A month of months

Earlier in quarantine, Jalie announced... actually, I can't remember how it happened. Did Jalie announce a free pattern? Did I read about it on a blog? Who knows. Anyway, the Jalie YOKO top is a free pattern that is basically a square with sleeves, so easy, right? Ha!  And it looks like something I'd want to add to my wardrobe.

It's a really cool pdf where you can turn on and print only your size. No multiple lines to follow.

I went through my fabric stash in... April? and realized I had a lot of annoyingly small scraps of stretchy fabric that I probably couldn't do anything with.

Or could I?

I would recommend Claire Shaeffer's book for the photos alone. She has a great collection of couture.  The two items above specifically are constructed by sewing striped fabric together to make different fabric.  The one on the left has been seamed together to change the order of the stripes, and the top on the right has been seamed to prevent the lowest stripe from being teal.

If Chanel can sew stripes together, SO CAN I! My garment would definitely not be couture, though.

So how to get stripes out of the scraps I had?  I wanted to figure out how tall I could cut the strips and have the exact width needed to fit on all my pattern pieces, with none leftover. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

I needed some sort of math equation to figure that out. I felt like I knew how to do this - it was on the tip of my tongue - I just couldn't get my brain to work!  Bias strip calculations are similar, but didn't help because they have the height specified, ie 2", 3", 4.5", etc. It's simple to figure out how many strips you'd get from a square that way. I thought I could reverse engineer that and figure out something iterative from that. Would I need limits? Integrals? Did I need calculus for this?

So I set it aside for a bit. How long? Who knows these days.

When I came back to it, I played around with different stripe configurations on the model. I like the way I look in larger stripes. I wanted something that would be shaded from top to bottom, light to dark.

And what do you know, the YOKO top size T is evenly divisible into 2" and 5" sections.


I just went ahead and assumed I had enough fabric. Enough grey fabric.


I vertically seamed the fabric together, cut 5.5" and 2.5" high strips. I laid them out on the pattern pieces. It was not quite the gentle gradient from top to bottom that I wanted. If only I had a lighter shade of grey.

 
I cut them to torso and sleeve widths, then seamed them horizontally to make the final fabric. I was short by about 2" of one color, so I subbed in a different color. But I had enough of everything else!


This took a loooonnnngggg time.

And done.


Where the shoulder in the right side of the photo below starts to curve down is where my shoulder starts to curve down, so it's an accurate line-up of the stripes in the sleeve to the stripes in the torso when I'm wearing it.

It's a great lounging-around-the-house item. Nice scrunchy neck, nice scrunchy sleeves.

It would, however,  be more comfortable if there weren't a million serged seams with different amounts of stretch.

I want to make another one! From one piece of fabric, this would probably take an hour to make. And maybe a medium to heavy weight stretch knit. This would be dreamy out of sweatshirt fleece.

And, of course, I found the perfect shade of light grey after I finished and went through some OTHER fabric. *shakes fist at the sewing gods*