Fiber Monday - Warp chains and sewing realizations

The past week was not taken up with a lot of fiber activity. Looking back, I'm not sure exactly what the week was taken up with, but it felt rather hectic. I don't really like hectic. This week is my do or die week for school planning, so I'm not sure how much free time I'll have this week, either.

But I did manage to get a version of the t-shirt I showed you last week fitted so that I will wear it. There's no picture because it looks exactly like the one I showed you last week, just with more ease. It was annoying because it took three different tries to get it to fit correctly. 

As I was working on it, I made two realizations. The first is that my sewing skills are rusty. The whole process took longer than it would normally because I felt as though I was having to remember how to do things at every single step. It wasn't actually an enjoyable process. The second thing I realized is that before I took my not-so-brief sewing hiatus, I was just at the point of actually doing the work to make myself pattern blocks.

If you don't know what a pattern block is, it's a basic pattern fit for a specific person's measurements. It would then be used to draft whatever pattern you like knowing it will fit because you already did the hard work of fitting it.

On t-shirt attempt number three this all came rushing back to me. I hate wasting fabric and having a pattern block would have saved yards of fabric I actually liked. But making pattern blocks is tedious because it involves making muslin, fitting them, changing your pattern, making another muslin, fitting it, over and over until you get the fit like you wanted. I'm really at a point where putting in the time to create them would be worth it. This is especially true because my goal is to weave my own sewing yardage and you can bet that I want the fit of a pattern to be absolutely correct before I start cutting things out of handwoven fabric. 

So there's my goal. See if I can make the process of obtaining clothing as long and as complicated as possible.

The only other thing I've done fiber-wise this week is starting to measure out the warp for my next weaving project. I have four warp chains done with just two more to go. 



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