#sewing posts

[cy-lindric]

hey!! i have some fashion questions if you dont mind, did you make the white shirt and pants in the first pic on your vampire post yourself? do you wear prescription glasses, and if so whered you get red lenses from? i am slowly taking an interest in dressing similarly regularly lmao

Hello ! I did make the whole outfit in the first picture. The shirt is a basic men's linen undershirt (the kind you make with rectangles, it's a great beginner project and there are a lot of tutorials online), and the pants are based off this pattern by Laughing Moon . As for the glasses, I am quite short sighted so the glasses in the first pic are indeed my regular prescription glasses, but the red ones are basic sunglasses I got in a thrift shop so I wore contacts with them. I do think you can customize prescription sunglasses with different lens colours when you buy them online at places like Polette and similar stores but I've never tried that myself.

I hope you'll find what you're looking for to embrace your future style ;) Cheers !

[anoddrock]

Did y’all know there’s a free Blåhaj pattern. And you can scale it up or down however you want. No? Oh well here’s the Hi the Shark pattern

[bananna-threads]

Hand embroidered, self drafted, birch tree inspired buttonup shirt.

[girlblocker]

[rowzien]

The Trans Court Suit

This was my big project I made over the summer! I am beyond proud of and happy with the coat.

The first initial project I wanted for this was a pink waistcoat. I grew up liking pink and most of my stuff was, but that (along with growing up in a hot pink room) made me start to resent pink a lot especially as a teenager. (I think a lot of trans guys have similar stories.) But of course pink was very popular for men throughout a lot of European fashion history. So in many ways this was a self healing project for me, at least in that regard. Which I think was a success!

I actually found the first two portraits after I started working on the outfit, they looked perfect! The first especially is super close to my hair.

The silks for the coat as well as the linen interfacings were second hand or scraps in my stash. The cotton sateen was from Burnley and Trowbridge. This is the first project I fully drafted myself. The waistcoat and breeches were made from an 1820s manual and the coat was primarily taken from Period Patterns by Doris Edison, using also Agreeable Tyrant for interfacings and The Taylor's Complete Guide (for shape reference).

This is also the most hand sewing I’ve done for an outfit. Both of the fronts of the coat and waistcoat are completely by hand. Most of the coat is by hand with machine for structural/backstitches, mostly the seams but not the edges. In total there are 22 buttons.

I made the waistcoat straight across for two reasons A. So I can wear it with my other stuff B. I didn’t have any more trim, that was it. I’ll probably make a more 18th century style waistcoat out of white for this (at some point).

The breeches ended up being too small for my thighs so I started getting frustrated with the fit and rushed them by the end so I could move on. (I accidentally sewed the buttonholes on the wrong side).

[sabh0]

My roman empire is that custom-made badge Dazai has sewn inside Chuuya's jacket after the Lovecraft fight

[forcefedthelies]

there is something very beautiful about the irresistible human desire to create

clowns like these will be on etsy very soon <3

UPDATE: etsy fucking banned me lol. currently selling these via cashapp within the united states only

[salamispots]

a rug hook commission for @stickynotebirds! :O (who also drew the original sketch/design and I tweaked it a little bit)

[stardew-bajablast]

if you haven’t at least tried sewing or crocheting or knitting your own clothes, you really should. even if it’s just one time and you never do it again, i really think everyone should do it at least once

learning how to crochet was what finally made me grasp the abject horror of the fast fashion industry and realize just how laborious and time consuming it is. i have to take a few days off a week so my back/wrists don’t get sore — and i get to do this as a leisure activity in the comfort of my own home, rather than in a sweatshop. it takes dozens of hours to produce a single item. there is just something about trying it yourself that makes you realize just how little the people making our clothes are being paid for retailers to be able to sell clothes at such obscenely low prices.

i understood in the abstract that people were earning literal slave wages to make my clothes, but that concept wasn’t real to me in a way i could understand until i spent 14 hours making something that i myself wouldn’t have even been willing to pay more than $10-20 for if i saw it in a store.

i have not bought any new clothes since learning how to crochet. every time i see clothes at a store (especially obviously handmade items like crochet), and i look at the price tag i feel genuinely sick to my stomach.

i’m not saying everyone needs to make their own clothes in order to be against fast fashion, but what i am saying is if hearing about the conditions and wages secondhand has not been enough to make you stop buying it, if you find yourself becoming desensitized to the suffering of the people who make your things, you should try making something yourself.

you need to see firsthand how physically and mentally demanding it can be and imagine how much worse it would be if you were forced to sit in a sweatshop for 16 hours a day doing it nonstop, earning pennies an hour to do so. you need to spend weeks laboring over something only for it to turn out looking like shit so you realize just how much wisdom and technical skill goes into these supposedly “unskilled” and undervalued jobs. if the abstract concept isn’t enough to get through to you, then you need to get hands on.

[vaimetanyx]

@themolluscasometimes said she wanted a Skinhe plush and now this skin creature lives in her home because I asked 'how much do you want one?' and everything spiraled from there. The most interesting part of all this has been explaining who and what he is to people not in the know - stay insane svsss fandom

[canisalbus]

Hello! I wanted to ask if you got any inspiration for Machete’s outfits? I would love to find an outfit similar to one of theirs for personal wear but I can never find anything that similar.

Most of his canon outfits are just slightly modified cardinal's cassocks.

Jehan Georges Vibert's paintings have been a recurring inspiration.

The buttoning on his shoes is visually reminescent to late 19th/early 20th century boots and spats.

[cheesycatz]

my brainworm

[bananna-threads]

Star #5/15 is added to the night sky!

"Are you going to post every single star???" Yes. Yes I am. Helps with my motivation 😅 God knows I need it. Anyone else struggle with...doing anything at all?

Credit to Wombat Quilts' "Starry Night"

[deanmarywinchester]

i like this substack article I found while googling jamie loftus’s book on hotdogs. it’s like a poem on the subject of “you can do whatever you want forever” to me

[vincentbriggs]

Do you need a sewing machine to start making shirts and vests? Is hand sewing an option worth considering, or should I invest in a machine, in your opinion?

That's really a matter of personal preference!

Do you need a machine? Absolutely not! Every garment ever made before the 1840's was sewn by hand, and a lot of them after that too. I've sewn many garments completely by hand, including the early 18th century tiddy-out-violinist shirt, these bright orange breeches, and this green waistcoat.

Is it nice to have a machine? I think so, but again, individual opinions vary!

One of the costumers I follow sews everything 100% by hand because she finds it meditative and isn't interested in using a machine at all. Some people hate hand sewing and prefer to do everything by machine, with maybe a bit of hand finishing if they absolutely can't avoid it.

I do about a 50/50 split overall, maybe skewing a bit more towards hand sewing. I like to do pants, shirts, and nightgowns mostly by machine with some hand finishing, but for jackets and waistcoats I usually do considerably more hand sewing than machine, because I like 18th century tailoring techniques and think they give a nicer looking result. I do most of my buttonholes by hand, or I do them by machine first and then cover them in hand stitching.

Most people who sew do at least some of it by machine, but again, I don't know which way you prefer to work, so I'd suggest trying out both to see how you feel abut them.

For hand sewing, I suspect a lot of people hate it because they're using shitty needles and/or shitty thread, and perhaps haven't found good resources for hand sewing techniques.

Here's a post of hand sewing advice that I found quite helpful a decade ago. Use good needles because the eyes of the cheap ones have jagged edges and will ruin your thread! Use nice thread because the wrong kind will be twisty and tangly and will fray more!

Thimbles are good and useful, and typically they go on the middle finger of your dominant hand, and you use them to push the needle. I prefer metal thimbles and dislike using leather ones, but some people prefer the leather ones, or rubber ones.

The metal ones come in sizes, and I don't know how to find out your size aside from trying them on in person, but I know I'm a size 11.

One very important thing is that if you're hand sewing a garment, look for hand sewing specific instructions on how to do the construction techniques you're going for. A lot of the time when someone nowadays is trying to figure out how to hand sew a thing they'll just try and copy the machine sewn version, and a lot of the time that's inefficient and more difficult and the result looks worse, because machines and hands work very differently!

This is something I'm going to briefly discuss in the outro to the very long shirt video I'm working on, because it's so very common, and I've done it too! On several of my earlier hand sewn shirts I didn't know to turn the edge in on the front slit and do a little narrow hem, so I instead sewed on a facing for the front slit and cut and turned it, just like I'd seen on machine sewn shirts. This made it about 3x more time consuming, and the result was much bulkier and looked worse.

I've got so many more things to say about sewing but it's almost bedtime and I don't want to make this post too long.

For machine sewing, again there's a lot of personal choice. Some people like newer machines, some people like vintage or antique ones. I'm one of the ones who prefers solid metal vintage machines. I grew up using an old cast iron Singer, and the newer domestic machines just feel so plasticy and insubstantial to me. I'm used to ones that just do straight stitch and can also go backwards, but some people are perfectly happy with ones that can't even backstitch.

I do think that for a beginner the vintage machines are a better deal, because if you're patient and look around for a while you can snag one for really cheap at a thrift store, yard sale, facebook marketplace, etc. Also they're mostly metal and therefore harder to break.

I recently got a Pfaff (from I think the 1960's?) at an estate sale for 25 bucks. The zig zag mechanism is stuck and needs fixing, but I cleaned & oiled it up and it works just fine for regular straight stitching.

There are SO MANY online resources for how to clean, oil, and fix vintage sewing machines, especially the more popular brands, and a lot of the time cleaning & oiling is all they need. Read the manual and get an oil bottle with a nice long pointy thing so you can reach all the parts, and get some compressed air to whoosh out the fuzz. If it's old and hasn't been used in years, turn the hand wheel and observe every single place where metal rubs against metal, and Make It Greasy There.

(If you don't have the manual, you can often find those online too. I even found the service manual for my new-old Pfaff! I have the original users manual, but this one's for the people doing repairs.)

Oh this post is getting much too long! If you don't know yet if you like machine sewing, try seeing if you can use one without owning it, perhaps at a sewing class or in a makerspace. I know some libraries can loan out machines. A sewing class would probably be a good idea actually, if there are any available where you live!

Much like how you'll have a bad time hand sewing if you've got shitty supplies and no proper instructions on good techniques, you'll have a bad time machine sewing if it's not oiled well and if the tension is uneven.

There are so so very many things to learn about sewing and I hope I'm not making it sound too overwhelming, because I promise it's not if you take it one step at a time!

Also, when someone who's been sewing for a long time says "You may think you can ignore (piece of sewing advice), but actually that's bad and you will regret it", they're usually right. Oh, how I regret not learning to use a thimble years earlier than I did...

Sorry this post is so long, I hope it's helpful!

Basically, there's no one best way to sew anything, and you should try different stuff and see what works best for you, because everyone has different preferences.

[macksartblock]

beware of burnout it's so real i'm afraid

also bc ended up making my writing into a font to avoid killing my hand as much and bc I saw Caden do this, I thought it would be fun to see who y'all think it suits lol