The blog says my last post here was over a month ago.  I got so wrapped up in wanting to prepare something for you all, and then I lost track of time.

Last time I promised interesting developments, but even I didn’t know what they were. The good news is that two of my three shirts are completed, and I can share photos of them with you along with some construction notes. But let’s start with the bad news.

Technical Difficulties

Currently, my sewing machine (a Brother PC-210PRW) is sitting at the sewing machine store, awaiting the technicians to inspect it and give me a service estimate.

I’ve had an on-and-off problem with my machine that first showed up a few months ago.  I will hear clacking sounds coming from the bobbin area from time to time. It happens at anything higher than low speed. Doing a backstitch can set off the clacking as well.  If I stop and restart stitching, the clacking will go away for a while and then come back a minute or so later. Usually the clacking is accompanied by poor quality stitching on the bobbin side.

While working on the third of my three shirts, stitching straight seams on shirting fabric, I heard a mechanical scraping sound coming from the bobbin, followed immediately by an inch-long thread nest in the seam. The third time this happened, I realized something was seriously wrong and stopped work before the machine ate my project.

I’m not sure what’s wrong here; I suspect something in the bobbin area has gone awry, perhaps the result of a massive jam or needle breakage. This seems like a simple repair, but I’m concerned the dealer’s quote to fix it will be a significant chunk of the $300-ish price for a replacement machine.  The repair estimate is free, but they’ve already told me the minimum for any service is $89.95. It does include cleaning and lubrication so there’s that.

If the repair cost ends more than half the replacement cost, my current thought is simply to take it home and tinker with it myself, and look for a replacement machine.  Unbeknownst to all of you, I have been thinking about upgrading my machine ever since my visit to the Sewing Expo earlier this year. That topic deserves an article all its own.

It’s sad that modern economics makes a strong argument to send a perfectly good sewing machine to the landfill, though.

The Purple Shirt

Here’s some modeling photos of the purple shirt. I’m also wearing the shorts muslin I did for the Jedediah Pants pattern.  Which I’m happy I made, because I’m getting some use out of it in the warm Indian Summer weather we’re having in San Francisco at the moment.

Construction Notes

This shirt was a bear to get right.  Just about every seam was picked and restitched because I wasn’t happy with the way it turned out the first time.

Pocket

Even the edgestitiching on the front pockets got redone; I put down a basting stitch after the first attempt, ripped out the first round of stitching, then did the second round of edgestitching with the first still in place.

Plackets

On the front placket, the walking foot did a better job preventing the fabric from shifting and twisting than my attempts to hold the fabric gently taut.

I also made a mistake matching the plaids on one of my front plackets – the plaid stripes were too low relative to the shirt front.  I didn’t have enough fabric left over to cut a new one, so instead I simply cut a scrap, interfaced it, then pieced it on as an extension to the bottom of the placket.

Collar

The collar turned out very nice.  I switched to a short stitch too soon at the pivot points, but the collar points are turning out nicely with the tips I got from both Kenneth King and Pam Howard’s video lessons on Craftsy. I was never successful at getting Pam Erny’s magic collar point trick to work (the link is to the BrianSews! website, where Brian demos it on video) so I’m glad I found an alternative.

If I have more success with my method, I may do a video on how I prepare collar points since I’ve seen so many ways to approach it at this point.

Sleeves

The big difficulty was setting the sleeves, which you can see in the photos above.

McCall’s 6613 has a big flaw in that the sleeve is drafted with too much ease.  When you try to ease the sleeve to the armscye there’s just too much to go around and you inevitably get puckers.  I tried several times to get this right, but ultimately I went back to a muslin so I could alter the sleeve cap to take out the excess ease.

I found several guides to eliminating excess ease from a sleeve cap, and ultimately settled on this method as being both simple and intuitive to follow – both big points in my book.

Here’s the pattern piece adjustment in action.  The first attempt, I removed 1 inch of ease, which still wasn’t enough.

For the second shirt I removed 1.5 inches of ease from the sleeve cap which worked much better.  I cut all three shirts at once at the start of the project, so after adjusting the pattern piece I went back and trimmed the blue shirt to the new pattern.

Next Time

I’ll have some photos of the blue shirt, and maybe an update on the ailing sewing machine. See you then.