Misadventures, or time to trash the project.

Okay, I'm working on Vogue 8060.  My sister-in-law's grandma gave her the base fabric and told her to get me to make Gracie a dress.  So the dress is almost done.  It's taken longer to hem it than anything else.  This entire project has been something of a disaster.  And I can't throw it away, because Joanna's grandma supplied the print, and it would insult both of them!

First of all, I don't like the dress.  At all.  With the right fabric, it could look okay, but this isn't the right fabric.  It's a large oriental print quilters cotton.  The overlay is dusky rose broadcloth.  Which I wasn't having any luck sewing.  And I cut the dress longer because Gracie is tall and forgot to cut the overlay longer.  I didn't want to waste the fabric, though, so the proportions are just a bit off.  Since fall is coming, we decided that it needed the jacket to go over it.  Now, I've had this cut out since the middle of July.  And Gracie has grown.  So I recut the sleeves to lengthen them so that they wouldn't be too short.

I started sewing Thursday night.  My sewing machine decided that it hated me.  When I got to the overlay, it decided it wasn't going to work.  It was doing wonky tension things.  I tried lots of things and managed to get through the dress.  To save me some time, so that I could get through the entire damn project (pardon my french), I pinned the hems and handed it over to my Mom for hemming.  I figured I was ahead of the game.  The dress was being hemmed, the panties were done, and the jacket was cut out.  WRONG.

I transferred the markings for the tucks and spent hours trying to get the machine to sew them right.  It was essentially tying knots in the fabric.  Not pretty.  It would do that at the beginning, and then go too loose and too tight at intervals with changeable stitch lengths.  I ruined a needle with this one, too.  I even grabbed what I thought was pink scrap fabric to test stitches on it and traded my good Gutermann thread for crappy Coats and Clark.  After a few hours and getting Gracie to bed, I decided that there had to be lint fouling the bobbin, so I took off the needle plate and found the problem--the feedey bit was very, very loose.  I untangled what thread had wrapped itself around bobbiney bits, tightened all the loose screws, and screwed the needle plate back on.  After rethreading the machine with the good thread again, it was all better.

I tried to salvage the jacket body, but it was a lost cause.  I just couldn't get the hard knotty bits of thread unpicked.  It was only then that I discovered the worst part--the "scrap" fabric was the sleeves!

So Monday, I'll cut out the jacket again. And unpick the top stitching on the placket of the dress.  And I'll need more thread and fray check. And hopefully, it will go together fast, because I simply don't have the patience to make it a third time!