Pattern Review: Butterick Retro '52 Capelet

 First off, sorry for the huge absence. I've been meaning to post, but with the coming retail holiday season I've been dealing with a lot of stress and have been lacking motivation.

 

exquisite photoshoppery

Butterick 4927

Pattern Description: Retro 1952 Wrap and Capelet

 What did you particularly like or dislike about the pattern? I wish that it were constructed slightly differently. Due to the weight of my fabrics, the hem is puffy, and I think that constructing it in a different way would have prevented that. The instructions do not have you topstitch anything, and that may have helped with the puffiness.
  
Fabric Used: Dark blue "fashion suiting" and a silky print used as lining from Joanns. I'm sure it's all 100% poly.

 Pattern alterations or any design changes you made: I was unable to get my machine to work on the buttonhole setting, so I hand sewed button holes, and due to the size of my buttons, made it single breasted instead of double. The fabric I used was a little too lightweight, and I may go back and see if chain-weighting it may help to hold it in shape.

My favorite part of this is the lining. As usual, my photographs are crap and don't do the fabric any justice.  The lining fabric really reminds me of Biba fabrics. I want a whole dress out of it! I originally had a black and blue floral silky print I'd found in the sale section (which was tiny? They had taken out the whole wall fixture that used to be full of clearance and red-tag fabric and replaced it with pre-cut yardage of novelty flannel and fleece.) and was trying to find an outer fabric. I waffled between this blue suiting and a black and white houndstooth suiting, and wound up going with the blue. I wish I had used the other, as it was slightly weightier. Anyway, the silky prints were in the same aisle as the suiting, and I found it while being shoved out of the way by a woman with a screaming kid, who screamed for the entire hour and a half I was in the store. Non-stop shrieking. 

My buttonhole setting on my machine didn't work, so I had to do the buttonholes by hand, which took the most time of the entire project. Overall, it only took about four hours start to finish.

Halloween in November

Due to it's controversial nature, let me put a disclaimer here: I do not support the modern fur industry, but I do appreciate true vintage and antique fur pieces. I feel that its better to appreciate them and use them than have them end up in a landfill, but I understand and respect people being anti-fur.

 

I'm finally getting around to posting about Halloween, a week later.

Since it was a Friday, I worked, but was able to get off early to go to a cemetery tour at Lone Fir Cemetery, my favorite Portland area graveyard. A couple years ago, a "Untimely Departures"-style cemetery tour was started for Fortuna, CA area graveyards namely the one where the majority of my paternal family is buried (Newberg, or Sunrise Cemetery), which my dad helps run, and I've been lucky to help out with two times.  They did several years at Sunrise, moving on to another this past year, as they ran out of stories!  Anyway, the original idea came from the Lone Fir tour, so I was on a fact finding mission to see how the originals do it.

The tour was really great! My one complaint was that it was too short... we only got to see three "ghosts"! There are several tours that run at once, covering both sides of the cemetery, but I understand that they have to do it that way to maintain traffic flow. Had I more cash on me, I would have gladly gone through again to see the other side's stories.

I'm really hoping to be able to volunteer for next year's tours. I really enjoyed working on the ones in Fortuna.

As mentioned in several posts, my theme for this year was "eccentric millionaire", basically just an excuse to wear weird stuff in public.   Almost everything came from goodwill at some point or another, except for the stole which came from Red Light on Hawthorne, where it was grossly under-priced.  I've had it since February, but it's not really something you can wear in public anymore, so this is its first outing!

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I had to take off most of my costume during work due to extreme lack of mobility, but was able to get a few photos of it.

Photo credit to ESCO