Snow day! Burda! Twin needles!

Snow day today! Woo! 3 day weekend! I was thinking, maybe a delayed opening, and was shocked by SNOW DAY! I was grateful since I stayed up til 12:10am last night to watch the women's figure skating finals and medal ceremony.

I did a little bit of work from home, and rested the most of today, then sewed tonight.

Here's the sunset over the new fallen snow (it was already melting when I took these photos):



I like the shadows on the snow:


I finally cracked open Burda October 2005 to work on the cowl neck shirt. Holy roadmaps, Batman! This is my first Burda. Antoinette told me the pattern lines all run over each other but I hadn't envisioned this. The pattern paper is double sided so there's even more on the back.



It's chaos.

My pattern is in blue and is only 4 pieces. Phew.

I had some "I don't know what I'm doing" moments (no seam allowances? what size am I? wait, the size isn't printed on the pattern? how do I know what size is the dashed line with the dots? is this piece the shirt front or shirt back?) Also Burda doesn't have drawings for step by step instructions. I forgot to add seam allowances for the cowl neck (oops) but it seems ok.

The pattern called for twin needle stitching. I've never used a twin needle before. I still had the one that came with my sewing machine. I got out my machine instructions. It says to use a twin needle with a zigzag foot, which didn't come with the machine. Oh well. I forged ahead anyway.

It sort of worked. I didn't have two spools the same color thread. I have skipped stitches. Sometimes the thread would shred in the needle and I had to start again. That happened a lot on the hem for the cowl, but happened only once while hemming the sleeves. WHY?



The cowl neck can be arranged in a few different ways. I think I like the cowl neck the best here, with a drapey, flowy look.


Though it can be stretched out and look very sci-fi spacey:


It's still in progress. I need to fix the sleeve caps, curve in the sides more, decide on the length, and hem it.

Longer version:


Shorter version:


I also need to decide if I'm going to rip out the twin needle stitching on the collar and try again?
I'm probably the only person who would notice the crummy stitching, but I think it might annoy me.

Again, here's the Selfish Seamstress version of this shirt.