Hey, it's Haley at Seamwork and welcome
to another monthly frabric video. Today I'm going to be walking you through
the fabrics that we used for the November 2020 photo shoot.
We're going to look at the Devon dress and the Baz coat.
The Devon dress is a really comfy, cozy sweater dress.
It has some really great details, like a dramatic collar and a cocoon shape.
It also has long sleeves and a drop shoulder.
This dress comes together super quickly and you can use a wide range of knits.
You're going to want to look for knits
with a twenty, twenty five -ish percent stretch ratio
and you can go for things a little bit
on the lighter side or on the more medium weight side.
It's just going to change up the look of the dress and the silhouette.
If you want the dress to fall more closely to the body and cling a little bit more,
then definitely go for something a little lighter weight.
If you want something with a bit more body and structure for that collar especially,
then look for something a little bit more medium to heavy weight. Fabrics that are
going to work include jerseys like cotton jersey or wool jersey, different blends.
Hacci knits, french terry, ponte,
these are all going to be phenomenal options for the Devon dress. This month
I bought all of our sample fabrics locally here in Portland at Mill End.
The first sample I going to show you is this really great striped Devon dress.
This is a hacci knit
and these knits are in the sweater knit category, but they are really fine.
They have a pretty smooth hand,
but they have that more obvious knit texture to them.
Really great for a project like this,
it drapes pretty softly and gives the collar a little bit more relaxed
look. I really love how this sample turned out.
This month's member bonus swaps out Devon's
fitted sleeve for a gathered sleeve and a fitted cuff. For this more dramatic look,
I wanted to choose something that really complemented the dramatic sleeve.
So I went with this amazing red fabric.
It is a wool jersey.
Wool jersey is a real pleasure to sew with for a few reasons.
It's nice and stable, but it still has a good amount of stretch
so that you are comfortable in those fitted sleeves or the fitted cuff.
In this case, it also is a little bit more lightweight.
It's not very, that's to say that it's not very bulky, however, it's wool,
so it's really insulating.
So great for layering up with during the colder seasons.
Let's talk about the Baz coat.
I love this project because you get a lot
of bang for your buck. It's not incredibly difficult to
sew, in fact, it comes together pretty quickly.
However, it is really elevated
and beautiful and elegant, and I just think it's a phenomenal pattern.
So Baz is a wrap style coat.
It has a kind of angular shawl collar
and a nice belt with belt loops at the side to
keep that in place,
and it also has a really cool side seam patch pocket,
that I think is really clever. It's simple,
it comes together really easily, but it's just kind of a fun design detail.
So let's get into the fabrics for Baz. For Baz,
you're going to want to look for heavier weight, knit fabrics.
Things like ponte, french terry, sweater knits.
These are all going to be phenomenal options,
you could also look for boucles.
You don't need a ton of stretch for this
project because it has some good built-in ease.
You just want to make sure that the fabric has a little bit of body so
that the collar and other details aren't completely falling flat.
This is not a place where you'd want to break out your jersey knits, for instance.
Let's look at the samples for this month's patterns. For the Baz coat,
I went with two types of sweater knits. Now sweater knits,
they're kind of this really overwhelming category of fabrics.
They're knits that typically have a more
open or exaggerated knit structure that are made to look like hand knit fabrics.
So, yeah, pretty broad, right?
I wanted to make sure that I was showing
you two super different kinds of sweater knit.
The first one I have here,
it almost looks like a woven kind of tweed
fabric at first glance, but it is not. On the wrong side
it's really smooth and almost has the look of a ponte knit
and the loop structure is really kind of close and densely knit.
And then on the right side, we have this really great slubby texture.
This particular sweater knit is a polyester/cotton/spandex
and I think there was a little bit of rayon in there too,
and you can really feel
the best properties of all of those fibers in here.
Yeah, really great option.
If you're newer to sweater knits, I would look for something more like this guy.
Something that's more tightly knit isn't going to be as prone to unraveling
and just is going to have an overall better sewing experience, more
like a ponte or something like that.
Let's look at another example of sweater knit. Here
I have the fabric that we used for the hack sample, and it is this really
pretty kind of pinky, beigey, coppery sweater knit.
This is what I would call like a more advanced level sweater knit.
If you're feeling confident or you've
worked with sweater knits before, I think this is a really great option.
You can see here that the weave is a lot more open.
This makes this fabric less stable to work with.
So you might want to do things like using fusible stay tape or clear
elastic to stabilize different aspects of your garment
if you go with a sweater knit like this.
On the plus side, you're going to get a really cool
high-end look when you're working with a fabric like this,
and it's going to give the appearance of a hand knit coat, which is
really lovely and beautiful.
So there you have it,
all of the fabrics we used in the November 2020 issue of Seamwork.
I hope you guys are enjoying the patterns if you haven't looked at them already,
go on and hop over to Seamwork.com, check all of those out.
And as always, I cannot wait to see what you make.