Jumpers again

One lunchtime during the AGU in San Francisco we popped into Sak's 5th Avenue Men's Store, which isn't on 5th Avenue at all, but just of Union Square. How silly to forget to rename their store when they went to SF. The shop is tiny compared to the other bit of the shop (the wimmins section?) which runs for almost the whole length of one side of the square. Anyway, inside S5AMS were lots of lightweight fluffy jumpers costing hundreds and hundreds of dollars. One might have been tempted only a badly fitting jumper is still a badly fitting jumper no matter the fluff-factor or the price tag. So, by way of getting some fun in famous Britex fabrics which is nearby, I suggested to James that we go and buy some fabric and make a fluffy jumper ourselves. Britex is an odd shop. You can't really browse. You tell the staff and they find you what you want from their stock. Fine for us since we'd just been feeling up the fluffy stuff in S5AMS. They sold me 2.25 yards of a 60 inch wide black wool knit for $50 a yard. It really was only just enough with no room for cutting error. It's smarter and less fluffywuffy than the stuff in S5AMS. I think it's high quality, and I expect it to wear well but time will tell.

So then it was back to KS2561, for the third time in the year. We decided to make it a bit slimmer than the previous version made with quite thick (and very fluffy) fabric, so trimmed the pattern down by 0.25" on the side seams, tapering the arms to their original side at the cuffs. Got confused again by the sleeve length. My tracing stated the adjusted pattern had been lengthened by 1.5" compared to the original but when I compared the two, it was much less than that. so I retraced it to 1.5" extra length. Of course when it came to it I had to take that extra length (5/8") off again! I've also now adjusted the cuffs to be narrower than the original pattern piece because I prefer them shorter.

So now having a properly adjusted pattern, James wanted another longsleeve T-shirt. The fabric to be used was this buttermilk. It is quite lightweight and I did wonder if it would be too light for men's t-shirt. I'd not sewn with buttermilk before. It really isn't all that stretchy. Pretty much no stretch along the grain and not that much width-ways. These features conspired to make James complain that the sleeves are now too short!! tsk! The problem is mostly that the tighter neckband (less width-ways stretch) pulls the neck higher, but the lack of length-ways stretch also contributes. So now I have a note on the pattern piece to lengthen it an inch for the crew neck version! A v-neck in this less stretchy fabric would I think really require a longer neckband. Another thing about buttermilk is that it ladders - so I got to use one of the very fancy over-lock stitches on my machine which was quite fun. A good feature of the low-stretch fabric was that I didn't get any stretching of necklines and hems. A less good feature is the fabric seems attracted to other fabric. It doesn't cling to skin but it does to under-Tshirts or over-jumpers, as can be seen in the photos of both the shirt and the jumper in this post.