Planning and Design
The other lounge set to use up my cotton gauze fabric.
Materials
- Patterns
- Ethel Top (Style Arc)
- Albie Short (Style Arc)
- Fabric
- Organic Cotton Double Gauze – Sage (Core Fabrics)
- Thread
- Rasant col. X0651
- Notions
- 100% Cotton Lightweight Fusible Shirting – White
- Organic Cotton Elastic – Ecru – 40mm – Light (Pattern Scissors Frock)
- Lite Steam-a-Seam 2
Sustainability Check
👍 Fabric is 100% cotton
👍 Elastic is cotton and natural rubber and biodegradable
🤏 Fusing is 100% Cotton although the glue apparently isn’t biodegradable. This is the best I can source at the moment as an Australian so I’m not going to be too harsh on myself
🤏 I can’t figure out what Steam-a-Seam is made of but at least the backing is paper
🤏 Rasant is OEKO-TEX but not biodegradable
Construction
So I made this in between my trips to Japan and Singapore, while battling a cold that I picked up in Japan, while dealing with handover for work since I was changing jobs…and as a result didn’t record anything about this make at all LOL. So, based on the sparse photos I took…
Starting with the Ethel Top – working with the cotton gauze was really hard because it was so soft and shifty. Cutting out the pieces was hard, I felt like they still ended up skewed despite my best efforts, and as a result I ended up with a lot of overhang at the ends of the seams. Which I fudged when it came to time to add the facings. Facings were done using the Closet Core perfect facing method which was fine.
I changed my approach from the previous Ethel Top where I was super hung up on making everything flat-felled seams. This time I pressed all the seams over and double folded and topstitched them. Then realised what a pain this was and french seamed the side seam instead. And then…trying to decipher one of the photos I took…I think for the top of the side seam I used fusible interfacing to encase and trap the raw edges so that the french seam would look nice and neat? The fact that I completely forgot I did this means the final result was good enough to not draw attention is my takeaway lol.
And then I didn’t take any photos of the shorts at all haha. I do know I decided to use the pocket opening design from the Peppermint Magazine Wide Strap Dress, but mistakenly (auto-pilot?) topstitched just a little offset from the opening edge, but I should have done it 6mm away (like the instructions say to) so that it would end up 100% enclosed. But otherwise the Albie Short is a very straight forward make, and I used the elastic I accidentally cut for the Lou Shorts.
Reflections
Because of the properties of the fabric, the feature seams on the front and back are super wavy. It’s not a big deal because this is loungewear, but definitely need a more structured fabric to bring out the design of the Ethel Top.
Things I learnt:
- I’m still learning about matching suitable fabric to a pattern…
- French seams are probably the way to go with cotton gauze
Categories: Sewing
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