Saturday, October 11, 2008

Penguin Progress Part 2


Riddle: Why don't penguins like rock music?


The next step, was to construct the wings. Each wing has a front and a back, and a layer of padding in between. Each front has a hole for their little hands to poke through. I don't have a water soluble pen, so I had to put the pattern piece on each front and cut out the hole using the marking on the tissue paper.


Then around each hole goes a knit cuff. Being new to sewing, this is my first experience working with knit fabric. I knew that you're supposed to use a stretch stitch, so I figured out how to do that on my machine. But this kept happening:


I finally got fed up and just used a regular straight stitch. I'm not exactly sure what it will mean ultimately, but the seam is so little, hopefully it won't matter.

To attach the two cuffs,


I pinned each one to the wing holes with the raw edges matching.


The directions said to stretch the knit fabric to fit the hole and pin it before sewing, but I found my sewing was actually much cleaner if I put in those key center pins, and just stretched the fabric as I needed around the curved edges.


Otherwise the fleece tended to bunch under the knit and I got bubbles like this one.


I found this out with trial and error on each subsequent wing since I was unable to remove the tiny white stitches from the fleece to correct my mistake(perhaps I should have basted the cuffs on initially).

Finally the directions said to stitch near the cuff seam to hold the seam back against the inside of the wing, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to do this on my machine, so I hand stitched them. Here's the finished wing front with cuff.


It's not perfect, but I'm pretty ok with how it looks, and considering the whole thing is probably going to be a little baggy on them I don't think the wrinkles and bulges that are there will be very noticeable anyways. Besides no one will be looking that close. I have to keep reminding myself of this. :)

To be continued...


Answer: They only like sole.

2 comments:

Gwen said...

How cool! It is so much fun to watch these costumes coming together! :)
PS - Another good riddle!

Anonymous said...

Wow, the cuffs are so tiny, no wonder they are giving you such trouble. No worries, I am sure they will turn out really cute and will be worth the frustration.
-Natalie

P.S. I love Penguins :)