Oh I saw this and wanted to make it right away now now! I had other projects in the way but it jumped to the top of my winter sweatshirt queue. I used stable sweatshirting from The Fabric Box and a colour combination that I knew would pop...though I wasn't entirely sure how well it would work together.
The size chart is very precise, I cut BB, based on the fact that the finished measurements had a hip of 39" which is a nice amount of ease for my 37" hip. I sewed all the diamond pieces together before overlocking and the stitching got pretty thick, and then my overlocker broke a needle! I've never changed a needle on my overlocker so I didn't even know what I could use and that slowed things down a bit. I ended up using a normal sewing machine needle, which the machine didn't love, but it did work. (I was in a hurry because I wanted to take it on a weekend away with me, which I did.)
There's a tiny mismatch at the base of the diamond but everything else came up perfectly, and it is a pretty fun project to tetris together. The high-low hem of the sweatshirt is hard to shorten - you have to shorten through a lot of pieces, but I think you could also just shorten at the hem. I was lazy with the hem and didn't snip into the turning points, which I would do in the future. You do not need to stretch any of the hem bands to fit.
Basically after this I wanted to make more! I thought I'd shorten the high-low hem in future, but I also thought I would make the tunic length next, and then I changed my mind and instead I decided to do another one exactly the same, plus a straight hem version in normal tshirt weights of lovely hoarded scraps.
I went scrappy first:
And oh, it's too long. That was foreseeable...drat. I am going to cut it by just cutting off the binding and shortening it, but I wanted to wear it around first and get a sense for how much to crop, so for now it's staying long.
I went straight on to my precious bamboo sweatshirting from Blackbird Fabrics. This stuff is so cozy, soft and very stretchy, feels a bit thinner than standard cotton/poly sweatshirting. I was happy to have a few run throughs done because I already knew the pitfalls. Really happy with this - and this time I did snip the hem after sewing it on the machine, so that I could overlock it cleanly.
On all three versions I heavily leaned on my sewing machine. I sewed each part of the diamond and the front with the machine then overlocked to finish it. When sewing the top and bottom of the diamond together, I sewed just the match points until they matched (3 tries...) and then sewed it together. I think this is necessary to get good matching on all these geometric bits.
This is a project that takes more than the usual hour for a sweatshirt, but it is so fantastic that it's worth it. I'm done with Dias for now but I am looking over Misusu's other offerings. I loved the instructions, the drafting was great, the detail was fantastic. Rare these days.
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