It’s Thanksgiving and I have a LOT to be grateful for, y’all! Thanksgiving has always been a tricky holiday for me, which I think I have discussed before on this blog at some point. It’s one of those cultural traditions that I just accepted when I was growing up without giving it much thought, but as I got older and started questioning so much of the history that I was taught in the Alabama school system I attended, I began to realize how complicated it is to uphold traditions that are dear to us while also being aware and even critical about where they come from and what they represent. On the whole, spending a day with family (chosen or otherwise) to break bread (gluten free or otherwise) and celebrate all you are thankful is an absolutely honorable and lovely thing to do. But it is so closely tied with excess and consumption (both of food and black friday deals), and so often separated from the horrors of all the indigenous life lost in the name of this holiday, that it can be really frustrating to know how to celebrate it appropriately. Of course I don’t have an answer for how to do it, and even if I did, that would assume there was a “right” way. All I can do on this day is try and make enough room for all the contradictions that exist within and around me- being thankful for my wonderful, supportive relationships with friends and family, for my loving, encouraging wife, for my health, for my body and all it is capable of, for therapy, for the roof over my head, for the food being cooked in the oven at this very moment, for my brother’s recovery from illness, while also saving space for the fact that so much of what I am thankful for is rooted in privilege- financial privilege, class privilege, able-bodied privilege, gender privilege, geographical privilege and more.
It’s interesting to imagine what all I would be thankful for if there weren’t so many inequities among us all.
Today I am also thankful for the firefighters (both incarcerated and not) for all the hard work they do to keep us safe. I am thankful for the sewing community- the support, encouragement and laughter generated from almost every interaction I have with some of you brightens my days and continues to inspire me. And I am thankful for being an ambassador to The Fabric Store, which keeps challenging my sewing practice, elevating my makes, and ensuring that my stash is stocked with so many divine textiles. Which leads us to our regularly scheduled blog post…
Normally I don’t put several versions of the same make on the blog, because I don’t often have all that much to say about a variation on a pattern, other than “I must really love this thing to keep making it” and “ooooh, look at this pretty fabric”! But the Peppermint jumpsuit that I hacked (thanks to inspo from some other amazing sewing bloggers) got so much attention that I figured it was smart to talk about it on the blog again, especially since I knew I wanted to make it in a slightly dressier fabric compared to my casual, summertime striped linen version.
I really do love seeing how much a pattern can be transformed when you pair it with different textiles and prints. Cotton and linen tend to have a crisper feel against the skin and a more relaxed vibe when sewn up in designs like pants and jumpsuits, but a softer, drapier, more luxurious fabric can make the same design look red carpet ready, and I was excited to see how elevated this fun (and free!) Peppermint/In the Folds jumpsuit hack would look in this gorgeous crepe rayon I got from The Fabric Store. The color I used for this make is lapis (french blue) but they have several stunning hues in this fabric and I have a couple other cuts in my stash that I have yet to dig into- I’ve just been waiting for inspiration to hit! The fabric is silky and flowy but the crepe gives it a nice surface texture that I love, which also makes it shimmer a bit in the light. It’s not transparent but it is lightweight, so I think it works best for a garment that has some ease or some pleating/gathering/folding which allows the fabric to move and dance and catch the light.
Since I had already made the hack once before, this garment was pretty straightforward to create, but I did adjust the legs a bit; the original drafting of the Peppermint Jumpsuit has a significant amount of ease in the legs (particularly around the thighs), which can be seen in all the folds created around the midsection of the garment, which is cinched in by the belt. I made the legs a bit narrower in my first hack with the striped linen fabric, but I brought the seams in even more (on the outer leg) for this crepe rayon version. They tend to bulge out a bit at the sides and look like clown pants, perhaps because of all the other adjusting I did to the top half of the pattern, so tapering them in on the sides gave a much cleaner, more classic silhouette. Everything else was pretty much the same- I created french seams on all the main seams since rayon tends to fray a lot and I prefer clean finished insides for this kind of fabric. Surprisingly I didn’t need to sew in bra strap tabs (I don’t know what the real name for this is, but it’s when you sew snaps onto a little cut of ribbon and place it inside the shoulder seam to keep your bra straps connected to the garment when either one of them likes to slide down) like I did on my striped linen version- I would think that a slinkier fabric like rayon would want to slide down much more than linen would, but the opposite turned out to be true!
One question I got asked a lot about this hack was whether or not you could create bias strips to enclose the raw edges of the neckline/wrap, and there is a way you can do it, but it will involve adjusting the way the front wrap gets attached to the crotch seam, and possibly a redrafting of that area- I think you would need to add seam allowance to the top of the crotch seam edge so that you can flip the bias-edged wrap under and connect it to the seam that way. But I haven’t tried it on this pattern and I’m only working it out in my head so that could be totally wrong, lol. I actually prefer creating a facing for the neckline that gets sewn to the jumpsuit and then under stitched because it provides a lot more stability to that area, which is cut on the bias and has a tendency to stretch out like mad. In fact, I learned after making this second version that it is essential to stay stitch the entire front and back necklines of your pattern pieces as soon as you cut them because they will want to morph out of shape as soon as you start moving the fabric around.
To create my facings, I just traced the edges of my front and back necklines on transparent pattern paper, and then I widened the shapes so that they were about 4-inches all the way around. I interfaced all the pieces, sewed the back halves together, then sewed the back piece to the front pieces at the shoulder seams. Next, I sewed the whole facing piece onto the jumpsuit, pausing at the area where the belt is attached so that I could sew it in the way I like (I prefer my wrap front to maintain it’s triangle shape at the edge, which means I can’t sew it to the belt like normal and just flip it to the right side- but if you don’t want to go through the trouble of all that, you could sew the edge flat instead of pointed).
And that’s all she wrote! I love the way this jumpsuit fits and feels (although this fabric gets a little wrinkly!) and I think I might add a little vintage romper slip (to match the fact that this is a jumpsuit) to my list of future makes because I wouldn’t mind having one more layer of fabric under this thing. I love the color, I love the effect, and I love how I look in it- I can’t wait to wear this for an #auditionlewk when I go in for Recently Divorced Mom In A Small Town Trying To Get Her Groove Back While Going Back to School to Become A Beautician 😉
Happy Thanksgiving if you celebrate it, and Happy ThanksLiving if you don’t!
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