Making Peace with Nathalie

I lost an entire day on Thursday. I had a scratchy throat on Tuesday afternoon, but it didn’t get any worse on Wednesday, so I thought that perhaps I had dodged a bullet. No such luck. After breakfast Thursday, I managed to get the collar made for a second Nathalie top (no interfacing in this one) before giving up and curling up under a quilt to drink tea and binge watch mountain climbing disaster videos for the rest of the day. ‘Tis the season.

Tera texted me Thursday evening with a picture of the Nathalie she made. I asked her about the fabric and she said it was a French terry she picked up on a Walmart remnant rack on some recent travels. Tera and I are friends for a reason.

I woke up feeling better yesterday morning, although more than a bit annoyed to have lost a day’s worth of work. My voice sounds like rusty chains being dragged across a concrete slab, so I have to delay recording the podcast for a few days, too.

And while I am still not firing on all cylinders, I managed to make a second Nathalie top yesterday and I am quite happy with it. I think I am going to wear it to church tomorrow.

The fabric is a Joanns luxe fleece bought on clearance. I’ll talk more about the fabric in a moment.

Part of the reason Tera texted me Thursday night was to show me a picture of the Nathalie she made. Hers had a lot of excess fabric at the shoulders. It fit well in the rest of the bodice. I have broad shoulders, so I don’t have that excess fabric there, although the shoulder seam does drop off the shoulder about an inch.

This is an athletic wear design, so that doesn’t surprise me. The sleeve cap is correspondingly shallow; that’s a combination often seen in garment knitting patterns. The intent is to create a relaxed silhouette without it being boxy.

Tera worked on adjusting that shoulder area and texted me another photo yesterday afternoon. I think I am going to frankenpattern the closer-fitting shoulders and sleeves from my favorite Burda 6315 with the Nathalie. I do like the rest of the Nathalie top, especially that cowl. Tera and I want to get together in January to monkey around with the bodice slopers from our class at Sew Expo last March.

So . . . that fabric. I bought this on clearance and had 1-5/8 yards, which was just enough for the shorter version with the band and no pocket. (I did add an inch to the length.) I kicked around the idea of hemming it, but I decided to stay as close to the original pattern as I could. This band is fine because it hangs straight instead of pulling in. I might hem the next one.

The fabric is a “luxe fleece” substrate with a gold pattern printed on it. Interestingly, the issues I ran into were not due to the gold print. (I did have to vacuum my sewing room when I was done, which is par for the course with fleece.) This fleece doesn’t have an obvious nap on the front—or it’s obscured by the print—but it most certainly does on the reverse side. It has such an obvious nap on the reverse side that I had to be very careful to feed the fabric through the machines, both serger and sewing machine, with the nap. If the nap fed against the feed dogs, the fabric would hang up. I figured that out by copious testing on scrap fabric, because I knew I had no room for error.

Also, this is the reason I don’t like patterns that specify 1/4" garment seams:

A 1/4" seam is 6mm wide. I have a 6mm stitch width setting on my serger, but for thick fabrics, like fleece, I use the largest stitch width setting, which is 9mm. You wouldn’t think the extra 3mm would make a difference, but it does, especially on multiple layers. Through testing, I also determined I needed to lengthen the stitch to the longest setting and increase the differential feed. A serger seam made on thick fabrics where the stitch length is too short and the stitch width too narrow has a tendency to pucker. The seam in the photo, above, is nigh on perfect, but it’s a bit wider than 1/4". I understand that pattern companies want to include customers who don’t own sergers. However, 1/4" seams are for quilt tops, not garments. Get off my lawn.

On this Nathalie, I sewed in the collar on the sewing machine using a 3/8" seam allowance, then finished the raw edges with the serger. I see lots of justification in patterns for not finishing edges on knits because they won’t ravel, but I want the inside of my makes to be as attractive as the outside. I attached the cuffs and the bottom band directly on the serger.

I think I have made my peace with this pattern. There will be more Nathalie tops in my future—and maybe a dress?—although hacked and refined to my sensibilities.

************

Those of you who have been around for a while may remember that we lost internet service (CenturyLink) for two weeks at Christmas last year due to a couple of problems. The first was a severe cold snap that resulted in Bonneville Power throttling down the amount of electricity they were sending to western Montana so they could serve their Washington state customers first. Our electric co-op had to do some fast maneuvering to redistribute power across our valley, and in the process, some of the components in the CenturyLink box up at the corner were fried. The second issue is that every winter, without fail, someone misses that corner when the road is icy (or they are drunk, or both) and takes out the service box. That happened again recently—this time very thoroughly:

RIP, CenturyLink box. Everyone downstream of that box likely is without internet service again. We still have service because no one runs over a Starlink satellite and destroys it.

************

The husband texted his business associates Wednesday morning to let them know that the 2008 work truck was for sale. Within 15 minutes, he had people wanting to come look at it. He ended up selling it to a farmer friend of ours who grows hemp commercially. Everyone who knows the husband knows that he takes excellent care of his vehicles, so I was not surprised at the amount of interest. The proceeds from the sale of this truck will get applied to the loan for the new truck to pay that down.

And I went for almost two whole weeks without the check engine light being on in The Diva, but it is lit up again. The husband checked the code; it’s yet another emissions sensor. I think they will just continue to fail serially until he has replaced all of them.