Weekend Review: Text in Textile Art

Text in Textile Art / Sara Impey
London: Batsford, c2013.
128 p.

This is a beautifully put together Batsford book, by a textile artist who has been using text and language in her work for a long time. Lots of photos, nice design and that famous fuzzy Batsford cover make this a lovely item in itself. 

But it also has lots of fascinating examples of how Impey quilts with words. The cover shows one of her signature techniques, stitching the background of plain cloth (sometimes pieced, as with the cover image), using threadwork to make letters out of the blank spaces left. She also does the opposite, quilting letters onto a bare background. It's quite graphical and striking. 

There are a lot of techniques and ideas shared here, from both machine and hand-stitching to using computers (or computerized sewing machines with fonts), photo transfer, found objects and printed materials. There are many examples, both of her own work and of other contemporary textile artists, including Tracey Emin for one. This is a great feature, as you can see how a lot of different artists incorporate the use of text, it's not just one style shown. 

There is also a discussion of copyright, which is important for anyone wanting to use words or images coming from elsewhere. She includes prompts and exercises for readers to discover how they might want to use text in their own work, and suggests places to find inspiration. It's a very solid book for anyone wanting to add text to their textile art -- it really is focused on art, which I appreciated and found illuminating. This is solid content by a very experienced artist, and anyone interested in this topic should be sure to read it. 

Pivoine Blouse for the Literary Sewing Circle

When I was thinking about projects for this round of the Literary Sewing Circle, I kept coming back to the Pivoine Blouse by Delphine & Morrissette.

I have owned this blouse pattern for quite a while and always intended to make one, so now is the time. As I said in an inspiration post, Pivoine is French for Peony, so we are nodding both to Peony the cat and to Miss Judson's French background with this pattern. The fabric I chose is an alphabetical novelty print (actually a sheet originally), so it is also reflective of the entire writing world, I'd say.

There are many versions of this blouse in many fabrics, but I thought that this crisp polycotton would give a boxier look to the blouse - which I wanted. I had just enough left from a previous project using this sheet to fit all the pieces of this blouse pattern onto. I wanted to be sure that the letters ran across the top evenly, on the same plane, and that the cuffs were also vertical (which necessitated cutting them on the cross grain). 

This pattern is all in French, and while my French is basic, I only had to search a few words and instructions on Google Translate to be sure I was doing things correctly. There is a good photo laden blog post about the construction of this blouse on Delphine & Morrissette's site, which was also helpful, mostly to be sure I was getting the seam allowances right and doing things in a good order. 

Otherwise I just depended on my sewing experience to help me along. This was actually quite an easy sew, not many tricky bits at all. I used my trusty 1/4" quilting foot to help me get even edgestitching on the button placket and collar band. Then I searched through all 5 of my button tins to try to find a good match for this fabric. I had a basic white shirt button in mind, but when I saw all of my random one-off buttons that just seemed to match the colours in the fabric so well, I made a decision to use multicolour buttons. They are all nearly the same size, so I just made all the buttonholes based on the mid-sized one (the largest was infinitesimally bigger, and the smallest just a hair smaller) and that worked out okay. I worked out my own button placement so I ended up using 8 buttons rather than the 7 called for in the pattern.

I am really pleased with the cute summer feel of this blouse, and I do love a good alphabet print. This is light and floaty and goes with a lot in my wardrobe. I think I'd make this blouse again, maybe in a drapier fabric for a really different look. I enjoyed sewing this while thinking about Myrtle's adventures in Premeditated Myrtle and all the following titles in the series. I hope everyone else participating in this round of the Literary Sewing Circle also enjoyed both the reading and the sewing! 

Burda Book Jacket

Well, I was fortunate enough to move on to the second round of the PatternReview Sewing Bee this year, and was also fortunate that I had the week off so I could work on my new assignment! I'm glad I did because it was a tough one. The brief was to create a garment in which the buttonholes were the feature -- not the buttons, but the buttonholes. Yikes! I was stumped at first.

I thought about it all the first day and came up with tons of different ideas, that were all rejected almost immediately. I researched various buttonhole techniques and ideas, and when I watched a Threads video on shaped buttonholes I was hit with the idea of making a "Book Jacket" - perfect for this librarian! It would feature open book shaped buttonholes. Once I had that thought I couldn't get rid of it, so spent most of the next day looking through my jacket & blazer patterns for a clean silhouette with buttons all the way up the front. Harder than you might think. 

But Burda came through for me again; I found the perfect pattern, 108 from 12/2021. It's a boxy style, and also had a coat variation (109). This was helpful because the collar on 109 had a wider gap at centre front, which I thought I'd need to accommodate my elaborate front buttonhole feature which required an extended placket to fit them on while keeping them centred on the centre front line. So I traced mostly 108, but 109's collar.

There are only 3 buttonholes, but laid out against the plain black jacket I think they stand out as the main feature. This is after all my Book Jacket, so my faced buttonholes shaped as an open book had to be the focus. To avoid disrupting the effect, I used the same text fabric for self-covered buttons (one of my favourite kind of buttons). While buttonholes for a jacket like this are usually horizontal, I had to switch mine to vertical to fit the book theme - the spine of the book becomes the buttonhole.

I made the buttonhole feature using a paper template I drew out, and was very careful to line the centres up with the centre front line. I don't always do a lot of thread tracing to mark centre front and button placement marks on a pattern, but I did here. On my samples I tried stitching the 'lips' to the facing to make a clean edged window, but I preferred the look of the topstitched window, as I felt it emphasized the book outline a little more. So that's what I did on the jacket. I put the buttonholes in on the right front pattern piece before I did anything else at all, in case I needed to recut the front and try again ;) Fortunately I didn't, so went ahead with construction.

I also decided to add in a little sleeve gusset at the wrist as a way to bring in the text fabric somewhere else in the garment. It's a little detail that shows when I'm moving.

I find the jacket comfortable and like it both done up and open -- I wasn't intending to ever wear it open, but the book effect still works when it's not buttoned up, and the counter effect of seeing the buttons separately actually adds to it, I think. I'm happy with the contrast between the black background and the book shaped buttonholes and text fabric. I enjoyed learning the shaped buttonhole technique and now have lots of ideas about how to use it in future projects.

Another element I liked about this project was that once again I was able to use stash fabrics & notions for the entire project, even if it meant I had to use two different types of lining for the body and the sleeves. 

The pattern included little patch pockets, but I didn't like them with this version - I was going for streamlined. So I didn't add them. I did shorten the sleeves (always) but not the body of the jacket. And my main change to the pattern (besides the buttonholes of course) was to extend the placket on the right side by 1/2" to accommodate the size of the book buttonholes. This was a cute pattern even with a few small issues with the instructions - it all worked out and I'm very pleased with this little jacket. The Sewing Bee really forced me to think about buttonholes in a new way! 

Vogue 9329: My First Marcy Tilton

Here I am, finally, with a finished project! I made my first ever Marcy Tilton pattern, Vogue 9329, which is rated "easy". And it is. I chose this pattern as my latest project for the Fabricville bloggers network. Upon seeing this wonderful cotton lycra knit print in the Fabricville online shop, I knew I had to make something that would highlight the scribble print -- as a sewing librarian, I have a real weakness for any kind of alphabet/text based print. I have a few in my stash that haven't been used yet as well!

Since this recent Vogue pattern was a Marcy Tilton, which I've always been interested in, but it also isn't too wacky or out there in terms of construction or effect, which I've always been hesitant about, I went for it. The simple lines of the dress plus the cute swingy hem really appealed to me -- and that easy rating didn't hurt either, considering my recent sewjo levels.

I received the fabric and pattern very quickly, but was too busy to get going on it right away. After a couple of weeks I finally got the time to sit down and attack this project, and ended up making it all this weekend, from cutting to wearing.

And of course my photo location had to be the children's library stacks at work. Where else would I highlight such a literary print? Thanks again to cooperative coworkers who don't mind taking a few snaps on a break!

On to construction notes: this fabric is a medium weight cotton lycra knit - it has a great hand, not too thin and clingy, not too stiff and thick either. It holds the shape of this dress well but also swings with the pattern lines. It was also really easy to handle while sewing: I just used a medium-weight ballpoint needle and poly thread, as usual.

Even though it's a knit, it uses an interfaced (knit interfacing) neckline facing which is then topstitched at an inch below the neckline. This fabric just soaked up the navy thread I was using, and I really can't see any of the topstitching either at the neckline, sleeve bands or pockets unless I am looking very closely indeed. It is really a wonderful finish and my neckline sits much more smoothly than if I had used a knit neckband - I can never get those things right.

I made a large, which fit my lower half well, but was a bit baggy around the bust area. I took in an arc of 3/4" at the underarm, narrowing out to nothing halfway down the sleeve and just above the pocket. That was all I needed to get a snugger and more comfortable fit.

The pocket construction was really interesting, too, just one piece topstitched to the front piece and only sewn into the side seam of the back piece. I'm sure it's a common technique but I haven't done it before and really like it. The other interesting bit was the hem. Because it is a handkerchief like hem with side slits I was worried they might reveal a little too much of my very short legs, so I didn't shorten the skirt as I usually do with everything. I measured and the regular front hem would land just at the bottom of my kneecap so I left it, though the pattern design as shown on the cover is much shorter. The problem with being so short, though, (I'm barely 5'2") is that the length of my leg from hip to knee is quite small, and so side slits that might be nice on a person with a lot more leg can be a bit more revealing than I'm comfortable with since I have so few inches to play with! So if I do shorten this in future I may also reduce the side slit height just a little at the same time.

There are narrow sleeve bands and an offset side seam on the back which offer opportunities for print blocking, as shown in the cover images. This time I just used all one and love the fit and the comfort of this dress. But now I wonder how useful this pattern might be to use up some larger knit scraps in the stash! There could be ways to play with the neckline and pockets to print block a bit more as well.

In any case, I really enjoyed making this easy dress - it helped me get back into the swing of sewing and have a finished project to show for it. The quality of this fabric was a joy to work with, and as always, thanks to Fabricville for the chance to sew along for the blogger network.