#hiviz

Once everything is quilted, it’s time to cut things out! I traced the pattern pieces onto the quilts and then stitched just inside the marked lines. This has the dual effect of 1) making sure I’m cutting the right lines and 2) helping prevent fraying and making things easier to handle when cut. It also compresses the quilt sandwich at the edge for greater precision. Then cut things out and start assembling! I batched up all the independent pieces (eg, sew the hood together, sew the long sleeve seams, sew the shoulder seams) and then had to take a break to hand-finish the seam bindings on all of them. The pattern called for a single fold bound seam which I cleverly (lol no) cut out of the same flannel I used for the lining. This made the seams extra bulky. I stitched the two seam allowances together by machine and trimmed the far one down to about 1/8”, then stitched another line along the near one (again squishing down the quilt sandwich) and trimmed it to 1/4”, then folded the binding edge over the flannel at 1/2” and sewed it down by hand. So the seams wound up being not too bulky but a bit stiff. In hindsight I probably should have sewn the 1/4” allowance and the 1/8” allowance separately, which would have made it more flexible. #handmade #quilting #stargazerChoreCoat #sewing #hiviz

One of the things I like to do to insert some randomness into my sewing is to use small tokens or coins to determine placements. In this case I sprinkled sewing clips over the pre-drawn radial lines, made some manual adjustments, and then marked the clip positioning to turn them into stars. I then stitched around the edges to minimize fraying and tossed all the pieces in the washer and dryer to shrink and wrinkle. A bit of pressing afterwards flattens them back out but still gives it a homey rumpled look. I’m *delighted* by how the thread is looking. Hell yes. #sewing #handmade #StarGazerChoreCoat #hiViz #fashion #quilting