Planning and Design

I made this pattern before out of remnants of my Manatee Sweater and really love the fit and look. But since I kinda stuffed up and didn’t have any fabric to spare, I had to do the hem bands in the wrong grain direction and it really annoys me 😅 So was eager to redo it properly.

I saw this fabric when placing an order for other things on MaaiDesign and impulse bought it. Since I didn’t buy a sample first I was surprised at the colour. At first I didn’t like it but it ended up growing on me.

Materials

• Pattern
  • Portsea Luxe Sweat (Style Arc)
• Fabric
  • See You At Six – French Terry – Agate Gray Green (MaaiDesign)
• Thread
  • Rasant col. X0672

Sustainability Check

👍 Fabric is 96% cotton and 4% spandex so biodegradable

🤏 Rasant is OEKO-TEX but not biodegradable

Construction

Preparation

So I assumed all terry fleece was like Homecraft Textiles’ and did not have a direction and learnt the hard way that I was mistaken 😫 Of course I got it the wrong way around. It probably won’t matter too much, especially since this is such a loose fit, but it’s good to know if I buy this brand again.

Seams

So I decided very last minute that I didn’t want to use the overlocker. I get way too hung up on my overlocker thread not matching my fabric but it’s very hard to justify buying multiple spools, especially when the colour is uncommon like this one. So late decision to fold seams over twice and topstitching. Which meant battling with 1cm seam allowances 😅

I also forgot to use the walking foot so switched to that which meant I kinda ended up doing half inch seams instead of 1cm which helped with the seam folding 🙃

I also made copious use of water soluble thread haha. First time I did a straight basting stitching, figuring that even if I sewed over it, it would wash out. But since the seam folding was so fiddly I switched to whipstitching for the extra stability.

I accidentally confused sewing knits with sewing with Maraflex and think I could have stuck with stitch lengths of 2.4 for seams and 3.0 for topstitching instead of the 3.0 and 5.0 required for Maraflex.

Reflections

Very happy with how this turned out, I love a neat backside 😝

Things I learnt:

• Always check for direction on both the front and back of the fabric.
• Don’t elongate stitches if not using Maraflex

Categories: Sewing

Tagged as: Style Arc

hikaru