other, I have a wrinkle in the front.  I think I could fix it by making the seam allowance bigger to sorta pull up the fabric.

You can see the problem here on the right side facing:

 It's exaggerated because of the movement with my other arm, but it would be there nonetheless.  After three or four attempts at inserting the sleeve head, I didn't have it in me to rip that all out and adjust the shoulder seam.  So, I'll try that next time.


 Otherwise, after all that, it's nearly nearly finished.

Why oh why buttonholes?!?  'Til the next time - keep safe and happy holidays everyone!!

P.S.  What's up with the crazy spacing with Blogger?  It doesn't represent what I typed and seems impossible to fix!