When Finished Isn’t Perfect

When I bought my first sewing machine black Friday of 2017 I had never used a sewing machine before in my life. I had been looking at sewing machines for a couple months because I recognized that I was utilizing less that half of the Joann’s isles that I would frequent for my paper crafting and yarn hobbies. My (now) in laws came to town to visit and the boys left to play golf.  My MIL and I entertained ourselves for the morning. I mentioned that I was looking at a sewing machine in the ad and wouldn’t mind popping over to look at it. She jumped on it (a quilter herself) and has been enabling me ever since. I quickly learned about PDF patterns and the rest is history (shout out to A.C. for introducing me to the PDF pattern crowd which eventually led to me finding Phee).

Fast forward to now, a year and a half later, I have jumped in head first with having added a serger, cover stitch, and most recently an embroidery machine to the ranks. Sewing has become a love me for. I can create just about anything that my mind thinks up. Most of the time it turns out really well. But what happens when it doesn’t? I don’t know about you, but it drives me up the wall when I invest my time, thoughts, and money into a project to have it either not fit right, not be how I imagined, or the worst-maybe I took a short cut and didn’t follow the pattern or left a feature off that I realize I wanted afterwards.

Usually when this happens, I just throw the project in a pile and let it sit until I calm down. In this case, I made some his and her Elevation Hoodies out of Supplex that I love the look of. However, I made a huge mistake. I looked at the pattern and was going through the steps of the pocket and became incredibly intimidated. It was a welt kangaroo pocket and look way out of my skill set. So, even against all of the “Pockets in everything” that has been drilled into my head by having tiny pockets in jeans that don’t hold anything useful, I didn’t complain with my husband said he wasn’t entirely interested in a pocket in his. Then, when I made mine, I honestly didn’t think about it much and ignored my need of a pocket.

Within a day of finishing, we both noticed how much we missed the pockets. From sliding our cellphones across our stomaches and then just dropping them on the ground, to realizing I had no place to put my badge at work when I walk through the office. Soon after I noticed we both stopped wearing the new sweatshirts because they didn’t have pockets. So, I decided to take the plunge and rework these sweatshirts and add in the missed pockets. So I came up with my plan:

Step 1: Formulate a Plan

Add pockets to the hoodies (My husband’s didn’t make it into the blog because his was left at work, so knock this down to one hoodie for this reading). To do this, I will have to seam rip the band off and the side seams atleast about half way up my torso. Since I will have the band and front opened up, I am also going to take 2 inches off of the torso length as I have alot of extra fabric down around the band.

Step 2: Procrastinate

Seam ripping is not my favorite, so I stalked my cat around the house a bit and took some photos. I army crawled around, but gosh these photos are worth it (I am still getting used to my camera):

Step Three: Seam Rip

Seam ripping around the band was actually not as awful as I was expecting. I started the music and just let myself seam rip. I also experimented and found the best way and the seam ripping only took about 10 minutes to get the band off. From here I cut off the 2 inches to shorten the bodice.

I was rather impressed with the Supplex at this point. Normally when I seam rip, the material comes up frayed and I get worried about redoing my seam without removing more material. After seam ripping the edge of the fabric still looks like a fresh cut and it was ready for another try.

Next up was to seam rip up the sides:

Step Four: Prepare the Add-On Pattern Pieces and Continue the Original Pattern as Instructed

I was a bit on the struggle bus for this step and ended up having to recut both pieces once. For marking the fabric I used a chalk pen as the only interfacing I had was black.

From here I followed the directions, but made sure to have the back side out of the way for all parts-expecially the part about cutting open the center of the pocket.

Now, here is the really important part. When you clip the 90 degree angles from the center to the corner, ensure you get as close to the corner as possible. Almost to where you think the seam is being cut (but don’t cut the seam).

If the corners of your pocket opening look like above after being flipped out, go back to clipping the corner and clip even closer to the corner.

This pocket is so professional looking and a serious upgrade from the lack of pocket I had originally settled for. Definitely give extra time when trying this one for the first time, but its so worth it in the end and I fully expect that when I put pockets on the ‘his’ version it will be a much smoother process.

Thanks for