For a bit of fun this week, I’ve been playing with fabric crayons to give a bit of interest to a plain grey sweatshirt.  And I finally got around to making arms for my dress-form.  Something I’ve been meaning to get around to for ages.

Owl Sweatshirt

The pattern for the sweatshirt is McCall’s 6614 which I made last year.  I’m using view A/B again.  It has a darted raglan sleeves with cuffs, side panels for subtle shaping or colour blocking, and a shirt tail hem.

The fabric is a grey marl French Terry.  Not the best quality.  It looked OK in the shop but pilled after washing.  It’s a bit disappointing as I bought 5m of the grey and 3 of the black to make sweatshirts and sweatpants with.  They will be for wearing around the house and working in the yard, so will get knocked around a lot.  I may be lucky and get 2-3 years out of them.

A plain grey sweatshirt looks a little boring so I decided to add a graphic onto the front.  I could have used fabric paints, but decided to use fabric crayons instead.  The crayons can be blended on the fabric which meant I could add some shading to tree limbs and vary the colour of the iris/moon.  It was very quick to do; just a couple of minutes to draw the design and then heat-set with an iron.  No fuss, no mess.  Yay!!

The armed dress-form

I’ve been meaning to add arms to the dressform for ages.  Lately I’ve been taking more photos of the dressform as it is a lot easier than taking photos of myself and cartooning them.  For some projects, it is worth the time to take a photo of me wearing the garment, but I don’t think it is necessary for everything.  You know I can fit a garment and I’d much prefer to be taking about sewing details than posting selfies.

One of the things that I haven’t liked about my dressform photos is how poorly the sleeves sit, especially those with raglan sleeves.  I had been trying to get away with using foam bra cups to give the sleeve head a bit more natural shape, but arms would be so much better.

The pattern I’ve used is from Cloning Couture.  She did a wonderful post on how to make the arms and generously provides a free PDF pattern.   It goes together fairly quickly, but requires a bit of handstitching to attach the wrist and shoulder.

I’m using a Singer dressform, which has shoulder stubbs rather than a flat plate.  This means that the arm doesn’t fit as well onto my dressform as well.  Removing the cardboard support  for the armhole and using less wadding helped

I modified the pattern to add width to the bicep, as shown in her post, and  but forgot to adjust the length.  The final length of the arm is equivalent to the second joint in my hand.  It looks a little odd with a wrist length sleeve, but has the advantage of being able to tuck the arm into a pocket.

I should correct the length and modify the armhole interface.  What to you think.  Is it good enough or deserves to be redone?

Here is a before and after photo of my recent North Face knock-off showing the difference.