For many years, I made my wife a vest for our big science fiction convention. It's an homage to Gene Kranz and the Apollo program. There have been cartoon llamas, peacock feather print, pin-up girls, and brocade. This year, I decided that I understand enough about garment construction that I would try hand-draping the pattern.

I got out some cotton plaid, which makes it really easy to see the grainline, and I pinned it to her. I did a half-pattern on front and back. I marked the garment lines with a Sharpie, just eyeballing where I wanted it to fall. This was exhilarating and a bit terrifying. Just... drawing lines. On fabric. In ink.

I assembled the pieces I had and had her try it on again. Then I pinched out darts to make it fit better. I marked them the same way. This time when I cut the pieces apart to trace them, I rotated the darts into the seam lines, and made a princess seam. The pieces looked like this.

Three pieces of pastel plaid laid out on a cutting table. They are pattern pieces for a garment.

With that settled, I knew that I wanted to use my newish embroiderbot to fancy up the front of the vest. My original idea was to do pretty intense embroidery up the front panel. I got fabric for this in New York City when I made my lightning raid on the garment district.

I got some new software (Embroidery Toolshed) and some clipart embroidery designs, and spent a long afternoon teaching myself the second crafting software in a year. But then there is the problem of making sure the embroidery would fit on the pattern piece. It's easier to embroidery a pattern piece and then cut it out. Frequently people solve the fitting/size problem by printing the pattern to paper and physically placing it on the fabric, but my printer was on an adventure, so I couldn't do that.

Eventually, after a bit of thinking, I remembered that I have a ceiling-mounted projector that I use for pattern-cutting, and I could just use that to project the design onto the fabric to check that it would work.

A piece of dark green fabric on a cutting table. A pattern piece is outlined in chalk, and a complicated embroidery design of gears and circuits is projected onto it. To one side is a Bernina sewing machine with a sticker that says 'Internet of Toasters'.

I can now see that it will not quite fit, and adjust it in real-time from the computer. SLICK.

I stitched out a test on the fabric to make sure my fabric, thread, and stabilizer were all going to work. This is like making practice buttonholes or gauge swatches - boring, apparently useless, until you really wish you had done it, but you didn't.

A design of gears and circuits, embroidered in purple on green satin.

Thus satisfied by my plan, I discarded my previous design and did something different.

The embroidered front of a green satin vest with violet-purple sparkly buttons.

Once it was embroidered, I cut it out, and the rest of the vest, as well as the lining (a white cotton cambric). I then completely forgot how to assemble a vest and had to unpick the armholes and resew them a stupid way, but that's ok, I remember now how the assembly sequence goes.

I had been thinking about doing nifty embroidered buttonholes, but it seemed like A Bit Much once I had the embroidery on, so I just did them the conventional way, and sewed on these extremely Extra buttons I also got at Mood Fabric.

I got the vest finished by deadline and dropped it off, but in all my planning, I forgot that my beloved wife always wears a utility vest, so the finished result, while good-looking, was not precisely what I had in my mind's eye.

I'm going to persuade her to put it on for me without the belt and see if the fitting needs refinement, and if not, I'm going to preserve the pattern for next year. Yay!

Next skill along that tech tree: Digitize hand-draped patterns so I don't have to store pattern pieces, just files.

Next project: The State Fair is immanent, and I have two ideas for things I want to submit. First and easiest is an implementation of the Laughing Moon Merchantile Victorian Trousers. These are for my son, to match his ridiculous cape. The fabric for that was so pretty I went back and bought more to make trousers. But he can wait on trousers until after the Fair. The other State Fair project is more ambitious, since I haven't done it before - a blazer for me. I'm planning on this ridiculous silver liquid satin, which will show EVERYTHING, so it's a real workmanship challenge, but I'm always delighted by the idea of a completely conventional garment in weird fabric.

A length of silver fabric that looks like it might also be wet plastic? The reflections are just weird and confusing.

Next up in Leaflet: learn how to resize images so they aren't all HUGE.